Your taking on of Cicero’s idea as “the right one” (as “truth”, most ironically) is wholly arbitrary. It’s simple preference, like choosing Juicy Fruit chewing gum over DoubleMint gum.

A skeptic can walk around with his dick in his hand (no offense ) claiming that “there is no truth!” but that doesn’t satisfy man’s thoughts or feelings. That’s why I said a few posts up that the skeptic has a tough row to hoe when trying to convince someone who does believe in an accessible truth. I would say to the skeptic: “Your idea does not satisfy me, what do I stand to gain from taking on your way of thinking? How does my life possibly become any better by becoming skeptical on these issues?”

Maybe I didn’t make this clear, I’ll try again: Plato believed that truth existed. Aristotle did not. Cicero, through skepticism, proved that truth, at the very least, one can not know truth.

Fast forward a couple hundred years. Christianity is now a fledgling movement. But there isn’t any big thinker to set the Christian philosophical system into place. In comes Augustine, a recently converted pagan. Being the thinker that he is, he quickly realizes that Christianity has a major problem: Cicero. Cicero has apparently proved that one cannot know truth. Christianity is based on Plato, and it kinda HAS to agree that one can know truth, because for a Chrstian, truth is not Plato’s ideal, but rather God, so it is immediately at odds with Cicero.

So imagine Plato’s “truth” transposed as the Christian God and you’ve got the general idea. Now of course, if Cicero were alive, he’d say this whole Christian thing was ridiculous because “um, I’ve already solved this problem. Ask the Stoics sometime”.

So Augustin feels it is absolutely imperative to prove that truth does exist and that one can indeed know it, otherwise Christianity is no better logically than the old Roman religion that Cicero dismantled. So Augustine’s entire goal is to prove Cicero wrong and show that truth is only attained through Christ etc. etc.

Unfortunately, Cicero’s strategy is easy: take apart the logical system Augustine is using not by saying it is wrong, but rather by giving him his argument, while showing that Cicero’s can be just as valid. If Cicero can prove that his system is just as valid, well then Augustine loses because he’s the one saying nothing else can work.

That’s the beauty of skepticism: you don’t tell your opponent that he’s wrong, you just show him that you are right as well, thereby crushing their argument that they know the real truth. Because there can’t be more than one truth from Augustine’s perspective

As for the arrow, it’s all about illusion baby. You can’t trust your senses!

It would be like saying, “The Boston Red Sox won the World Series, so they are superior athletes compared to the New England Patriots, who lost their championship game.”

You’re talking about two very different situations there, so different that the comparison flat-out doesn’t work. To compare one philosopher who was explicitly talking about an omnipotent God-figure, versus another philosopher who wasn’t talking about an omnipotent God-figure… it’s apples and oranges.

I’ve heard of the “never hits the target” thing. Basically, you can halve the distance between projectile and target an infinite number of times and there will always be some amount of distance, however small, between the two so a person could say, mathematically, the two items will never touch.

It’s a cute demonstration of math but it’s meaningless in the practical world. If we ask a physics professor about it, rather than a philosopher, they might explain it in a different way.

If you’d ever like to give it a try, I’ll be happy to shoot at you

Also remember that Cicero was not talking about the Christian God when he was writing on skepticism. Augustine had to force God into the equation after the fact. Cicero successfully dismantled Plato, and since Augustine wanted to use Plato as the template, he had to respond to Cicero’s criticism if he wanted to make Christianity work.

As for truths existing…I once saw video of a skydiver who slammed into the ground when his chute didn’t open…and lived

It’s a completely different tangent but Cicero deals with these “obvious truths” pretty handily. It’s got a lot of stuff to do with illusions and the “reality” we perceive with our senses, i.e. katalepsis, cannot be trusted. For example, I could give you a logical mathematical reason for why an arrow shot from a bow never actually hits its target

it’s crazy stuff

That’s not intellectually satisfying, to me. That’s one guy setting up a premise that he likes and claiming that the mere fact that, in his own mind, he has satisfied himself should mean that others should also be satisfied by it. To be fair, I can see how the other side’s argument may not be very satisfying, either.

Cicero’s line of argument, as I understand your summary of it, is assuming that man’s reason is the highest authority. When the existence of the Christian God is one of the chief points of debate… then to believe that such a god exists is to believe there is a higher authority than man’s reason.

And even in less spiritual/metaphysical terms, the assertion that it’s impossible to know truth seems sort of goofy and weak-minded (though I realize many would assert just the opposite). I mean, say you go jump off of a tall building… there are some true things that are absolutely going to happen. Truths exist.

Remember, Augustine relies on the fact that truth HAS to exist in order for Christianity to even work. All Cicero has to do is show that truth can’t exist, that it is an “illusion” in his words.

You see, that’s exactly what Cicero wants: to show that something is impossible to prove. Because if something is impossible to prove, then how can Augustine claim to know what Truth is?

Cicero would basically say “fine, have your funny little way of thinking. I don’t mind. But I’ve just proved it logically irrelevant and therefore proved how truth is an illusion”.

smart fella, that Cicero

A person says “There is no absolute truth.” To which another person responds “Are you absolutely sure?”

All of this is contained inside of individual people’s minds. There is no “winning” on either side. When you say “All he has to do is find a way to show it is wrong…” – that’s all just thought inside of mens’ heads. You’re simply left with two different men with two different ways of thinking about things. Which isn’t far-fetched at all, to me. If there are six billion people on earth, I could believe that each and every one of them might have a unique way of thinking about Truth.

So I gather you’re debating the validity of Augustine’s assertion that everything had to be binary? In matters of we people just walking around in life, I don’t think that anyone has to adhere to that style of thought.

If the debate is saying: “No, Augustine, I believe that more styles of thought than just this one are available to people.” Then I would certainly agree with you.

But if you tack onto the end of that “…therefore there is no absolute truth.” – then I would disagree with you because that’s impossible to prove.

If Augustine attacks Cicero for being wrong logically, then Augustine, as the respondent to Cicero must prove that the skeptic’s system is impossible. Augustine claims he can do this. So if Cicero, in his response, shows categorically that Augustine has not achieved what he set out to do, well then the game is over and Cicero has won.

You see, Cicero’s entire argument is that you cannot know truth and he set out this argument a couple hundred years before Augustine. Augustine writes his response because he is a Christian. If he follows what Cicero says, then Christianity is completely pointless so he needs a way to defend his religion. Therefore he comes up with his own system to explain it. But because he is a Christian, he cannot acknowledge that there can be a separate system, i.e. a Ciceronian way of looking at things. That’s just an impossibility for Augustine.

That’s the reason why all a skeptic needs to do is find a counterargument that nullifies their opponent. A true skeptic believes that it is impossible to know the truth of anything, so when someone comes along claiming to know what that truth is, then all the skeptic has to do is find a way to show it is wrong. That can either be by playing the system against itself, or finding another system altogether.

In either case, Augustine’s logic is shown to be foolish. To Cicero, God has nothing to do with it. Augustine is simply transposing Plato’s ideal onto the Christian ideal, which is God. Cicero is saying “that doesn’t make any sense. Christian philosophy is just Plato by another name and I’ve already defeated Plato”

That second person has a tough row to hoe. You say the onus is on the first person to prove that they actually do know the Truth. However, from their perspective they already know the truth and they would place the onus on the second person, to prove that they are wrong.

Ultimately neither side can prove categorically, using physical evidence, that they are right. A person’s inability to prove that they know Truth/God is essentially the same as the opponent’s inability to DISprove that the first person knows Truth/God. You may posit that inability to prove is philosophically distinct from inability to DISprove – and if we were sitting on a criminal jury I might agree with you. However, in matters of Truth/God it’s a different situation.

The only thing the skeptic has to do is prove that there is a different non-dialectic path that leads to Truth being impossible to know, and the skeptic has won.

The onus is on the person claiming to have the correct answer to prove it. That’s why Aristotle was so famous. Someone would give this great philosophical, logical thing and he would shoot it down with a counterargument that goes against whatever that person was arguing for, therefore rendering it silly and foolish.