Commitment without Conviction: Cicero’s Skeptical Eudaimonism

In this paper I offer an account of how Cicero governed his practical life as an Academic skeptic, which I call “commitment without conviction.” While Cicero was committed to the universal suspension of assent, he was nonetheless entitled to form rationally warranted, diachronically stable beliefs. At the same time, I argue, Cicero lacked conviction in two senses. First, he did not believe with conviction, or with a level of confidence exceeding the bounds set by Academic arguments for akatalēpsia. Second, he lacked a central conviction. That is, he never endorsed, even in an appropriately skeptical way, an all-encompassing view of the summum bonum. This picture emerges from a close reading of Cicero’s pedagogical strategies in the late philosophical works and, in particular, from the metaphilosophical commitments articulated in the Lucullus. On my reading, Cicero aimed not only to liberate his readers from authority and dogma, but also to cultivate independent thinking and, above all, a love of truth. One method he employed to achieve these aims was to model intellectually virtuous inquiry for his readers, including by transparently documenting his own sustained indecision about the human telos.