Античный скептицизм и философия науки: диалог сквозь два тысячелетия

The stoic school has much anticipated the historical and postmodern trends of the philosophy of science. T. Kuhn demonstrated that it was only historical practice that could serve as a criterion for the scientific truth; and the priority motivation of the scientific progress was quite different from the aspiration for objective truth, now coming under the competition of time and history. The stoic epistemology points to this priority motivation. The stoic epistemology is characterized by the automatism of the truth achievement – «the harmony of thinking», thus the importance is shifted from the result of truth to the process. The stoics outlined the idea according to which the main question of the epistemology is not the truth, but the procedure of transition of the thinking from empirical to theoretical level. As a result they «designed» the phenomenon of science outlined by the logical structure of the cognitive process.

The school of Pyrrhon and his followers has much anticipated the postmodern trend of the philosophy of science. The stoics and the epicureans could admit at least the existence of intersubjective truth, but the pirronists excluded it as well. They put a man into the world of total subjectivism, where there was no truth but there were a lot of subjective worlds. That’s why there was nothing a man could affirm to protect himself from various delusions, but he could doubt and deny everything without any fear for being wrong. These statements of the pirronists predicted the postmodern trend of the philosophy of science with its indifference concerning the problem of truth and with the principle of the theoretical pluralism (the relativity of truth).