## 1. Life, Works and Background




Antiochus was born in the latter part of the second century B.C.E. in
Ascalon (whose site is in present-day Israel) and died in 69/8
B.C.E. (On Antiochus' life, see Hatzimichali 2012). Early in life he
moved to Athens, at this time still the center of the ancient
philosophical world, where he became a member of the Academy, the
philosophical school founded by Plato in the fourth century B.C.E. He
may also have studied with certain of the Stoic philosophers then
active in Athens. His membership in the Academy dates from around 110
B.C.E., the date when Philo of Larissa became the school's head, or
scholarch. At this time Philo championed a form of the skepticism that
had been defended in the Academy since the scholarchate of 
 Arcesilaus,
in the first half of the third century B.C.E. Antiochus was for many
years a student and follower of Philo, whose views he defended in his
writings, but at an uncertain point (though before 79 B.C.E.;
see Section 3) he broke sharply with Philo and
rejected skepticism (Cicero, *Acad.* 2.69).



A measure of caution is in order. "Skeptic" is an ancient
Greek term meaning inquirer. The Academics did not use it of
themselves; The descriptive appellation 'skeptic[al] ' was
first applied by Pyrrhonians to their school in order to signal their
commitment to open-minded inquiry (see the overview in the entry on
 ancient skepticism). Understood in
this way, the term applies at least as well to the skeptical Academy
as to the Pyrrhonian school, which was founded or revived by
Aenesidemus, an Academic who reacted against what he saw as an
increasingly dogmatic tendency in the Academy of his time in the first
century B.C.E. Later in antiquity the term "skeptic" seems
to have been applied to both schools. A range of arguments that, in
one way or another, call the existence or possibility of knowledge
into question, together with the positions or attitudes taken in
response to, or expressed by, these arguments, have been styled
"skeptical", and several forms of skepticism were defended
by different Academics in the course of the school's history.




From his break with Philo Antiochus was a dogmatist, who maintained
that knowledge was possible and that there were truths known to him
and other human beings. It is clear that he began a new school of
thought and attracted followers. Later in antiquity, when different
phases in the history of the Academy corresponding to changes in
doctrine and philosophical approach were distinguished, some people
spoke of a fourth Academy of Philo and a fifth of Antiochus (Sextus
Empiricus [S.E.], *Outlines of Pyrrhonism*, i.e.,
*Pyrrhoneae hypotyposes* [*PH*] 1.220). These
distinctions were not meant to correspond to changes in the Academy as
an institution, and evidence about institutional developments and the
relations between them and Antiochus' change in intellectual direction
is fragmentary and unclear. It is not plain, e.g., whether he began
expounding his new views while still a member of the Academy or after
forming a group around himself, which he dubbed the 'Old Academy' in
order to signal his allegiance to the original Old Academy of Plato
and his immediate successors and to contrast it with the 'New Academy'
of Philo and his predecessors from the time of Arcesilaus (cf. Polito
2012) 




Political instability in Athens led Philo to transfer his activities
to Rome in 88 B.C.E. We know that Antiochus was in Alexandria the
following year in the company of Lucullus, a Roman general and
statesman, with whom he maintained ties for the rest of his life. He
also exerted an influence on other prominent Romans. Cicero, though
not a follower of his, studied with Antiochus in Athens in 79. Varro,
apart from Cicero the greatest Roman intellectual of the first century
B.C.E., and Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, were adherents of
Antiochus' philosophy (on Varro, see Blank 2012).




