Antiochus of Ascalon (c.130–c.68 B.C.), Greek philosopher and the last prominent member of the New Academy. He played the major role in ending its two centuries of Skepticism and helped revive interest in doctrines from the Old Academy, as he called Plato, Aristotle, and their associates.
The impulse for this decisive shift came in epistemology, where the Skeptical Academy had long agreed with Stoicism that knowledge requires an infallible ‘criterion of truth’ but disputed the Stoic claim to find this criterion in ‘cognitive perception.’ Antiochus’s teacher, Philo of Larissa, broke with this tradition and proposed that perception need not be cognitive to qualify as knowledge. Rejecting this concession, Antiochus offered new arguments for the Stoic claim that some perception is cognitive, and hence knowledge. He also proposed a similar accommodation in ethics, where he agreed with the Stoics that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness but insisted with Aristotle that virtue is not the only good. These and similar attempts to mediate fundamental disputes have led some to label Antiochus an eclectic or syncretist; but some of his proposals, especially his appeal to the Old Academy, set the stage for Middle Platonism, which also sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. No works by Antiochus survive, but his students included many eminent Romans, most notably Cicero, who summarizes Antiochus’s epistemology in the Academica, his critique of Stoic ethics in De finibus IV, and his purportedly Aristotelian ethics in De finibus V.
See also ACADEMY , ARISTOTLE , CICERO, MIDDLE PLATONISM , PLATO , STOICIS. V.C. & S.A.W.