Essential Thinkers #7 Cicero, A Mixture of Scepticism and Stoicism

For much of his life Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) was known as a Roman politician, lawyer and orator, who despite his humble origins, rose to pre-eminence among the conservative Roman aristocracy. As a youth he had travelled and studied in Greece and maintained a firm interest in philosophy throughout his public life. He maintained friendships with philosophers from all the leading schools but it was not until his retirement, finding himself in the political wilderness, that he devoted his final years to translating large parts of the Greek corpus into Latin. Much of our knowledge of Greek thought is due to Cicero’s translations and he remains a primary source for students of Hellenistic philosophy.

Of Cicero’s many works the most important include his Acedemica, on the impossibility of certain knowledge, the De Finibus and De Officiis, in which he discusses the ends of human action and the rules of right conduct, the Tusculan Disputations, concerning the problems of happiness, pain, the human emotions and death, and On the Nature of Gods and On Divination, both concerned with theological matters.

Mostly produced in the last two years of his life, Cicero’s philosophy comprises a mixture of scepticism in the theory of knowledge and stoicism in ethics. He was largely critical of all things Epicurean. Although he maintained a claim to some originality in his thought, Cicero’s dialogues are principally a ‘pick and mix’ of the three leading Greek philosophical schools. This was neither by accident, nor disguised. Cicero felt that the more modern Latin language could resolve and clarify the problems of Greek philosophy, as well as make it more appealing to a modern audience.

In this aim Cicero is largely judged to have been successful. The philosophical vocabulary invented by him is responsible for Latin becoming the primary philosophical language over Greek: despite the invention of modern languages, Latin remained the primary language of philosophy right up until the Renaissance. Even Descartes’ hugely influential Meditations of First Philosophy, published in 1641, was written first in Latin and only later translated into French. Its most famous conclusion ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (popularly translated as “I think, therefore I am”) is still today referred to in philosophical schools by its Latin name, “the Cogito.”

Although philosophy no longer uses Latin as its first language, many of Cicero’s philosophical terms are still in common employment today. Latin phrases such as a priori (meaning “prior to experience”), a fortiori (even more so), reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity), ceteris paribus (a caveat meaning “other things being equal”), are not just in common philosophical usage but also, in some cases, set the agenda for the philosophical debate. For example, the great debate between empiricists and rationalists is primarily a debate over whether there can be such a thing as a priori knowledge – as the rationalists maintain – or whether all knowledge is a posteriori, in other words, derived from experience. In both logic and philosophical logic, Latin terms remain in current and widespread use.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012.
Also listen to Forgotten Thinkers: Cicero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rswj2AvC1Xk ]

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