Pirro

Pyrrho (c.365–c.275 bc)

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis gave his name first to the most influential version of ancient scepticism (Pyrrhonism), and later to scepticism as such (pyrrhonism). Like Socrates, he wrote nothing, despite which – or thanks to which – he too became one of the great figures of philosophy. Although he has vanished behind his own legend, he must have helped nurture that legend: his unique personality palpably exercised an unequalled fascination on his acquaintances, and through them, on many others. We possess, thanks especially to Sextus Empiricus, extensive documentation of what can be called ‘Neo-Pyrrhonian’ scepticism, because from the time of Aenesidemus (first century bc) it invoked Pyrrho as its patron saint. But Pyrrho’s own thought is hard to recover. The documentary evidence for him is mainly anecdotal, and the principal doxography is more or less directly dependent on his leading disciple Timon of Phlius, who managed to present himself as Pyrrho’s mere ‘spokesman’, but who was in fact perhaps rather more than that. The main question, which is still unanswered, is whether Pyrrho was primarily or even solely a moralist, the champion of an ethical outlook based on indifference and insensibility, or whether he had already explicitly set up the weaponry of the sceptical critique of knowledge which underlies the epistemological watchword ‘suspension of judgment’.

 

1 Life

According to Diogenes Laertius (IX 61–70), who is following a life of Pyrrho written around 225 bc by Antigonus of Carystus, Pyrrho had been an obscure painter before his studies, which were first with Bryson (probably the Megarian philosopher of that name), then with Anaxarchus. Anaxarchus was a companion to Alexander the Great on his Asian campaign, and brought Pyrrho along too. Alexander’s biographers speak quite often of Anaxarchus, but never of Pyrrho. On his return to Greece, Pyrrho lived in the countryside near Elis, surrounded by a group of admirers, but hardly seeming a head of school.

The numerous anecdotes about him reveal a split between two concurrent images. On the one hand we hear of Pyrrho as an eccentric: indifferent towards himself as towards others, he leaves himself entirely unprotected, taking account neither of sensations nor of the beliefs which guide practical life (fr. 6). He behaves as a fakir (fr. 16) who recalls his encounters with the ‘gymnosophists’ or ‘naked sages’ of India (frs 1A, 10). He thus personifies a ‘rustic’ kind of scepticism, which subjects to ‘suspension of judgment’ not only learned doctrines but also beliefs found in ordinary life.

A second image, endorsed by Aenesidemus, is of a Pyrrho who suspends judgment when philosophizing but does not lack foresight in his practical life (fr.7). He lives in a manner which is modest, peaceful and relatively conformist (fr. 14), along with his sister and his farmyard animals, highly esteemed by his fellow citizens (fr. 11). He thus stands for an ‘urbane’ scepticism, which outlaws all doctrinal assertions but leaves intact the instinctive beliefs of everyday life.

This duality no doubt nurtured the debate as to what was the Pyrrhonists’ chief good (telos) (Diogenes Laertius IX 108): insensibility (apatheia) according to some, gentleness (praotēs) according to others. It is possible, moreover, that both the ‘rustic’ and the ‘urbane’ image had their roots in the complexity of one and the same personality, as illustrated by some anecdotes. For example, the story goes that Pyrrho once fled from a vicious dog, and, reproached for violating his own principles of indifference, replied ‘It is difficult to strip yourself completely of being human’ (fr. 15A–B). We should take it that his ambition really was to escape the human condition, but that he knew himself incapable of unfailingly achieving this.

 

2 The legends

More by his personality than by his ideas, no doubt, Pyrrho created a sensation: he gave the impression of having found a new way of being happy. A disciple, Timon, asks him the secret of his superhuman serenity (frs 60–1). Another, Nausiphanes, reported that one of his own pupils used to question him eagerly about Pyrrho’s conduct (fr. 28); the pupil’s name was Epicurus (§1). When Cicero speaks of Pyrrho, he never describes him as a sceptical critic of knowledge (despite having the opportunity to do so), but always as an absurdly rigorous moralist (frs 69A–M), even more radical than the extremist Stoics Ariston of Chios (§2) and Herillus. Pyrrho must, nevertheless, have cared as little about the difference between knowledge and ignorance as about anything else; Timon contrasts his tranquil lack of curiosity to ‘the empty wisdom of the sophists’ (fr. 60). Later, his condemnation of the branches of knowledge as useless could be presented as a way of condemning knowledge itself as impossible.