None of Antiochus' books have survived, but we know something
about them. He wrote an epistemological work called *Canonica*
in at least two books. The title comes from
'*kanon*,' meaning a ruler or straightedge, a
term that was used by philosophers in the Hellenistic period for the
standard or criterion of truth. It is cited by Sextus Empiricus in his
survey of views about the criterion of truth at *Against the
professors*, i.e., *Adversus Mathematicos* [*M*]
7.162, 202, and modern scholars have conjectured that it was
Sextus' source for much of that survey (cf. Tarrant, 1985,
94-6; Sedley, 1992). The *Sosus*, possibly a dialogue,
was also an epistemological work and belonged to the last phase of
Antiochus' controversy with Philo
(Cicero, *Acad*. 2.12). He wrote a book about the gods,
concerning which we know nothing more. He sent a book to the Roman
Stoic, Balbus, in which he maintained that, despite differences in
terminology, the Stoics and Peripatetics (as Aristotle's
successors in his school, the Peripatos, were called) were largely in
agreement on matters of substance (Cicero, *N.D*. 1.16). And
Cicero informs us that he wrote in many places about his view of the
relation between happiness and virtue (*T.D*. 5.22).


## 2. Overview of Antiochus' Philosophy




Antiochus regarded the criterion of truth and the goal
(*telos*, end) of human life as the two most important concerns
of philosophy (Cicero, *Acad*. 2.29), and we are best informed
about his epistemological and ethical views. As we have seen, the
occasion for his break from Philo was a disagreement about
knowledge. After years of loyally defending the skepticism of Philo
and his Academic predecessors, Antiochus came to embrace the opposing
dogmatic position that knowledge is possible. What is more, he
maintained that the original or Old Academy of Plato and his immediate
followers were of the same opinion. This put him in conflict with his
more immediate predecessors, some of whom had argued that Plato should
also be interpreted as a skeptic (Cicero, *Acad*. 1.46). Thus,
according to Antiochus, it was not he who was departing from Academic
tradition, but the institution from the time of Arcesilaus to Philo
that had betrayed the true Academic inheritance of the original Old
Academy, which he was now restoring.




There is a further complication. The epistemology that Antiochus
defended was Stoic in all essential points (Brittain 2012). This was
obvious to his contemporaries, some of whom charged that, far from
being an Academic of any kind, he was a Stoic and belonged in the Stoa
rather than in the Academy (*Acad*. 2.69, 132, cf. 137;
S.E. *PH* 1.235). In reply, Antiochus maintained that the Old
Academy, the Peripatos and the Stoa were in fundamental
agreement. According to him, far from being an innovator, Zeno of
Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was responsible mainly only for a new
terminology and a handful of corrections to the Old Academic doctrine
(Cicero,
*Acad*. 1.35). Though unconvincing to many of his
contemporaries, this historical thesis explains how Antiochus could
defend Stoic epistemology against the arguments made by his Academic
predecessors while claiming to revive the Old Academy. His arguments
about both epistemology and ethics were embedded in this
reinterpretation of Academic history and thus were part of an argument
about who was the legitimate heir of the school's
tradition.




Matters were likely more complicated still, and the state of the
evidence leaves much room for interpretative disagreement. Some
scholars have argued that his engagement with Platonism was more
thoroughgoing than ancient and modern interpreters who have emphasized
his debts to Stoicism tend to allow. The tantalizing fact that Zeno
studied with the Academic scholarch, Polemo, lends some plausibility
to the idea that Stoicism was itself indebted to the Old Academy in
certain respects. And the case has been made that Antiochus exerted an
influence on, or prefigured, developments in Middle Platonism (see
Bonazzi 2012).



Epistemology and ethics belong respectively to Logic and Ethics which,
together with Physics, were the three parts of philosophy recognized
in the Hellenistic era (cf. Ac. 1, 19). We are better informed about
Antiochus' epistemology and ethical theory than his Physics, which
accurately reflects his own priorities, though, as we have seen, he
wrote a book about the gods, a subject that belonged to Physics. For
firm evidence about Antiochean Physics we we are largely reliant on
the brief exposition of the views of the Old Academics and
Peripatetics by the Antiochean spokesman, Varro, *in Acad*. 1
(24-29), who also mentions a few "corrections" by Zeno,
which Antiochus may have adopted (1. 39). Here as elsewhere it is hard
to tell whether and to what extent the resemblance between Antiochus'
view, according to which material reality is constituted by two things
and their interaction, one active, one passive, and Stoic views
reflects the influence of the latter on Antiochus or is evidence of an
Old Academic influence on Stoicism (see Inwood 2012). 


