Pyrrhonism

Although Pyrrhonism's objective is ataraxia, it is best known for its epistemological arguments. The core practice is through setting argument against argument. To aid in this, the Pyrrhonist philosophers Aenesidemus and Agrippa developed sets of stock arguments known as "modes" or "tropes."

Aenesidemus is considered the creator of the ten tropes of Aenesidemus (also known as the ten modes of Aenesidemus)—although whether he invented the tropes or just systematized them from prior Pyrrhonist works is unknown. The tropes represent reasons for suspension of judgment. These are as follows:[11]

1. Different animals manifest different modes of perception;
2. Similar differences are seen among individual men;
3. For the same man, information perceived with the senses is self-contradictory
4. Furthermore, it varies from time to time with physical changes
5. In addition, this data differs according to local relations
6. Objects are known only indirectly through the medium of air, moisture, etc.
7. These objects are in a condition of perpetual change in colour, temperature, size and motion
8. All perceptions are relative and interact one upon another
9. Our impressions become less critical through repetition and custom
10. All men are brought up with different beliefs, under different laws and social conditions

According to Sextus, superordinate to these ten modes stand three other modes: that based on the subject who judges (modes 1, 2, 3 & 4), that based on the object judged (modes 7 & 10), that based on both subject who judges and object judged (modes 5, 6, 8 & 9), and superordinate to these three modes is the mode of relation.[12]

These "tropes" or "modes" are given by Sextus Empiricus in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism. According to Sextus, they are attributed only "to the more recent skeptics" and it is by Diogenes Laërtius that we attribute them to Agrippa.[13] The five tropes of Agrippa are:

1. Dissent – The uncertainty demonstrated by the differences of opinions among philosophers and people in general.
2. Infinite regress – All proof rests on matters themselves in need of proof, and so on to infinity.
3. Relation – All things are changed as their relations become changed, or, as we look upon them from different points of view.
4. Assumption – The truth asserted is based on an unsupported assumption.
5. Circularity – The truth asserted involves a circularity of proofs.

According to the mode deriving from dispute, we find that undecidable dissension about the matter proposed has come about both in ordinary life and among philosophers. Because of this we are not able to choose or to rule out anything, and we end up with suspension of judgement. In the mode deriving from infinite regress, we say that what is brought forward as a source of conviction for the matter proposed itself needs another such source, which itself needs another, and so ad infinitum, so that we have no point from which to begin to establish anything, and suspension of judgement follows. In the mode deriving from relativity, as we said above, the existing object appears to be such-and-such relative to the subject judging and to the things observed together with it, but we suspend judgement on what it is like in its nature. We have the mode from hypothesis when the Dogmatists, being thrown back ad infinitum, begin from something which they do not establish but claim to assume simply and without proof in virtue of a concession. The reciprocal mode occurs when what ought to be confirmatory of the object under investigation needs to be made convincing by the object under investigation; then, being unable to take either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgement about both.[14]

With reference to these five tropes, that the first and third are a short summary of the earlier Ten Modes of Aenesidemus.[13] The three additional ones show a progress in the Pyrrhonist system, building upon the objections derived from the fallibility of sense and opinion to more abstract and metaphysical grounds. According to Victor Brochard "the five tropes can be regarded as the most radical and most precise formulation of skepticism that has ever been given. In a sense, they are still irresistible today."[15]

Pyrrhonist decision making is made according to what the Pyrrhonists describe as the criteria of action holding to the appearances, without beliefs in accord with the ordinary regimen of life based on:

1. the guidance of nature, by which we are naturally capable of sensation and thought
2. the compulsion of the passions by which hunger drives us to food and thirst makes us drink
3. the handing down of customs and laws by which we accept that piety in the conduct of life is good and impiety bad
4. instruction in techne[16]

The Pyrrhonists devised several sayings (Greek ΦΩΝΩΝ) to help practitioners bring their minds to suspend judgment.[17] Among these are:

• Not more, nothing more (a saying attributed to Democritus[18])
• Non-assertion (aphasia)
• Perhaps, it is possible, maybe
• I withhold assent
• I determine nothing (Montaigne created a variant of this as his own personal motto, "Que sais-je?" – "what do I know?")
• Everything is indeterminate
• Everything is non-apprehensible
• I do not apprehend
• To every argument an equal argument is opposed