His chronological position inevitably favoured this metamorphosis. Aristotle’s junior by twenty years, Pyrrho was still in his forties when Aristotle and his former pupil Alexander the Great both died (322 and 323 bc), that is, at the start of the Hellenistic age. He was a generation older than Epicurus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium, the founders of the two great new schools of this era (see Epicureanism; Stoicism). And he was two generations older than Arcesilaus, who restored scepticism to the Platonic Academy. He was therefore perfectly placed to appear a pivotal thinker in the eyes of posterity. Just before him, Aristotle seemed to have brought to completion an era of intellectual audacity, in which thinkers had vied in cognitive ambitions without necessarily considering their multiple disagreements a fatal drawback; when they had discussed knowledge, they had tended to suppose that its existence and possibility went without saying, and instead set themselves the task of analysing its nature, its tools and its methods. After Pyrrho, on the other hand, and throughout Hellenistic philosophy, there was a concern as to whether we really do have cognitive access to the world: the new schools placed the problem of the ‘criterion of truth’ at the head of their agenda, and their solutions to it marked the crucial distinction between dogmatists and sceptics (Hellenistic philosophy). It looks as if, in the intervening time, a radical new challenge to the very possibility of knowledge had been thrown down. When the author of this challenge is sought, Pyrrho emerges as the perfect candidate. One might even speak of a duel fought between Aristotle and Pyrrho. When Aristotle (Metaphysics IV) speaks of the manner of speech, thought and action to which those who deny the law of non-contradiction are condemned, he uses expressions which recur in the reports of Pyrrho’s behaviour and in the formulas which he recommends using. It is as if Pyrrho had found a way to show that one could perfectly well live, speak and think in just the way Aristotle had said one could not (unless these coincidences were a later imposition designed to make Pyrrho look like the hero of an unprecedented philosophical rebellion.)

To correct this exaggerated portrayal, it is enough to notice that Pyrrho’s contemporaries and successors, even the most enthusiastic of them, do not present him as an innovative theorist. Timon, despite doing more than anyone else to place him on a pedestal, nevertheless does not make him stand altogether alone: it is he who first assembles that gallery of ancestors (the Eleatics, Democritus, Protagoras and, above all, Xenophanes) which is thereafter associated with Pyrrho by the doxographers and authors of ‘successions’ (see Doxography).

Much later, from Aenesidemus to Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrho’s name reappeared in the titles of sceptical works (Pyrrhonian Discourses, Pyrrhonian Sketches) as emblematic of a scepticism senior to that of Arcesilaus and altogether uncontaminated by the New Academy: after long neglect, it became a prestigious flag to wave. In this late era little was still known about Pyrrho. It was in any case sensible for a Pyrrhonist to disavow that name, as did Theodosius (second century ad), who remarked that ‘given that the movement of someone else’s thought is undiscoverable, we will never know what Pyrrho’s mental disposition was; and not knowing that, we could not label ourselves Pyrrhonists’ (fr. 41). It is notable that Sextus’ only response to this objection is the mild one that scepticism can be called Pyrrhonism ‘owing to the fact that Pyrrho seems to us to have devoted himself to the activity of sceptical inquiry (skepsis) more solidly and manifestly than his predecessors’ (fr. 40) (see Pyrrhonism).

One may wonder, in the circumstances, whether Pyrrho’s posthumous fate does not result from a sort of collage: the overwhelming originality of his ethical message, immediately recognized and celebrated, seemed to demand as its complement a radical critique of epistemology. This latter may have been bestowed on him retrospectively, in the way that philosophers often get saddled with the real or imagined consequences, or premises, of their ideas.

 

3 The key testimony

It would clearly be presumptuous, and would perhaps make little sense, to pretend to reconstitute the ‘real’ Pyrrho behind, or in front of, his multiple reflections. Reale (1981) has distinguished no fewer than eight defensible types of interpretation of Pyrrho’s philosophy. Some separate him only narrowly, others widely, from the epistemological and phenomenalist scepticism of the neo-Pyrrhonists. For some he is above all an ascetic proponent of indifference; for others a nihilistic theorist of pure appearance and radical critic of all ontology. Such diversity is all the more surprising given the existence of a text (fr. 53) universally considered the centrepiece of Pyrrho’s doxography, and respectable as much for its pedigree (it is cited by Eusebius from the late first century bc philosopher Aristocles, who himself drew its substance, if not its letter, from Timon) as for its content: an overview of Pyrrho’s philosophical project. Clear and instructive in appearance, at a first reading this text seems to attest that Pyrrhonism does indeed have a fundamentally ethical goal, and that there are two closely linked means to its achievement: practical indifference and abstention from judgment, the latter going hand in hand with a complete disqualification of the ordinary instruments of knowledge. But the articulation of these different elements raises difficulties; and by scrutiny of the text we may be able to perform a task widely judged by interpreters to be impossible or useless: to separate Pyrrho’s original message from Timon’s own contribution.

Anyone who is on the verge of being happy, says Timon, should consider three questions: what the nature of things is, how we should be disposed towards them, and what benefit those who adopt this attitude will derive from it. The sequence of these three questions is itself puzzling: no latter-day sceptic would inquire about ‘the nature of things’ before asking himself whether we can know it. Pyrrho nevertheless does ask this; and he replies – in the one phrase of the text which Timon expressly attributes to him – that ‘things are entirely undifferentiated, undetermined and undecided’. This no doubt means that it is we who introduce the differences which appear to us to distinguish them (fr. 64). But what differences? He might mean all differences, including those of colour and so on as much as those between values. Or he might mean only these latter. Another summary (fr. 1A) has Pyrrho saying ‘that nothing is fair or foul, just or unjust, and that likewise in every case nothing is really (this or that), and that it is by custom and habit that people do everything they do; for nothing is any more this than that’. These generalizations seem restricted to the sphere of practical ethics.