## 3. Epistemology




Academic skepticism arose out of the debate, initiated by Arcesilaus,
about the nature and possibility of knowledge between the Academy and
rival schools of philosophy, chiefly the Stoics. The Academy's method
of argument was, in the first instance at least, dialectical. Their
model was Socrates as depicted in Plato's Socratic dialogues, where he
puts questions to his interlocutors and deduces conclusions unwelcome
to them from their replies. Following Socrates' example, the Academics
took their premises from the doctrines of their Stoic opponents or
from assumptions that the Stoics could reject only at a high cost in
plausibility. By arguing in this way, the Academics hoped to enhance
their and their opponents' understanding of the issues and, if
possible, to progress towards the discovery of the truth that would
resolve the question in contention. The difficulties that the
Academics uncovered in this way were, then, in large part internal to
their interlocutors' position, and, in drawing them out, the Academics
did not necessarily commit themselves to a position of their own.




Stoic epistemology attempts to show how it is possible for human
beings to attain wisdom, which the Stoics take to be a condition
entirely free of opinion, i.e., false or insecure judgment (see the 
section on Logic in the entry on
 Stoicism). For this to be possible, they
maintain, there must be a criterion of truth (see Striker 1990). In
their theory, it is what they called a cognitive impression that plays
this part. This they define as an impression from what is, stamped
and impressed in exact accordance with what is, and such as could not
be from what is not (cf. Annas 1990, Frede 1999, Sedley 2002).
Cognitive impressions, then, are true impressions which are, in
addition, distinguished by a special character belongs only to true
impressions (though not to all of them) and which enables human beings
to discriminate cognitive from non-cognitive impressions. In the
paradigm case, which the definition has in view, cognitive impressions
are perceptual, but in a broader sense of the term, non-perceptual
impressions that afford an equally secure grasp of their contents can
also be called cognitive. According to the Stoics, by confining assent
to cognitive impressions, it is possible to avoid error entirely.




The existence of the special character alleged to distinguish
cognitive impressions from other impressions was the principal target
of the Academics' arguments (see Section 3 of the entry on
 Carneades). 
 If such impressions do not exist, it follows immediately in the
context of Stoic epistemology that nothing can be known. On the basis
of this result and the Stoic doctrine that the wise, i.e., human
beings as they ought to be, do not hold (mere) opinions
(S.E. *M* 7.155-7), the Academics went on to argue that one
ought to suspend judgement about all matters.




These two doctrines--that nothing can be known, or a claim
that implied it in the Stoic context, and that one ought to suspend
judgment--make up the skeptical Academic position, in the sense
of the position put forward and defended by Academics if not
necessarily endorsed by them. The Stoics, followed by Antiochus in his
dogmatic phase, argued that this position is self-refuting since to
adopt a position is to assent to its component doctrines and assent is
impossible without taking oneself to know. The Stoics also argued,
again followed by Antiochus, that the skepticism called for by the
Academics' arguments was a practical impossibility since action
is impossible without assent.




Even though, as previously noted, the Academics were not necessarily
committed to the skeptical position, they defended the possibility of
a life of committed skepticism in order to prevent the Stoics from
escaping the difficulties raised for their position indirectly by
means of these anti-skeptical arguments. Arcesilaus made a start, but
it was Carneades, his successor in the 2nd century B.C.E., who did the
most, and who was responsible for the version of the defense with
which Antiochus was familiar.




Carneades argued that, in the absence of cognitive impressions, a
basis for action and inquiry could be found in so-called probable
impressions (from *probabilis*, meaning that which lends itself
to or invites approval, Cicero's Latin for the Greek
*pithanos*, meaning persuasive) (see Section 3 of the entry
 on Carneades).
 