Skeptics in Raphael's School of Athens painting. Pyrrho is #4 and Timon #5

Pyrrhonism is often contrasted with Academic skepticism, a similar but distinct form of Hellenistic philosophical skepticism.[9][20][21] While early Academic skepticism was influenced in part by Pyrrho,[22] it grew more and more dogmatic until Aenesidemus broke with the Academics to revive Pyrrhonism in the first century BCE, denouncing the Academy as "Stoics fighting against Stoics.[23]" Some later Pyrrhonists, such as Sextus Empiricus, go so far as to claim that Pyrrhonists are the only real skeptics, dividing all philosophy into the dogmatists, the Academics, and the skeptics.[20] Dogmatists claim to have knowledge, Academic skeptics claim that knowledge is impossible, while Pyrrhonists assent to neither proposition, suspending judgment on both.[9][20][24] The second century Roman historian Aulus Gellius describes the distinction as "...the Academics apprehend (in some sense) the very fact that nothing can be apprehended, and they determine (in some sense) that nothing can be determined, whereas the Pyrrhonists assert that not even that seems to be true, since nothing seems to be true.[25][21]"

Sextus Empiricus also said that the Pyrrhonist school influenced and had substantial overlap with the Empiric school of medicine, but that Pyrrhonism had more in common with the Methodic school in that it "follow[s] the appearances and take[s] from these whatever seems expedient."[26]

Although Julian the Apostate[27] mentions that Pyrrhonism had died out at the time of his writings, other writers mention the existence of later Pyrrhonists. Pseudo-Clement, writing around the same time (c. 300-320 CE) mentions Pyrrhonists in his Homilies[28] and Agathias even reports a Pyrrhonist named Uranius as late as the middle of the 6th century CE.[29]

Nagarjuna, a Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher whose skeptical arguments are similar to those preserved in the work of Sextus Empiricus

According to Diogenes Laërtius, Pyrrho was said to have traveled to India with Alexander the Great's army where Pyrrho was said to have studied with the magi and the gymnosophists,[30] and where he may have been influenced by Buddhist teachings,[31] most particularly the three marks of existence.[32] Scholars who argue for such influence mention the fact that even the ancient author Diogenesis Laërtius states as much, when he wrote that Pyrrho “foregathered with the Indian Gymnosophists and with the Magi. This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy."[31]

According to Christopher I. Beckwith's analysis of the Aristocles Passage, adiaphora (anatta), astathmēta (dukkha), and anepikrita (anicca) are strikingly similar to the Buddhist three marks of existence,[32] indicating that Pyrrho's teaching is based on Buddhism. Beckwith contends that the 18 months Pyrrho spent in India were long enough to learn a foreign language, and that the key innovative tenets of Pyrrho's skepticism were only found in Indian philosophy at the time and not in Greece.[33] Other similarities between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism include a version of the tetralemma among the Pyrrhonist maxims, and more significantly, the idea of suspension of judgement and how that can lead to peace and liberation, ataraxia in Pyrrhonism and nirvana in Buddhism.[34][35]

Furthermore, Buddhist philosopher Jan Westerhoff says "many of Nāgārjuna's arguments concerning causation bear strong similarities to classical sceptical arguments as presented in the third book of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism,"[36] and Thomas McEvilley suspects that Nagarjuna may have been influenced by Greek Pyrrhonist texts imported into India.[37] McEvilley argues for mutual iteration in the Buddhist logico-epistemological traditions between Pyrrhonism and Madhyamika:

An extraordinary similarity, that has long been noticed, between Pyrrhonism and Mādhyamika is the formula known in connection with Buddhism as the fourfold negation (Catuṣkoṭi) and which in Pyrrhonic form might be called the fourfold indeterminacy.[38]

McEvilley also notes a correspondence between the Pyrrhonist and Madhyamaka views about truth, comparing Sextus' account[39] of two criteria regarding truth, one which judges between reality and unreality, and another which we use as a guide in everyday life. By the first criteria, nothing is either true or false, but by the second, information from the senses may be considered either true or false for practical purposes. As Edward Conze[40] has noted, this is similar to the Madhyamika Two Truths doctrine, a distinction between "Absolute truth" (paramārthasatya), "the knowledge of the real as it is without any distortion,"[41] and "Truth so-called" (saṃvṛti satya), "truth as conventionally believed in common parlance.[41][42]

