The Skeptics

1. The Skeptics 4th CENTURY BC

2. The Skeptics • We don’t know as much as we might like to about the activities of Plato’s Academy after the death of Aristotle. But between about 300 and 100 B.C. — almost up to the birth of Jesus— the Academy became known as the center of the Skeptics.

3. The Skeptics • The Skeptics were a group of philosopherswhose main idea was that we can't really know anything for certain about the world around us, or about ourselves. Therefore, we can't really ever know what is right or wrong, either. Some of these ideas came from Socrates, who also thought that the wisest man is the one who realizes that he doesn’t know anything, but Skepticism really began with Pyrrhon (about 365-270 B.C.) and was continued by Pyrrhon's student Timon (about 320-230 B.C.).

4. The Skeptics • You might say, if you can't really know anything, why bother studying philosophy at all? But the Skeptics said the real point was not to worry about things they couldn't know or didn't have enough information to decide. Instead, people should relax and let go. If you couldn't know, then there wasn't any point in worrying about it. You should leave it in the hands of the gods.

5. The Skeptics • Some people think that this Skeptic attitude might have been influenced by Indian philosophy. This is certainly possible, because Alexander the Great went to India around this time, and we know that Alexander and his followers spoke to many Indian philosophers there. According to some Greek historians, Pyrrhon actually travelled to India with Alexander.

6. The Skeptics • Pyrrhon himself did not write down any of his ideas, so we don't know as much about the Skeptics as we would like to. We do know that most people forgot about Skepticism after about 100 years, so it wasn't as successful a philosophy as Stoicism or Epicureanism

7. The Skeptics • Skeptics can easily be regarded as the "bad guys" of the philosophical arena. On the other hand, if philosophy consists in raising questions that lead us to ponder and revise the very foundations of our own thinking, then skepticism is probably the chief school of philosophy. And, by all means, the efforts made in fighting the skeptics brought about some of the best philosophical ideas.

8. The Trolley Problem - Ethics What would you do if a runaway trolley were headed towards six unwitting workers and they were standing by a lever that would divert the trolley to a track with only one worker.

9. “What's Your Reason?" • Give each student four note cards and tell them to write down four claims that they believe in. Tell them to have at least one false claim and one normative claim. Then tell them to write down three reasons for believing each claim on the back. Split the students into two teams. Take the cards from each team, setting them in two piles. Pick a student from Team One and take a card from Team One's pile. Read out the "reasons" and ask the student to guess the claim