Aenesidemus of Knossos, Agrippa and Sextus Empiricus are representatives of a further development of ancient skepticism.
In their radical skepticism, these thinkers argue that nothing can be known with certainty, nor by feeling, or by thought. Both philosophers listed a number of topical issues, dogmatic objections to demonstrate the need to suspend judgment on any matter.
According to Aenesidemus, the conditions for a true knowledge would be three:
- That it be a certain stability of ‘being’ able to found the first principles,
- That it be a link of cause and effect,
- That it be possible a meta-phenomenic inference (i.e to go beyond what appears to grasp something else, of which what appears would be a "symbol".
Aenesidemus wants to dismantle these three assumptions:
• There is no stability of ‘being’: being, as I see it, is or is it not, constantly changing; if there is no stability of ‘being’, are not reliable the basic logical principles of identity, non-contradiction and law of ‘tertium non datur’;
• Just in his manner Aenesidemus shows that it is not possible to sustain the validity of the principle of causality;
• Aenesidemus opposes, finally, to the belief that what appears to be a sign, symbol, open to something that is "other" than themselves.
• In his explicit skepticism, even Sextus says that we do not know things in themselves, but only the feelings captured by the intellect that "veil", rather than reveal, the objects themselves, and all we know are our impressions. Also the development of knowledge, proper of the intellect is only accommodation of impressions, and therefore remains a subjective knowledge.
Clearly, skepticism is always at risk of a drift into contradiction, especially whenever it stands as truth self-refuting statement as "There is no truth." "This statement is true." An absolute and consistent skepticism, therefore, is impossible, because it would reduce to silence.
The radical denial of the truth, however, should not be understood as a statement undoubtedly true, which would contradict the skeptical principle, but as a negation that denies, as well as its content, even itself: denying any pretense of giving this same denial an absolute and dogmatic value.
Skepticism in modern thought has less radical tones than the old one, denier of every opportunity to learn the truth, asserting simply that knowledge is necessarily connected to the single individual consciousness and how it is affected by the particular characteristics of the subject.
During the Renaissance, Montaigne (1533 - 1592) takes up the skeptical theme of an illusory truth that can not be based on an impossible claimed correspondence between concepts constant in their structure and sensory data, always different and changing. As a result, says Montaigne, there are no universal laws that can give the same unchanging vision of reality.
Within self-consciousness, instead, as there is a perfect coincidence of ‘I’ with itself, it can be possible to establish permanent and moral laws, equally identical to everyone, while are bound to change both the laws of positive law and the religious norms
David Hume (1711-1776) called himself a skeptic but not Pyrrhonian. His skepticism is moderate different from the traditional one: it is absent in fact suspension of judgment and it asserted the need to have subjective principles of truth that can guide the practical life of men.
Hume’s analysis is more a rational analysis of what reason can know, the extent to which the claims of reason must confine themselves: reason, then, becomes both accused, judge and jury. Hume's skepticism is to consider knowledge as something only probable and not certain, although it comes from experience, that the philosopher thought to be the only source of knowledge.
Thus, although much of the phenomenal knowledge is reduced to only a probable knowledge, Hume fits also a field of safe knowledge, in other words those mathematical, which are independent of what really exists and merely the outcome of mental processes.
Hume then only runs through the boundaries of the claims of reason, although very drastic: the principle of causality, the existence of the world outside to us, ‘I’ and many other aspects of the world that until then seemed obvious; they are now downgraded to simple "habits" and "beliefs". But habits necessary to human life.
So while modern skepticism says the inability for reason to capture in the sensitive data a content of truth, but at the same time recognizes elements of truth within sensitive consciousness, so the feelings in themselves can be taken as true , the ancient skepticism, while acknowledging the subjectivity of all knowledge, denies both to reason and sensitivity, any possibility of grasping the truth.
Hegel himself (1770-1831) highlights in the radical nature of skeptical doubt its positivity: recuperating to some extent the Kantian position on the skepticism of Hume, he observes as though denying any validity to objective truth, skepticism should not be considered as "the most dangerous opponent of philosophy "just because it contributes to the advancement of philosophical thought by warning it of the contingency of reality and preventing it from falling into the Kantian " sleep " of dogmatism.
None of the philosophies previous to skepticism has ever found (proved incontrovertibly) the truth: it imposes the suspension of judgment (epoché). The philosopher Professor Emanuele Severino in 'Ancient Philosophy' asserts: "The sense of truth, evoked once and for all from the philosophical thought, remains firm even in skepticism: only that the latter, unlike skeptical philosophies, believes it can see that the specific sense, despite appearances, did not take space and therefore it is necessary, for those who think, the stay of proceedings ".
The main criticism that addresses this form of skepticism is that the denial that every truth which has been reached is itself a truth, contradicts the first statement. In these terms skepticism is an open struggle to dogmatism, especially the one backed by the Stoics.
In modern and contemporary philosophy skepticism, instead of being explicitly theorized, it is used as a weapon critical of philosophies that claim to give a definitive and comprehensive set up to human knowledge. Thus, in the context of modern philosophy, G.E. Schulze in his work Enesidemo (from the name of the skeptical philosopher) claimed the validity of the skepticism of Hume, opposing it to Kant's rationalism.
Among the contemporaries they turned to skepticism to fight the idealism of Hegelian inspiration that was spreading in Italy in the first decades of the twentieth century.
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