Building on this account of probable impressions, Carneades defended
two views about assent. According to one proposal, the wise
person will always withhold assent, but will be able to act and
inquire by following or using probable impressions in a way that does
not amount to assent, and so does not involve holding opinions about
anything (*Acad*. 2.59, 99, 108). According to the second, the
wise person will assent to what is probable and so form opinions, but
provisionally and on the understanding that he may be wrong
(*Acad*. 2.59, 67, 78, 112).




It is a matter of controversy whether Carneades went beyond putting
these views forward for the sake of argument and actually subscribed
to one of them. It appears, however, that some of his successors
endorsed one or both of the skeptical doctrines. One tendency, led by
Clitomachus, Carneades' student and eventual successor as scholarch,
favored what we may call a radical skeptical position embracing both
doctrines. Though Clitomachus rejected assent, he accepted Carneades'
proposal that we could follow or use impressions without assenting to
them and adopted this attitude toward, among other impressions, the
skeptical doctrines that nothing can be known and that one ought
therefore suspend judgment (*Acad*. 2.109-10). The other
tendency endorsed a moderate or mitigated form of skepticism. Though
it accepted the first skeptical doctrine, namely that nothing can be
known, this tendency permitted the wise to form opinions by assenting
to non-cognitive impressions so long as they are sufficiently probable
and the assent given to them is bestowed in the provisional spirit of
Carneades' second proposal. And this tendency took the opinion that
nothing can be known to be among the impressions to which one should
assent in this way. The appearance of paradox dissolves when one
realizes that in accepting that one does not know anything one is not
taking oneself to know this, but only opining that it is highly
probable. The most prominent proponent of this view was Antiochus'
teacher, Philo, and it is this mitigated form of Academic skepticism
that Antiochus defended before his conversion to dogmatism.




We are informed about Antiochus' case against Academic
skepticism by Cicero's *Academica*, substantial parts of which
have survived intact. Antiochus seems to have followed the Stoics, who
produced a substantial literature defending their position and
attacking the Academy's probabilistic alternative, but also to have
added some elements of his own to the argument (cf. Striker 1997). He
defended the veracity of the senses. He seems to have argued that in
order even to possess a concept of the truth we must indisputably
apprehend some truths in a way that is possible only if there are
cognitive impressions (*Acad*. 2.33). He argued that probable
impressions are a wholly inadequate substitute for cognitive
impressions (*Acad*. 2.35-6), so that the charge that by
abolishing the cognitive impression (as they think) the Academics
deprive human beings of a basis for action stands
(*Acad*. 2.31, 33, 54, 62, 102-3, 110). And he argued that, in
maintaining the skeptical position, the Academics must take themselves
to know at least one thing, viz., that nothing can be known
(*Acad*. 2.28-9, 109; cf. Burnyeat 1997).




There is one more twist in the story, however. After removing to Rome,
Philo published a pair of books - the so-called Roman Books -
which, when they came to Antiochus' attention in Alexandria, seemed to
him to represent a radical and intellectually untenable departure from
his teacher's previous position. This was the occasion for
the *Sosus*, which contained a stinging riposte to Philo's new
ideas. In opposition to Antiochus' view that there were two Academies,
an Old and a New, Philo maintained that there had only ever been
one. But he now held that the Academics from Plato to Philo himself
were not united by their skepticism, as we have seen some Academics
believed. Rather they had never been skeptics because they had never
meant to challenge the possibility of knowledge. Philo did not deny
that Arcesilaus and Carneades had argued against the existence of
cognitive impressions. Rather, he now maintained that these arguments
showed, and were always intended to show, not that cognition or
apprehension is impossible, but that it is impossible on the Stoic
conception of apprehension, which is therefore mistaken
(*Acad*. 2.18; S.E. *PH* 1.235).