Aristocles’ summary, after characterizing ‘things’ as ‘undifferentiated’, strangely adds that ‘for this reason, our sensations and beliefs are neither true nor false’. Here again, a latter-day sceptic would say otherwise, indeed the reverse: that our sensations and beliefs are untrustworthy, and that therefore ‘things’ are in their nature undifferentiated. Some have even emended the text to make it say this. However, once we notice that the grammar of the text attributes this bizarre inference to Timon, not to Pyrrho himself, we may prefer not to emend it, but to see in its very incongruity the traces of Timon’s own intervention, a somewhat clumsy epistemological graft onto the original Pyrrhonian trunk.

The second point on the Pyrrhonian agenda admittedly does not help much with testing this hypothesis. In the face of undifferentiated ‘things’, the attitude that we should take is that of respecting their non-differentiation: we must be ‘unopinionated, uninclined, undisturbed’ either positively or negatively towards anything. These expressions can be interpreted as describing a refusal to affirm, just as much as a refusal to choose. And the same equivocation between theory and practice persists in the description of the discourse that goes with this behaviour: it is appropriate to say, of each thing, that ‘it is no more (this or that) than it is not it’, or again (no doubt with the implication ‘if it is necessary at all costs to say something positive or negative’) that it is appropriate immediately to negate our assertion, saying that ‘it is (this or that) and at the same time that it is not it’, or that ‘it neither is (this or that) nor is not it’. These expressions are remarkable; but they do not make it clear whether ‘this or that’ covers all possible predicates, or only those which, like ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’, concern the sphere of action.

One who is ‘on the verge of being happy’ must last consider – and this is the final phase of the Pyrrhonian programme – ‘what will happen to those who are disposed thus’ (that is, ‘without opinions’ and so on, as already defined). Whoever is reformed by Pyrrhonian training, says Timon, will achieve first aphasia (not in its modern sense of mutism, but a sort of non-assertive, non-committal use of language), then ataraxia (complete lack of disturbance, perfect unworriedness). It is worth noticing that the attainment of this benefit is here described as predictable. In later Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 28–9), and already in Timon (Diogenes Laertius IX 107), there was to be on the contrary an insistence that ataraxia results unexpectedly, by a happy chance, from suspension of judgment. Might this difference not be the result of the epistemological graft hypothesized above? That ataraxia should result from practical indifference makes sense: freed of all preferences, we will no longer undergo the feelings which upset us. But that ataraxia should result from suspension of judgment makes less sense: the renunciation of all certainty might seem, on the contrary, to condemn us to everlasting anxiety. The appeal to ‘happy chance’, an innovation on the rational planning offered by Pyrrho’s programme, may therefore reflect the new complexity introduced into the sceptic’s itinerary by the epistemological detour. If this analysis of the key testimony in Aristocles is correct, we are entitled to say, even more firmly than before, that Pyrrho was not the first of the Pyrrhonists.

 

Pyrrhonism

Pyrrhonism was the name given by the Greeks to one particular brand of scepticism, that identified (albeit tenuously) with Pyrrho of Elis, who was said (by his disciple Timon of Phlius) to have declared that everything was indeterminable and accordingly to have suspended judgment about the reality of things – in particular whether they were really good or bad. After Timon’s death Pyrrhonism lapsed, until revived by Aenesidemus. Aenesidemus held that it was inadmissible either to affirm or to deny that anything was really the case, and in particular to hold, with the Academic sceptics, that certain things really were inapprehensible. Instead, the Sceptic (the capital letter denotes the Pyrrhonists, who adopted the term, literally ‘inquirer’, as one of the designations for their school) should only allow that things were no more the case than not, or only so under certain circumstances and not under others. Aenesidemean Scepticism took the form of emphasizing the disagreement among both lay people and theoreticians as to the nature of things, and the fact that things appear differently under different circumstances (the various ways of doing this were systematized into the Ten Modes of Scepticism); the result was meant to be suspension of judgment about such matters, which would in turn lead to tranquillity of mind. Thus ‘Scepticism’ denotes a particular philosophical position, not simply, as in modern usage, that of any philosopher inclined towards doubt. Later Pyrrhonists, notably Agrippa, refined the Sceptical method and concentrated on undermining the dogmatic (that is, anti-Sceptical) notion of the criterion – there is no principled way to settle such disputes without resorting to mere assertion, infinite regress or circularity. We owe to Sextus Empiricus our most complete account of Pyrrhonian argument and the clearest exposition of the Pyrrhonian attitude. Faced with endemic dispute, Sceptics reserve judgment; but this does not render life impossible for them, since they will still react to the way things appear to be, although without believing in any strong sense that things really are as they seem. Furthermore, when Pyrrhonians describe their affective states, they do so undogmatically – and the Sceptical slogans (‘I determine nothing’, ‘nothing is apprehended’, and so on) are to be understood in a similar way, as merely reporting a state of mind and not expressing a commitment. Thus the slogans apply to themselves, and like cathartic drugs are themselves purged along with the noxious humour of dogmatism.

