The Academy After Plato

Plato's Academy did not remain a fixed doctrine after its founder's death in 347 BCE. Leadership passed first to his nephew Speusippus, then to Xenocrates, both of whom continued broadly dogmatic Platonic teaching, but in the third century BCE the school turned sharply toward skepticism under Arcesilaus, who argued that Socrates' own admission of ignorance was the true spirit of the Academy and that certainty should be withheld on every question. This skeptical phase, later called the New Academy, reached its most systematic form under Carneades in the second century BCE, who developed sophisticated arguments against Stoic claims to certain knowledge while famously visiting Rome and arguing both sides of the question of justice on consecutive days, to the alarm of Roman moralists. The school returned to a more positive, dogmatic Platonism under Antiochus of Ascalon in the first century BCE, who blended Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic ideas into what he presented as a recovery of the Academy's original teaching. The physical school itself was destroyed during the Roman general Sulla's siege of Athens in 86 BCE, but the philosophical tradition continued under the name Platonism for centuries afterward, eventually feeding into the very different, more mystical Neoplatonism associated with Plotinus in the third century CE.