Scepticism - Lecture 4
4. Pyrrho, Pyrrhonism and Academic Scepticism
Pyrrho
Born around 360 BC (compare Socrates 470? – 399; Democritus 460? – 370?; Aristotle 384 – 322)
The principal philosophical influence on Pyrrho appears to have been Anaxarchus of Abdera. Pyrrho is reported as having travelled around with him everywhere, including accompanying him on Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia and invasion of India.
Anaxarchus was a Democritean philosopher, and a pupil of a pupil of Metrodorus of Chios. According to Sextus, Metrodorus espoused the view that ‘we know nothing, nor do we even know the very fact that we know nothing’ (M VII 88).
Sextus classifies Anaxarchus as one of those philosophers who denied the existence of a criterion of truth (M VII 48) and someone who, along with the Cynic Monimus, ‘likened existing things to a scene-painting and supposed them to resemble the impressions experienced in sleep or madness’ (M VII 88).
Anaxarchus was known as the ‘happy’ man because of his fortitude and contentment in life. Described as having the capacity to restore anyone to equanimity in the easiest possible way. Thus Plutarch’s Alexander presents Anaxarchus as curing Alexander’s despondency, after he has killed a friend in a fit of drunken anger, by rebuking him for lying on the floor and weeping like a slave in fear of the law and the censure of man when he has conquered the right to rule and mastery: ‘Knowest thou not ... that Zeus has Justice and Law seated beside him, in order that everything done by the master of the world may be lawful and just?’ This constitutes an effective application of Democritean methods. Anaxarchus confronts Alexander with an opposite, counterbalancing way of looking at the murder he committed (one suggesting that what he did was right, not wrong) and restores his psychological equilibrium. Others who accepted Alexander’s judgement were powerless to help him.
In the course of his travels with Alexander, Pyrrho is supposed to have met and talked with the Indian Gymnosophists and with the Magi (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, IX 61). Laertius tells us that Ascanius of Abdera reported that this led Pyrrho to adopt ‘a most noble philosophy ... taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement.’
Some of the stories about Pyrrho reported by Laertius. When a dog rushed at him and terrified him, he answered a hostile critic by saying that it was not easy entirely to strip oneself of human weakness. When his fellow-passengers on board a ship were all frightened and alarmed by a storm, Pyrrho remained calm and confident, pointing to a pig in the ship that went on eating, and telling them that such was the unperturbed state in which the wise man should keep himself. When septic slaves and surgical and caustic remedies were applied to a wound Pyrrho had sustained, he allegedly did not even frown. He lived in fraternal piety with his sister and helped with the housework, ‘quite indifferent as to what he did’. He particularly enjoyed quoting and reflecting on the opinions of Democritus and Homer.
The nature of Pyrrho’s philosophical stance. Pyrrho appears to have embraced a dogmatic view about the nature of the world, namely that the world is intrinsically indifferent, unmeasurable, and inarbitrable, that then lead him to suspend judgement on all more particular claims about the world. According to Pyrrho’s pupil Timon the outcome for people who adopt such a stance is ‘first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance’.
Why, then, do later sceptics adopt Pyrrho as a sceptical figurehead? It seems, in fact, that Pyrrho would be more appropriately classified as what Sextus calls a negative dogmatist (Outlines I 1-4). Moreover the supposition that the kind of position espoused by Pyrrho evolved into the kind of position espoused by Sextus through a process of incremental evolution appears to be highly implausible. According to Aristocles of Messene, Pyrrhonism lapses after Pyrrho’s immediate successors. Menodotus of Nicomedia holds that Timon left no successor and that Pyrrhonism was eventually re-established Ptolemy of Cyrene. And Cicero, writing around 45 BC, presents Pyrrho exclusively as a discredited moralist and shows no awareness whatsoever of his epistemological views. Somewhat surprisingly, it appears that a proper understanding of the relationship between Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonean scepticism advocated by people like Sextus requires us to investigate the history of Plato’s academy after Plato’s death in 347 BC.
Arcesilaus
Although the final years of the Academy are associated with a position that would be more accurately described as epistemological fallibilism rather than scepticism, the stance espoused by Arcesilaus seems to have involved a stance of radical suspension of judgement akin to the one embraced by Sextus and other Pyrrhonean sceptics. A variety of sources describe Arcesilaus as withholding assent in respect of all matters of inquiry (where withholding assent seems to have been a matter of suspending belief on all matters of objective fact). And other sources present Arcesilaus as embracing the normative claim that we ought to withhold assent. Though in these latter instances, it seems likely that the writers attributing such a stance to Arcesilaus are being misled by his use of ad hominem arguments intended to drive his philosophical opponents into confessing that by their own standards it is inappropriate for anyone to give his assent to any judgement.
Arcesilaus was elected scholarch around 272 BC, and he appears to have drawn his philosophic inspiration from the role allocated to Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues.
In these dialogues Socrates is portrayed as questioning other people to see whether they possess real expertise in a particular area of inquiry; and he tests this expertise by attempting to construct arguments that use claims endorsed by his interlocutors to arrive, via principles of inference that are equally acceptable to these people, at conclusions which contradict their professed views on a given topic. If Socrates can achieve this result, he infers that he is not conversing with real experts; but significantly there is no indication that Socrates already possesses the expert understanding initially claimed by his conversational partners.
Arcesilaus’ enthusiastic employment of the methods of Socratic dialectic and his proficiency at undermining positive claims by these means lead to his being associated with a wide-ranging suspension of judgement and a powerfully argued repudiation of other people’s claims to have arrived at knowledge or rationally justified beliefs. And some of Arcesilaus’ contemporaries specifically compared this suspension of judgement to the unopinionated and uncommitted stance espoused by Pyrrho and his immediate disciples. Thus we find, for example, that Ariston of Chios, a Stoic philosopher, described Arcesilaus as ‘Plato the head of him, Pyrrho the tail, midway Diodorus’ (Lives of Eminent Philosophers IV 33); and Laertius interpretation of this aphorism as a response to Arcesilaus’ admiration of Plato, his perceived tendency to emulate Pyrrho, and his enthusiasm for the dialectical methods of the Eretrian school seems a highly plausible interpretation (though Sextus himself offers a very different reading of this tag in the Outlines I 234).
Carneades
Carneades, the fourth head of the Academy after Arcesilaus was interpreted by many of his contemporaries as moving away from the uncompromising epochç associated with Arcesilaus; and Sextus accordingly reports that ‘according to most people there have been three Academies ... the third or New Academy [being] that of the School of Carneades and Cleitomachus’ (Outlines I 220).
Essentially it seems to have been Carneades’ elaborate discussion of the different levels of plausibility that an impression might possess that was responsible for the emergence of the view that he was not as strongly committed as Arcesilaus to epochç. However although the emergence of this view had a major impact on the subsequent history of ancient scepticism and may indeed have been ultimately responsible for the establishment of the Pyrrhonean school of scepticism, it seems highly likely that Carneades’ invocation of degrees of plausibility was actually nothing more than a move within a complicated piece of ad hominem argument intended to disarm the criticism that epochç of the kind recommended by the Academics was incompatible with voluntary action.
 Scepticism - Lecture 5a |
| Home Page |
Send E-Mail to: alan.bailey4@yahoo.co.uk
Copyright © 2007 Alan Bailey. All Rights Reserved