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Pyrrho was born in the town of Elis on the Greek Peloponnesus. He joined the
expedition of Alexander the Great to India and there met several of the learned
magi of the East. Following Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., Pyrrho returned to Elis
and spent the rest of his life teaching there.
Pyrrho was greatly influenced by the Democritean notion that the world is not
as our sense perceptions would lead us to believe. According to Pyrrho, we can
know only appearances relative to each person—there is no way we can know
things as they really are. This means that any statement we might make about real-
ity can be opposed by an equally valid statement that contradicts it. Given this
inability to know which assertion is true, Pyrrho said we should develop an attitude
of “suspended judgment” <epoche> and thus gradually attain “unperturbedness”
or “quietude” <ataraxia>. This claimed inability to know came to be called
“Skepticism.”
Pyrrho left no writings, but his philosophy is well represented by the works of
the third-century A.D. author Sextus Empiricus. Little is known about this writer
other than that he was apparently a Greek physician, that he was the head of a
Skeptical school in some major city, and that he wrote the Outlines of
Pyrrhonism. The selection reprinted here, in the R.G. Bury translation, begins by
dividing philosophers into three categories: “Dogmatists,” who claim to know the
truth; those inheritors of Plato’s Academy, such as Carneades, who made the
opposite dogmatic claim that no truth is possible; and the Pyrrhoist skeptics, who
suspend judgment while looking for the truth. Sextus Empiricus goes on to
explain the nature of such a suspension of judgment and concludes with a discus-
sion of how this suspension leads to “quietude.” In the process of his explication,
Sextus avoids self-refutation by explaining that he is not describing what is really
true (which would be dogmatism), but only how things appearto him to be.PYRRHO
ca. 360–ca. 270 B.C.
SEXTUS EMPIRICUS
A.D. third century