Philo's Roman innovation, then, was to reject the Stoic account of
knowledge while continuing to accept his predecessors' arguments that
the requirement that cognitive impressions be set apart from other
impressions by a special character cannot be satisfied (cf. Barnes
1989, 70-76). For there to be knowledge, he now held, it was
enough that there be impressions which are true and accurately formed
(Cicero *Acad*. 2.18). It is not hard to see why Antiochus was
disturbed, for, if this is right, Philo was the legitimate heir of a
single unbroken Academic tradition stretching back to Plato in which
there was no place for alien Stoic doctrines. Cicero, who is our
principal source, chose not to recount the details of this controversy
(*Acad*. 2.12). But we know that Antiochus argued that, by
abandoning the full Stoic account of cognition and its commitment to
cognitive impressions satisfying the complete Stoic definition, Philo
succeeded only in bringing about the result he most wanted to avoid,
namely that knowledge is impossible (*Acad*. 2.18). Presumably
Antiochus drew on the case he had already brought against Academic
probabilism to argue that impressions which fail to satisfy the full
Stoic definition of the cognitive impression cannot provide a basis
for judgment of any kind let alone judgments of the kind that deserve
to be called knowledge.


## 4. Ethics




Antiochus maintained that his ethical theory was that of the
Peripatetics and original Old Academics just as he had maintained that
his Stoicizing epistemology was in substance that of the Old Academy
(Cicero, *Fin*. 5.7, 14; *Acad*. 1.22). He could make
this claim about his ethical theory with more justice. On the crucial
question of whether to recognize external and bodily items as goods in
addition to virtue, he agreed with Aristotle and the Peripatos and
disagreed with the Stoics, who made virtue the sole good. Nonetheless,
his theory is greatly indebted to the Stoa, and it draws on anti-Stoic
arguments of his predecessors in the Academy that also tend to
presuppose Stoic ideas. Roughly speaking, Antiochus defended the
Peripatetic view about goods on the basis of considerations and in the
context of assumptions that belong to a Stoic and not an Aristotelian
framework (cf. White 1978).




Cicero expounds and criticizes Antiochus' theory in book 5 of the
*De finibus* and draws on Antiochus in his critique of Stoic
ethics in book 4 (trans. in Annas and Woolf 2001). The Stoics
maintained that only virtue, which is identical with wisdom or the
perfection of reason, is good and only vice, its opposite, evil,
whereas all the so-called goods, like health and strength, and their
opposites, the so-called evils, were indifferent (see the section
Ethics in the entry on Stoicism).
Nonetheless the Stoics took some indifferents, often those generally
regarded as goods by others, to be preferred and some, often those
generally regarded as evils, to be dispreferred. This distinction
furnished the material or subject matter for rational
selection. Virtue consists in fully rational selection among them. The
wise or virtuous person acts with a view to obtaining preferred items
and avoiding their opposites, but it is as an expression of his
perfected reason that acts of selection are good, not because they
secure, or tend to secure, preferred items for him or protect, or tend
to protect, him from their dispreferred opposites. According to the
Stoics, the sole necessary and sufficient condition for human good and
therefore happiness is the possession of virtue. Indifferent items
cannot add to or detract from the goodness of such a life by their
presence or absence.




To judge by Cicero's evidence from book 4 of the of the *De
finibus*, Antiochus appears to have argued against this position
by confronting the Stoics with a dilemma. Either the so-called
preferred indifferents really were absolutely and utterly
indifferent. In that case, the Stoic position collapsed into that of
philosophers like the heterodox Stoic, Ariston of Chios, who refused
to make distinctions of any kind among the indifferents, thus
rendering virtue incapable of supplying practical guidance by
destroying the basis for rational selection among actions (Cicero,
*Fin*. 4.47, 60, 69). Or speaking of preferred indifferents
was a merely verbal innovation, and the Stoics really regarded the
items they called preferred as goods, albeit lesser goods, capable of
making a life better by their presence and worse by their
absence. Antiochus favored the latter diagnosis (Cicero,
*Fin*. 5.74), and his own position was that virtue is the chief
good, but not the sole good; this is the Peripatetic view, which he
may well have been right to attribute to the original Old Academy as
well (Cicero, *Fin*. 4.60, 61; 5.14; *Acad*. 1.22).




