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11517 results in Ancient philosophy

Page 440 of 576

  • Introduction

  • Julia Annas, University of Arizona, Jonathan Barnes, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Modes of Scepticism
    Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    23 May 1985, pp 1-3

  • Summary

    Those who investigate any subject are likely either to make a discovery, or to deny the possibility of discovery and agree that nothing can be apprehended, or else to persist in their investigations. That, no doubt, is why of those who undertake philosophical investigations some say that they have discovered the truth, others deny the possibility of apprehending it, and others are still pursuing their investigations. Those who are properly called dogmatists – such as the Aristotelians and the Epicureans and the Stoics and others – think they have discovered the truth; Clitomachus and Carneades and other Academic philosophers have said that the truth cannot be apprehended; and the sceptics persist in their investigations.

    With this paragraph Sextus Empiricus, the Greek sceptical philosopher, begins his introductory handbook to sceptical thought, the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. He portrays sceptics as perpetual students or researchers, as people who ‘persist in their investigations’, and the Greek adjective skeptikos derives from a verb meaning ‘to inquire’ or ‘to consider’. Now inquirers persist in their inquiries because they have neither discovered the object of their search nor concluded that it lies beyond all discovery: they have, as yet, no opinion on the matter. Hence the word skeptikos or ‘sceptical’ acquires its familiar connotation. Sceptics are doubters: they neither believe nor disbelieve, neither affirm nor deny.

    To be sceptical on any given matter is to suspend judgement on it, to subscribe to no positive opinion either way.

  • 2 - Scepticism in Ancient Philosophy

  • Julia Annas, University of Arizona, Jonathan Barnes, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Modes of Scepticism
    Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    23 May 1985, pp 10-18

  • Summary

    For us, as for Descartes and his contemporaries, Sextus Empiricus is the chief representative of ancient scepticism. But Sextus was the heir to a long tradition which the sceptics themselves liked to trace back to the very beginnings of Greek philosophy. The sceptical tradition, unlike its rivals, never hardened into a school. In the Golden Age of Greek thought, from about 400 BC to about 100 BC, the chief dogmatic philosophies – Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism – were to some extent institutionalised. They were marked by characteristic doctrines and distinctive ideologies. They enjoyed some measure of formal organisation. They functioned as educational establishments. They had official heads or ‘scholarchs’. They owned property. The history of scepticism, one episode excepted, is not like that. Leading sceptics had associates and pupils, and they were aware of their predecessors. Sceptical attitudes and arguments were transmitted from one generation to the next. But by its very nature scepticism could profess no school doctrines, and its adherents did not hanker after the institutional trappings or the professional status of the dogmatic sects. Greek scepticism has a history, but it is informal and discontinuous.

    The later sceptics called themselves Pyrrhonians, ‘from the fact that Pyrrho appears to us to have applied himself to scepticism more thoroughly and more conspicuously than his predecessors’ (Sextus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 17). Pyrrho of Elis is for us a shadowy figure. He lived from about 360 BC to about 270 BC.

Page 440 of 576