Sextus Empiricus: The Modes 339
again doing something absurd. Further, intelligibles are relative, for they
are expressed in relation to the one thinking about them, and if they
were by nature of the sort that they are claimed to be, they would not
have been the subject of disagreement. Therefore, the intelligible is
referred to the five modes, for which reason it is necessary for us to
suspend judgement entirely regarding the matter proposed.
These are the five modes offered by the later sceptics. They offer them
not as replacing the ten modes, but in order to provide greater variety
and to use them along with the ten to refute the rashness of the dogmatists.
Sextus PH 1.178-186 [III-37]
Ch. xvi The Two Modes- They offer in addition two other modes of suspension of judge-
ment. Since every thing grasped seems to be grasped either by itself or
through something else,is
grasped <by itself or through something else,> they seem to introduce an
impasse [aporia] regarding all matters. They say, I believe, that it is clear
that nothing is grasped by itself from the disagreement that has occurred
among physicists regarding all sensibles and intelligibles, a disagreement
that is for us undecidable either by using a sensible or an intelligible
criterion, since every one which we might take up has been the subject
of disagreement and so is not trustworthy. - And this is the reason they do not allow that something is grasped
through something else. If that through which something is grasped will
itself need to be grasped always through something else, one will fall
into circular reasoning or into an infinite regress. But if someone might
wish to assume that that through which something is grasped is grasped
by itself, it is countered that nothing is grasped by itself, for the reasons
given above. And we are at a loss to know how that which is the subject
of conflict is able to be grasped either by itself or through something
else, when the criterion of truth or of graspability is not apparent and
signs, even apart from demonstration, are rejected, as we shall discover
in the subsequent discussion. Let what has been said about the modes
of suspension of judgement be sufficient for the present.
Ch. xvii The Modes that Overturn the Causalists - Just as we offer the modes leading to the suspension of judgement,
so some [sceptics] set forth certain modes for particular causal explana-
tions and, by offering up such puzzles, we check the dogmatists because
of the special pride they take in these causal explanations. Aenesidemus
offered eight modes according to which he thinks he can refute every