 

1 History

Greek scepticism is inextricably associated with the name of Pyrrho; the ancients themselves dubbed the most enduring and interesting form of scepticism of their times ‘Pyrrhonism’ after its eponymous origin. Yet surprisingly little is known about Pyrrho the man, and it is possible that he was not even a Sceptic (in the strict sense of the term) at all (see Pyrrho §3). He lived from c.365 to c.275 bc, and his name became a byword for philosophical detachment from the ordinary concerns of life. Legend has it that his friends had to prevent him from walking over cliffs and under passing traffic; this and other amusing if apocryphal stories are recorded in the biography by Diogenes Laertius. He wrote nothing, and most of what we know of him derives from the writings of his disciple and amanuensis Timon. According to Timon, Pyrrho held that to be happy we must confront three questions: How are things by nature? What attitude should we adopt towards them? What will be the outcome for those who have this attitude? He answered that all things were equally indifferent, unmeasurable and undecidable, and that our perceptions told us neither truths nor falsehoods about the way things really are. The upshot of this is that we should be free of all opinion and commitment. The proper attitude to anything is to suppose that it no more (ou mallon) is the case than not. As a result we should simply acquiesce in the way things appear without having any strong beliefs concerning the way they actually are.

These remained the characteristic attitudes of Pyrrhonism throughout its history. However, original though Pyrrho undoubtedly was (even if the tradition suggests that he learned philosophical detachment from Indian philosophers while following Alexander the Great’s expedition with Anaxarchus), his scepticism was not entirely without precedent. Ever since Xenophanes (§5), Greek thinkers had puzzled over the nature and scope of human knowledge, and whether it was genuinely possible. Some fragments of Democritus in particular suggest a cautious attitude to the possibility of human understanding, and Democritus (§3) employed the formula ‘no more’ on occasion to indicate a sceptical refusal to commit himself one way or the other on some question. Moreover, Aristotle is clearly aware of sceptical challenges to our ability to rely upon our senses (Metaphysics IV 4–5), although he dismisses them as mere captiousness (it is possible that he knew of Pyrrho’s scepticism).

There is no hint of a concerted and systematic attempt to question our justification for belief in the natures of things before Pyrrho, however. Indeed Pyrrho himself may not have mounted a general assault on the reliability of the senses (although Timon evidently did), so much as a limited attack on our pretensions to ethical knowledge, or, more generally, knowledge of matters of value; in later antiquity, Pyrrho’s name was certainly associated primarily with ethical (in the broad Greek sense) issues; and it was principally as a role model for a certain way of life, one in which tranquillity is to be achieved by a refusal to allow oneself strong commitments of any kind, that Pyrrho’s fame was maintained in later antiquity.

After Timon’s death Pyrrhonism as such died out, although the New Academy of Arcesilaus and Carneades kept alive the sceptical tradition for the next two centuries, in the course of their long and tortuous epistemological conflict with the Stoics. The latter held that empirical certainty was attainable, on the basis of ‘apprehensive’ impressions whose clarity and distinctness were assurances of their truth (see Stoicism §12); the Academic sceptics countered by arguing that there was no true impression that was such that there could not be a false one indistinguishable from it in all internal characteristics: consequently, there was no criterion by which to judge whether or not an impression was indeed apprehensive.

By the first century bc both sides had so modified their positions as a result of the dialectical sparring that it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell the two schools apart, so much so that when (a little after 90 bc) Philo of Larissa relaxed Academic strictures against the possibility of knowledge, Antiochus seceded from the Academy altogether and adopted a position very similar to the Stoics. Reacting against this dilution of the pure sceptical spirit, Aenesidemus re-founded Pyrrhonism. Aenesidemus’ works are all lost, but a ninth-century summary of his eight-volume Pyrrhonian Discourses by Photius survives, which allows us to recreate something of its flavour. The target of his attack was the belief that apprehension, or secure knowledge of the nature of things, was ever attainable. Nobody really knows how things are, yet everybody but the Pyrrhonists claims to do so, wasting their time in futile, dogmatic bickering. Indeed, from this time on ‘dogmatic’ as applied to a philosopher or philosophical view, carries the connotation ‘non-Sceptical’: a dogmatist is anyone who professes belief in dogmata; and a dogma is, according to Sextus Empiricus, an ‘assent to one of the non-evident objects of scientific inquiry’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 13). Such matters are ‘non-evident’ precisely because they go beyond what is strictly contained in the appearances, the phainomena, themselves.

