Philo of Larissa (159/8–84/3 BCE)

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PHILO OF LARISSA
(159/8–84/3 BCE)

Philo of Larissa was a student of Clitomachus (187/6–110/9 BCE), whom he succeeded as head of the Academy in 110/09 BCE. In 88 BCE Philo transferred his activities from Athens to Rome, where Marcus Tullius Cicero, among others, studied under him. Present-day evidence does not allow one to say for certain whether Philo was the last head of the Academy or was succeeded by his student, Antiochus of Ascalon.

Philo taught rhetoric as well as philosophy, and an extended analogy of his between the way in which philosophy cares for the soul and the way in which medicine cares for the body has been preserved. But he seems to have been chiefly interested in epistemology, then the dominant concern of the Academy, and scholars are best informed about his views in this area.

It is likely that Philo first upheld Clitomachus's version of Academic skepticism, which endorsed the two theses for which Academics had argued in the their controversy with the Stoa since the time of Arcesilaus, who was head of the Academy in the mid-third century BCE. These are that nothing can be known—or a conclusion that amounts to this in the context of the debate with the Stoa—and that, in consequence, one should suspend judgment about all matters. As head of the school, however, he defended a mitigated form of skepticism that continued to embrace the thesis that nothing can be known, but now permitted assent to probable impressions, among them the impression that nothing can be known. The account of probability on which this view depends (probabile is Cicero's Latin for the Greek pithanon, meaning "persuasive") had been developed by Carneades (214/3–129/8 B.C.E.), Clitomachus's teacher, as an alternative to cognitive impressions that the Stoics had made the foundation of their epistemology and that supposedly afforded an absolutely secure guarantee of truth. This position had been anticipated by Metrodorus of Stratonicea, another pupil of Carneades, and seems to have been the position to which Aenesidemus, the one-time Academic who revived the Pyrrhonian school of skepticism in the first century BCE, objected.

In Rome, however, Philo came to hold that knowledge is possible. He did this not by renouncing the Academy's arguments against the Stoa, but by reinterpreting them. He now took them to show, not that knowledge is impossible, but that knowledge is impossible on the Stoic conception of knowledge, which is therefore mistaken. The fault lay with their insistence on a foundation of impressions that could not be false, a condition that the Academy had long argued could not be met and that Philo now held need not be met. And he maintained that his Academic predecessors had never intended to show anything else by their arguments. These new views were opposed by Academics who remained attached to skepticism and Antiochus, who had become convinced that knowledge is possible precisely because the Stoic conditions could be satisfied.

None of Philo's writings have survived. Though he probably wrote other works on epistemology and ethics, the only books we know of are the so-called "Roman Books," in which Philo set out his late views on knowledge and the history of the Academy.

Bibliography

Barnes, Jonathan. "Antiochus of Ascalon." In Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society, edited by Miriam Griffin and Jonathan Barnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Brittain, Charles. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Striker, Gisela. "Academics Fighting Academics." In Assent and Argument: Studies in Cicero's Academic Books, edited by Brad Inwood and Jaap Mansfeld. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997.

James Allen (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy