 Histories of philosophy typically speak, as I did above, of a ‘skeptical turn’ in the Academy or of the ‘skeptical Academy’. Ancient authors called the school of Arcesilaus and his successors the ‘New Academy’ to distinguish it from the ‘Old Academy’ of his predecessors. Some cautions and qualifications are in order, however. The term ‘skeptic’ was not used by the Academics, but was the most prominent of several descriptions bestowed on themselves by the members of the Pyrrhonian school. It was applied only later to the Academics on the basis of a long-recognized affinity between the two schools. In the original meaning of the term, a skeptic is an inquirer or investigator, but it came to be associated in particular with theses calling into question the possibility of knowledge and recommending suspension of judgment together with the arguments put forward in support of them. The sense of ‘skeptic’ and ‘skeptical’ most familiar to us has its origin in this use of the term. There is a corresponding tension in accounts of the Academy, and in the philosophical activity they seek to describe. 