Aenesidemus apparently held that there was as a matter of fact no apprehension of things. He sought to distinguish this position from that of the sceptical Academy on the grounds that they (according to him) were prepared actually to affirm certain things absolutely, notably that apprehension was impossible; by contrast Aenesidemus’ position is provisional – he has no apprehension now, but apprehension might yet be possible. Even so, the appropriate Pyrrhonian attitude to things is to say that they are no more so than not so, or sometimes so and sometimes not so, or so for some people and not for others. Thus Aenesidemus appears to allow a form of relativism. Relativism and Pyrrhonism are incompatible however: relativism positively asserts that there is no genuine fact of the matter, a relativist in ethics appealing to the facts of cultural divergence (as indeed will the Pyrrhonist); but while the relativist will conclude that there is no such thing as an objective good, or right and wrong, the Pyrrhonist will simply infer that we do not know whether any things are genuinely good, and, if any, which. The Pyrrhonist makes no metaphysical claims about the ontological status of such ‘objects’; and hence when Aenesidemus says that some things are one way for some people and otherwise for others, he is not asserting that things really are that way – this is simply a report of how things seem to be.

 

2 The Ten Modes of Scepticism

Fundamental to the Pyrrhonists’ method was the collection of cases in which things seem different under different circumstances. They appear differently to people as opposed to animals (muddy water appeals to pigs but not to us: Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 56), to different groups of people (‘Indians enjoy different things from us’: I 80), to different sense-modalities (‘Paintings seem bumpy to vision, smooth to touch’: I 92), and to the same sense-modality on different occasions (‘Honey seems sweet to the healthy, bitter to the jaundiced’: I 101). These are examples of the first four of the Ten Modes of Scepticism. Many of the examples retailed in the modes are Greek commonplaces, deriving from much earlier times (some may be found in Aristotle; and one of Sextus’ examples of the first mode – that sea water is poisonous to humans but nourishing to fish – is drawn from Heraclitus (§3)). What is important is the systematic way in which they are collected, and the use to which they are put. Aenesidemus may well have been the first to collect the material and organize it into ten separate modes (although this is controversial); in any event, a generation or so later, in the time of Philo of Alexandria (one of our major sources for the modes; see Philo of Alexandria §1), they were firmly associated with Pyrrhonian Scepticism.

A mode (tropos) in this sense is a general pattern of argument, for which any number of specific instances may be found. The basic structure of all of the modes is simple and lucid. Sextus describes Pyrrhonism as a ‘capacity for opposition’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 8): arguments are opposed to arguments, appearances to appearances, and arguments to appearances (I 8–9, 31–3). Whenever the issue goes beyond how things seem to particular individuals (that is, the way things really are), there is, the Pyrrhonists note, an ‘undecidable disagreement’ about the matter. Moreover, that dispute is undecidable because of the unavailability of any generally accepted means of resolving it, any criterion in the technical Greek sense (see §5). And in default of that, the Pyrrhonist urges, there is no reason to prefer one of the appearances to another, and hence we should not commit ourselves to any of them: we should suspend judgment about them (see §4). All the modes, then, share the following basic form:

(1) x appears F relative to a

(2) x appears relative to b

(3) at most one of ‘x is F’ and ‘x is ’ can be (objectively) true

(4) no uncontroversial decision procedure tells decisively either for ‘x is F’ or for ‘x is ’ so

(5) we should suspend judgment as to what x is really like.

The range of x (for example, ‘sea water’ in the Heraclitus case) is broad and varies from mode to mode, as do the predicates covered by the variables F and ; what substitutes for a and b is determined by the particular nature of each mode (thus in the first mode ‘a’ will be humans, ‘b’ other animals, fish for example; in the second a and b will be different individuals or groups of humans; and so on for the other modes). The substituends for F and must be incompatible predicates (for example, ‘poisonous’ and ‘nourishing’), and since they are incompatible, (3) follows trivially. Then, on the supposition that (4) can be made good, (5) follows on reasonable assumptions about rationality.

Sextus Empiricus, our main source for the modes, spends most of his time collecting examples of (1) and (2) for each of his different modes. The first four he labels ‘modes from the judger’: that is, the various types of opposition are to do with variations in the individuals observing them. Modes ‘from both judger and judged’ include the fifth, which notes that the appearance of things varies according to the distance and standpoint from which they are viewed (this is the source of the hardy philosophical perennial that a straight oar looks bent in water: Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 119), and the ninth notes that our appreciation of things differs according to how familiar we are with them (naked bodies become unexciting after a while: I 142). The seventh and tenth modes are labelled ‘from the thing judged’ (although in the latter case it is hard to see why); the seventh is to do with supposed variations in the constitutions of things which are observed under various conditions (thus the filings of black horn look white: I 129), and it is very hard to see what Sceptical leverage such considerations might have; the tenth is the mode ‘mainly concerned with ethics, having to do with ways of life, habits, laws, mythical beliefs and dogmatic suppositions’ (I 145), in which Sextus collects with evident enthusiasm examples of cultural diversity (‘Indians copulate in public’: I 143; ‘Persians marry their mothers’: I 152). These examples are multiplied in a later, more general treatment of ethics (I 3 168–238).