The way in which Antiochus appeals to human nature and its development
in the exposition and defense of his ethics is modeled closely on
Stoic theory, however. To be sure, Aristotle assigns an important role
to the development of character through habituation. But Antiochus
follows the Stoics and Epicureans in using what modern scholarship has
been called the "cradle argument" (*Fin*. 5.55). The idea is
that by attending to the behavior of infants, who have not yet been
corrupted by contact with society, we will be able to isolate our
original natural impulses and discover what the first objects of
natural concern or attachment are. If one accepts a general principle
according to which the object or objects with which we are naturally
concerned or to which we are attached by nature provide the basis for
determining the human good, the cradle argument can be used to answer
the question what is the true goal of human life.


 The Epicureans maintained that infants are naturally impelled to
pleasure, and that the goal for adult humans is a life of
pleasure. The Stoics argued that our first natural impulses were not
toward pleasure (and away from pain) but towards the "natural
advantages," things like health and strength, bodily integrity and
well-functioning senses (and away from their opposites). But it was
not because they thought these items were goods; they insisted that
they are indifferent, though preferred. The infant's natural concern
for them is the first stage of a development in which what is truly
good only appears later. According to the Stoics, if all goes well, a
human being's motives undergo a radical transformation from the
infant's. Only at a later point does the human being recognize virtue
and virtuous activity as the only human goods and act for the sake of
the true good. Preferred indifferents are the material or subject
matter for the rational selection in which virtue consists, but
nothing more. Since the objects of our first natural impulses turn
out not to be good but indifferent, to be the object of a natural
impulse, or to be in accord with our nature in the way such objects
are, is not thereby to be good.




Antiochus agrees with the Stoics about the importance of the first
natural impulses and, by and large, about which items are the objects
of those impulses. But unlike them, he accepts the principle that what
agrees or accords with a creature's fully developed adult nature, as
it is expressed in its natural impulses, is good for that creature,
and that the good life for human beings is therefore the life
characterized by the fullest possible enjoyment of the goods
corresponding to our natural impulses (Cicero, *Acad*. 1.19,
22; *Fin*. 5.24-5). He believes that he has an Old
Academic authority for this in Polemon (Cicero, *Fin*. 4.14;
*Acad*. 2.131), head of the Academy at the end of the fourth
century B.C.E. Nonetheless, despite admitting other goods, he holds
that virtue is the highest human good, and he believes that his theory
can explain why it is the chief human good without having to make it
the only good as the Stoics had done.




On his view, the development which leads a human being to virtue does
not involve a radical transformation of the kind posited by the
Stoics. Rather, if all goes well, a human being comes to value reason,
and hence virtue as the perfection of reason, above all other things
because reason is the most important part of human nature. It is not
so much the character of a human being's motivation that is
transformed as he develops, according to Antiochus, but rather the
self which is the object of his natural concern. As a result, though
virtue is the chief human good, there is room for other goods as well,
because they are in accord with human nature too, albeit less
important parts of it. Antiochus' use of the Stoic framework puts him
in a position to fault the Stoics for abandoning or forgetting the
nature from which they set out (Cicero, *Fin*. 4.26, 43; 5.72)
and for failing to see the difference between taking reason to be the
most important part of human nature--which is correct--and
thinking that it is the only part (4.41).




Like the Stoics, however, Antiochus wants to claim that virtue is
sufficient for happiness. Stoic ethics ensures this result by denying
that there are any goods or evils apart from virtue and vice and
therefore any items capable of affecting the goodness of a life except
virtue and vice. This option was not open to Antiochus because he
thinks that there are other goods and evils, which do have this
power. His solution, which is the most distinctive feature of his
ethical system and the one that seems to have drawn the most
criticism, is to distinguish between the happy life (*vita
beata* in Cicero's Latin), for which virtue is sufficient, and the
completely or entirely happy life (*vita beatissima*)
(*Fin*. 5.71, 95; *T.D*. 5.22), which requires bodily
and external goods as well (see Irwin 1992).