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Chapter 4 - Neoskepticism and Moral Education

from Part I - Historical Insights for Contemporary Moral Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2023

By
Massimo Pigliucci
Edited by
Douglas W. Yacek ,
Mark E. Jonas  and
Kevin H. Gary
Douglas W. Yacek
Affiliation:
Universität Dortmund
Mark E. Jonas
Affiliation:
Wheaton College, Illinois
Kevin H. Gary
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University, Indiana
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Summary

Contemporary moral education could learn a thing or two from the ancient Greco-Romans. This essay introduces the two major varieties of ancient Skepticism: Pyrrhonism and the New Academy, situating them within the current resurgence of interest in virtue ethics that includes, for instance, Stoicism. I then make an argument that the Academic Skeptics – authors like Carneades and Cicero – pursued two major intertwined interests: ethics and natural philosophy. “Ethics,” in the Greco-Roman conception, had a far wider scope than the field of study that we now identify by that label, having to do with how to best live one’s life. In turn, a crucial component of good living was thought to be the ability to understand, through natural philosophy, how the world actually works, in order to avoid taking refuge in psychologically reassuring fantasies of the kind that we refer to nowadays as pseudoscience.

Keywords

SkepticismPyrrhonismNew Academyvirtue ethicsvirtue epistemologyCiceropseudoscience
Type
Chapter
Information
Moral Education in the 21st Century , pp. 49 - 68
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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