The tenth mode in particular emphasizes an important issue. The proper Pyrrhonian conclusion from the facts of ethical diversity is, according to Sextus at least, that we cannot know whether or not anything is good or bad by nature (I 163, III 235); yet the ethical relativist will equally appeal to precisely the same examples in order to ground the different and incompatible conclusion that nothing is good or bad by nature: there simply are no fundamental facts about value. The Pyrrhonist avoids this move because it too is a species of dogmatism, albeit negative in form. Different people disagree; and that is all there is to it. For all we know there may be actual absolute values. The relativist, negative conclusion is just as unwarranted as its positive dogmatic opponent. Just as the Pyrrhonists will not say that everything is inapprehensible (although allowing that nothing actually seems to be apprehended: see §1), neither will they absolutely deny the existence of objective values.

Similarly, when propounding the eighth mode, the ’mode of relativity’, the Pyrrhonist only affirms that everything appears to be relative (I 135), although (as Sextus notes elsewhere: I 39), relativity is in fact at the core of all of the modes’ procedures (as (1) and (2) above make clear). Thus there is no second-order commitment to the truth of the claim that everything is relative; even that is a matter of appearances.

 

3 The Sceptical slogans

This is the core of the Pyrrhonian position. Pyrrhonists liked to sum up their philosophy in pithy slogans (such as ‘I determine nothing’: Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 197): but this merely means ‘I am now so affected as neither to affirm nor deny dogmatically any of the subjects under investigation’. Equally, ‘Everything is inapprehensible’ only means ‘All the non-evident subjects of dogmatic inquiry which I have investigated seem to me inapprehensible’ (I 200), and similar caveats apply to ‘to each argument an equal argument is opposed’ (I 202–3), and ou mallon: ‘the phrase "no more this than that" expresses our affection, by which we end up in equipoise because of the equal strength of opposing matters’ (I 120). The end result is suspension of judgment, or epochē (stage (5) see §2 above); even then, the Pyrrhonist is careful to say only that matters appear equally balanced (I 196), while Sceptical aphasia, or non-assertion, is ‘an affection of ours because of which we neither affirm nor deny anything’ (I 192); moreover, its scope covers only ‘what is said dogmatically in regard to things non-evident, since we yield to those things which move us affectively and force us necessarily to assent’ (I 193).

Pyrrhonists, then, can say how things seem to be to them, and report the way they are affected; they live their lives according to those appearances, but ‘undogmatically’, that is, without any commitment to their underlying truth. Furthermore, the ‘Sceptical expressions’ such as ‘I determine nothing’ apply to themselves; for the Pyrrhonist, unlike some varieties of relativist, there is no privileged meta-language in which unalloyed second-order truths can be expressed: it is Scepticism all the way down. Thus Pyrrhonism manages to avoid being (at least in any damaging sense) self-refuting, precisely, if paradoxically, because the Sceptical slogans apply to themselves: Sextus compares them to purgative drugs which eliminate themselves along with the ‘noxious humours’ which are their object (I 206).

 

4 The criterion, signs and proof

The Ten Modes of Scepticism are ascribed by Sextus to ‘the older Sceptics’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 36). By contrast, a set of five modes, more general in scope, is attributed by him to ‘the more recent Sceptics’ (I 164). Although in Sextus’ presentation each of the ten modes concludes with suspension of judgment, the arguments by which that is supposed to commend itself are not spelled out in detail; the final steps of the basic schema outlined in §2 still require elucidation.

The modes of Agrippa organize the Sceptical material rather differently: two modes emphasize, in general terms, disagreement and the relativity of appearances, while the other three aver that any attempt to resolve the dispute will result either in mere assertion, infinite regress or circularity (see Agrippa). These three formal modes are in evidence throughout Sextus’ presentation of Pyrrhonian argument; and they ultimately give the reasons why oppositions of the sort collected by the ten modes result in epochē. But, as Sextus was well aware, this is tricky, since elsewhere Pyrrhonists cast doubt on the validity of argument itself. If proof is doubtful, why imagine that (1)–(4) should entail (5)? Crucially, Sextus nowhere relies on the success of that entailment. Rather, perfectly consistently, he simply describes his own affective states. Persistent disputes of the sort gathered by the ten modes, and the persistent appearance that everything is relative, cause him to suspend judgment about things; but that too is simply an appearance, albeit an appearance of his own mental states, which he is at perfect liberty (non-dogmatically) to express.

