MEDIEVAL SKEPTICISM

Pyrrhonism ended as a philosophical movement in the late Roman Empire, as

religious concerns became paramount. In the Christian Middle Ages the main surviving form of Skepticism was the Academic, described in St. Augustine's Contra academicos. Augustine, before his conversion, had found Cicero's views attractive and had

overcome them only through revelation. With faith, he could seek understanding. Augustine's account of Skepticism and his answer to it provided the basis for medieval discussions.

In Islamic Spain, where there was more contact with ancient learning, a

form of antirational Skepticism developed among Muslim and Jewish theologians. Al-Ghazali, an Arab theologian of the 11th and early 12th centuries, and

his Jewish contemporary Judah ha-Levi (c. 1075/c. 1085-c. 1141), who was

a poet and physician as well as a philosopher, offered skeptical challenges (much like those later employed by the occasionalist Nicolas Malebranche and

by David Hume) against the contemporary Aristotelians in order to lead

people to accept religious truths in mystical faith. This kind of fideism also appears in the late Middle Ages in the German cardinal and philosopher Nicolaus of Cusa's advocacy of learned ignorance as the way to religious knowledge.