Map of Alexander the Great's empire and the route he and Pyrrho took to India

However, other scholars, such as Stephen Batchelor[43] and Charles Goodman[44] question Beckwith's conclusions about the degree of Buddhist influence on Pyrrho. Conversely, while critical of Beckwith's ideas, Kuzminsky sees credibility in the hypothesis that Pyrrho was influenced by Buddhism, even if it cannot be safely ascertained with our current information.[31]

While discussing Christopher Beckwith's claims in Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia, Jerker Blomqvist states that:

On the other hand, certain elements that are generally regarded as essential features of Buddhism are entirely absent from ancient Pyrrhonism/scepticism. The concepts of good and bad karma must have been an impossibility in the Pyrrhonist universe, if "things" were ἀδιάφορα, 'without a logical self-identity', and, consequently, could not be differentiated from each other by labels such as 'good' and 'bad' or 'just' and 'unjust'. A doctrine of rebirth, reminiscent of the Buddhist one though favored by Plato and Pythagoras, was totally alien to the Pyrrhonists. The ἀταραξία, 'undisturbedness', that the Pyrrhonists promised their followers, may have a superficial resemblance to the Buddhist nirvana, but ἀταραξία, unlike nirvana, did not involve a liberation from a cycle of reincarnation; rather, it was a mode of life in this world, blessed with μετριοπάθεια, 'moderation of feeling' or 'moderate suffering', not with the absence of any variety of pain. Kuzminski, whom Beckwith hails as a precursor of his, had largely ignored the problem with this disparity between Buddhism and Pyrrhonism.[45]

Ajñana, which upheld radical skepticism, may have been a more powerful influence on Pyrrho than Buddhism. The Buddhists referred to Ajñana's adherents as Amarāvikkhepikas or "eel-wrigglers", due to their refusal to commit to a single doctrine.[46] Scholars including Barua, Jayatilleke, and Flintoff, contend that Pyrrho was influenced by, or at the very least agreed with, Indian skepticism rather than Buddhism or Jainism, based on the fact that he valued ataraxia, which can be translated as "freedom from worry".[47][48][49] Jayatilleke, in particular, contends that Pyrrho may have been influenced by the first three schools of Ajñana, since they too valued freedom from worry.[50]

Balance scales in equal balance are a modern symbol of Pyrrhonism

The recovery and publication of the works of Sextus Empiricus, particularly a widely influential translation by Henri Estienne published in 1562,[51] ignited a revival of interest in Pyrrhonism.[51] Philosophers of the time used his works to source their arguments on how to deal with the religious issues of their day. Major philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne, Marin Mersenne, and Pierre Gassendi later drew on the model of Pyrrhonism outlined in Sextus Empiricus' works for their own arguments. This resurgence of Pyrrhonism has sometimes been called the beginning of modern philosophy.[51] Montaigne adopted the image of a balance scale for his motto,[52] which became a modern symbol of Pyrrhonism. It has also been suggested that Pyrrhonism provided the skeptical underpinnings that René Descartes drew from in developing his influential method of Cartesian doubt and the associated turn of early modern philosophy towards epistemology.[51] In the 18th century, David Hume was also considerably influenced by Pyrrhonism, using "Pyrrhonism" as a synonym for "skepticism."[53].

Nietzsche was critical of Pyrrhonian ephectics.

Friedrich Nietzsche, however, criticized the "ephetics" of the Pyrrhonists as a flaw of early philosophers, who he characterized as "shy little blunderer[s] and milquetoast[s] with crooked legs" prone to overindulging "his doubting drive, his negating drive, his wait-and-see ('ephectic') drive, his analytical drive, his exploring, searching, venturing drive, his comparing, balancing drive, his will to neutrality and objectivity, his will to every sine ira et studio: have we already grasped that for the longest time they all went against the first demands of morality and conscience?"[54]

Fallibilism is a modern, fundamental perspective of the scientific method, as put forth by Karl Popper and Charles Sanders Peirce, that all knowledge is, at best, an approximation, and that any scientist always must stipulate this in her or his research and findings. It is, in effect, a modernized extension of Pyrrhonism.[55] Indeed, historic Pyrrhonists sometimes are described by modern authors as fallibilists and modern fallibilists sometimes are described as Pyrrhonists.[56]

The term "neo-Pyrrhonism" is used to refer to modern Pyrrhonists such as Benson Mates and Robert Fogelin.[57][58]