Moreover, Pyrrhonian arguments are dialectical, directed against the various schools of dogmatists. If dogmatists believe in such things as proof, then they must, by their own lights, accept the Sceptics’ arguments (if they are valid). The Sceptics, by contrast, are not obliged to accept them, and do not do so (although they do not reject them either); but since they do not suffer from dogmatic belief they have no need of them. The bulk of book II of Outlines of Pyrrhonism is taken up with such issues – and Sextus opens the argument with a vigorous defence of the salubrity of the Sceptic’s procedure of investigating dogmatic doctrines on their own terms (II 1–12): the Sceptic can understand the content of the dogmatist’s claims without being committed to it, and can thus point out what should (to the dogmatist) appear to be inconsistencies; and if there are such apparent inconsistencies, dogmatists themselves should abandon their own positions. All of the argument here concerns the criterion.

A criterion is, literally, something that judges: a touchstone. Criteria are standardly, in Hellenistic philosophy and after, divided into criteria of truth (means of judging true from false propositions) and criteria of action (ways to decide how best to behave). The Academics, in their battle with the Stoics (see §1), had denied the existence of the former, while allowing that the latter were still available. Sextus seeks to cast doubt on all of the former, by the standard Pyrrhonian means of contrasting what differing dogmatic schools (primarily the Stoics and the Epicureans) had to say about the issue, as well as by pointing to internal difficulties in their several accounts. Thus Academic arguments are retailed against the Stoic criterion of the ‘apprehensive impression’, but not in order to show positively that there is no such thing (II 79).

Perhaps most characteristic is the claim that, since the existence of a criterion is itself a matter of dispute, it too requires a criterion to resolve it: but none is available, except on pain of infinite regress or circularity (II 20, 34–5). Given ubiquitous dispute, we might look for majority agreement, but that is hardly to be found, and even if it were would be no guarantee of the truth (you can fool almost all of the people some of the time, as the Stoics themselves allowed): Sextus employed similar considerations in discussion of the second of the ten modes (I 87–9); and elsewhere he refuses even to allow that universal agreement on an assertion is enough to show that it is true, since present consensus is no guarantee that future disagreements will not crop up (I 33–4).

Here an earlier issue resurfaces. What is wrong with adopting the Protagorean position that everyone is judge and jury in their own case? (See Protagoras §3.) Exactly that, Sextus thinks: criteria should be independent. But why? Once again it is vital to place Sextus’ argumentation in its dialectical context. Again and again, he will claim that some dispute, or opposition among arguments, or disagreement about appearances, is sufficient to induce epochē ‘concerning how things are absolutely and in their real nature’ (for example, Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 135). He is here relying upon what had become a commonplace of non-Sceptical metaphysics, namely that if something possesses a property essentially, it must do so under all circumstances and in all conditions; but surely the irremediable variability of appearances casts doubt upon our ability to infer to such properties; and if that commonplace is to be given a strong construal, the mere fact that nothing appears the same under all circumstances is enough to show that none of its apparent properties is, in this sense, real. Once more, that conclusion is presented as being something the dogmatist is forced, willy-nilly, to accept; the Pyrrhonist, of course, simply suspends judgment.

All of this is powerful and pointed; and it is backed up by the Sceptical attack on signs in general and proofs in particular. In the latter case, Sextus seeks to show that, on their own account, dogmatic conceptions of proof are self-stultifying (his principal target here is Stoic logic, his method to show that, on the Stoics’ own account of the truth-conditions for the conditional, every proof will contain a redundant conditional premise; and yet redundancy is, on the Stoics’ own account, invalidating) (II 159). More generally, Sextus argues that the dogmatists’ ‘indicative sign’ cannot fulfil its supposed function (Sextus is however, perfectly happy to allow the existence of commemorative signs, whereby one evident phenomenon serves as a sign of some other, temporarily non-evident, phenomenon, on the basis of past experience). An indicative sign was defined as ‘an antecedent in a sound conditional which serves to reveal the consequent’ (II 101), where the consequent is something by nature non-evident (as sweating, in the dogmatists’ stock example, is supposed to reveal the existence of invisible pores in the skin). But, the Sceptics urge, if what is signified is such as never to be evident, how can we know that it has been so revealed?

 

5 Cause and explanation: Sceptical physics

Dogmatists may reply that perhaps the phenomena are such that there is only one possible set of underlying circumstances which could account for them (as is alleged in the sweating-pores case). The atomists held that it was only on the assumption that the world was fundamentally composed of atoms and the void that evident facts of experience (such as the existence of motion) could be explained (see Atomism, Ancient; Democritus §2; Epicureanism §2): perhaps such quasi-transcendental inferences really can take us indubitably to the heart of things. But the Sceptics simply respond that there is no reason to think that there are any such valid inferences – after all, most physical theorists reject the atomist inference from motion to the void.

Such considerations formed the core of a set of eight modes against the aetiologists, attributed to Aenesidemus. These modes consist of a set of general Sceptical reflections on the limitations of explanation: ‘The first is that according to which…aetiology in general, being concerned with non-evident things, has no agreed confirmation’; ‘The second shows that frequently when there are many ways of assigning an explanation to what is being investigated, some of them account for it one way only’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 181). That is, there is no general way in which we can determine the truth (if any) of non-evident matters, since they tend to be susceptible of different interpretations. The fourth mode further notes that dogmatists assume, unfoundedly, that the micro-mechanisms to which they ‘infer’ will be, in general, much like their phenomenal counterparts; furthermore, all theorists are inclined to overlook awkward recalcitrant facts, as well as contradicting the evidence and sometimes themselves, and in general begging the question in favour of their own position.

Aenesidemus’ eight modes attack dogmatic scientific methodology. Elsewhere (III 13–30) Sextus retails more general arguments designed to cast doubt on the coherence of the notions of cause and explanation (some of these arguments mirror those against signs from the previous book). Causes must either precede their effects, or be concurrent with them, or succeed them. The last option is absurd; and cause and effect are relative, so one cannot precede the other; yet a cause is supposed to be productive of something, and hence must precede what it is productive of. This is just one of a battery of arguments Sextus rehearses here and elsewhere (for example, Against the Professors IX 210–51): he also urges that causes should invariably bring about their effects, and yet everything dogmatists refer to as a cause is defeasible; thus not even fire can really be of a nature to burn since it will not burn everything under all circumstances). Sextus then uses the apparent results of the attack on causation to undermine the rest of dogmatic physics: body is that which can act and be acted upon (Outlines of Pyrrhonism III 38), so if there is no agency, there is no body either (and out with it go a host of related notions such as limit, surface and solidity); and equally doomed are the nest of concepts relating to change (motion, increase, rest, and so on), while if these go, so do the ideas of addition and subtraction, and with them arithmetic and the concepts of part and whole.

 

6 The Sceptical end

Most of Sextus’ argument is devoted to attacking dogmatic concepts, yet he never loses sight of the overall goal of the Pyrrhonian procedure of constructing a dispute – it is just that the vast majority of people (and not just dogmatic theorists) believe in the existence of bodies, motion, and so on, and consequently that arm of the disagreement needs little support. Thus, first appearances notwithstanding, all of this is consistent with the general aim of Pyrrhonism. None the less, the question remains: why bother? Why should Pyrrhonists concern themselves at such length with refuting dogmatists, not to mention the views of ordinary people? The latter case is in fact particularly pointed, since Sextus frequently says that he has no quarrel with ordinary views and that he sides with life. Why, then, try to argue that motion is non-existent? Furthermore, while Sextus will on occasion argue that not even fire is warm by nature, elsewhere he will contrast the case of fire with that of ethical values, saying that the latter would have to be like fire if they were to be natural properties (Outlines of Pyrrhonism III 179); surely that is simple inconsistency?

The answers to these questions are controversial, but the following account seems at least coherent. Sextus does not conceive of argument in the ordinary philosophical way as entailing (or at the very least rationally buttressing) conclusions. As seen in §5, he is perfectly happy to argue against argument. Rather arguments affect us in just the same way as phenomenal appearances do; and we may, non-dogmatically, report those effects. Thus, when confronted with an equally balanced pile of considerations on both sides of an issue, I do not conclude that it is rational to suspend judgment: rather epochē just happens to me. Furthermore, Sextus characterizes Sceptics as perpetual investigators: why should they need to go on investigating once they have attained epochē? The answer is precisely that epochē is not rationally inferred by argument: rather it is a state, and one that is in constant need of replenishment; moreover the Sceptic goes on investigating in response to the way things seem.

Sceptics of all stripes were greatly concerned to evade the charge that life without belief (at least dogmatic belief that things really are thus and so) was impossible, since belief is a necessary condition for action. Dogmatic belief, Sceptics claim, is not necessary: they act on the basis of their impressions, but with none of the commitment to the truth of those impressions characteristic of ordinary people’s behaviour. This characterization of the Sceptic’s attitude implies a position on a much discussed question (see Barnes 1982; Burnyeat 1983; Frede 1987): namely, just what is the scope of the dogmata the Sceptic rejects, an answer to which is of capital importance to the associated question of whether life can be lived without them. Are dogmata merely scientific beliefs, beliefs involving explicit commitment to theory (as Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 13 suggests, the line adopted by Frede)? Or are they any and every non-epistemic appearance (Burnyeat’s view)? More probably what makes an appearance into a dogma is not its content, but one’s attitude to it: any appearance can, on this view, be a dogma, but only if its recipient accepts it as really true. And such commitments are not prerequisites of all action.

The upshot of this rejection of dogmata is epochē: the payoff, Sextus claims, is tranquillity, ataraxia, the state of being untroubled by things in general (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 25–30). Distress is caused by strong evaluations – get rid of those, and life will be simpler. Of course, as a Sceptic he cannot claim certainty for his prescription; this is just the way things seem to him. But he is moved by that appearance and his general philanthropy to offer these arguments to others as well. Indeed, in a famous passage at the very end of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus compares Sceptical arguments to drugs: their business is to effect a cure for morbid dogmatism. How they do so is no part of the Pyrrhonist’s concern.