Sceptics-Arg Philosophers

R.J. Hankinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134668601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 1999. The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance. This book focuses on Greek scepticism.

Book I

I
Introduction
Sources and Transmission

The student of ancient philosophy is in a position at once more fascinating and more frustrating than that of his colleagues who work in less antique disciplines. The exegete of Hume, for instance, has a complete body of text to deal with—and while the writings themselves may prove difficult and opaque, there is little dispute about how the text itself should actually read. Occasionally, a diligent editor may be able to point to differences between various editions of the same text, or between the printed version and the manuscript, in order to restore the precise reading intended by the author which has been obscured by typographical error or lapsus calami—and in even fewer cases, such alterations are philosophically significant (although one such case is noted in Chapter II: n. 25). Sometimes, too, investigators may discover among unpublished fragments, notebooks, and letters indications of where the author’s thought was tending. But by and large their efforts are directed towards the explication of a well-established text written in a relatively accessible language.

By contrast, the ancient philosopher works with material, often incomplete and fragmentary, written in dead languages. Even Platonists and Aristotelians, although relatively well served by the tradition, still need to take account of lacunae and imperfections in the transmitted texts, as well as of the fact that some of their work has been lost to the depredations of time. When we read Plato,¹ we do so from a text painstakingly established by scholars over a period of centuries from manuscripts whose reliability varies enormously, and whose relative importance has to be established by comparison and contrast. The editor’s job is to produce on the basis of the manuscripts (and, where no manuscript transmits sense, his own conjectures) a text as close as possible to his author’s original. All of that presupposes the existence of a healthy manuscript tradition: but even in the best cases what survive are copies of copies of copies, distant descendants of the original autograph. And the process of copying inevitably intrudes error and confusion into the original.

That is bad enough. But frequently the position is worse still, with no complete texts of the authors in question surviving. For the Presocratics we rely exclusively on later reportage. Sometimes, later writers preserve their actual words; more probably we will have to rely on the reports of doctrine later known as ‘doxography’, often filtered through the prejudices and misunderstandings of hostile reporters, for example Christian fathers such as Hippolytus of Rome whose Against the Heresies reports the doctrines (and sometimes the actual words) of the pagan philosophers in order to attack them. His attitude cannot be expected to be evenhandedly impartial: and it is not.²

Even when we are fortunate enough to possess substantial numbers of fragments,³ they may be impenetrably opaque, sometimes single words only, exhibiting no natural order and whose interrelations remain indistinct. Such is the case with Heraclitus, who was legendarily obscure even to the ancients who possessed the whole of his book and spoke his language: of the more than a hundred fragments that survive of his hugely influential On Nature, only a few are more than two or three lines in extent.

Where we have to rely largely on mere doxography (the précis reports as opposed to the ipsissima verba), even when we may reasonably acquit the doxographer of gross prejudice and partiality (or at least discount for it), we must often contend with the compiler’s lack of intelligence. This is true of one of our most important sources for Greek philosophy, Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers (henceforth ‘DL’). Diogenes, who probably wrote in the third century AD, evinces a gargantuan appetite for gossip and tittle-tattle; but buried among the National Enquirer-esque garbage (‘Heraclitus smeared himself with dung as a cure for dropsy and was devoured by dogs who failed to recognize him thus’: DL 9 4) are nuggets of genuine philosophy. Nevertheless, given his penchant for reporting virtually without editorial comment any story he finds in his sources (even when it conflicts with others), his testimony is at the very least suspect.⁴

The Transmission of Greek Scepticism

This is the basic situation with regard to the transmission of Greek scepticism. Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–c. 270 BC), the eponymous founder of the sceptical way (Chapter IV), wrote nothing at all; our earliest source for his philosophical outlook is the fragmentary remains of his follower and philosophical amanuensis Timon of Phlius (c. 320–230 BC). Timon wrote both prose and verse, but none of his works survive. His most famous piece, the mock-epic Silli (‘Lampoons’), poked fun at the dogmatic pretensions of every nonsceptical philosopher, as well as outlining his master Pyrrho’s stance. But only a handful of fragments from the Silli remain, many of which are mere invective.⁵ A brief outline of Timon’s philosophical position is preserved in the work of bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. But it is not even Eusebius’s own account: rather, he reproduces (apparently faithfully) the summary of Aristocles of Messene, a first century AD Peripatetic. Aristocles, as a member of a rival school, has no interest in impartial reportage. Even when the report comes from a favourable source, such as Sextus Empiricus, the original positions may become contaminated in other ways; Sextus, for instance, is particularly prone to discern scepticism in the work of his great predecessors even when none exists (see Chapter III).

Sextus is our principal source for Greek scepticism, particularly in its Pyrrhonian form; and we are fortunate to possess two complete works of his, as well as the bulk of a third. But Sextus is a late writer;⁶ and it is doubtful whether much if any of his work is original. Rather he provides a vast compendium of sceptical argument drawn from a variety of earlier sources; and consequently, if it is the sources themselves which are most to engage our interest, once again we shall be involved in a labour of reconstruction.

Indeed, of the four figures who are arguably of the greatest importance in the tradition of Greek scepticism, Pyrrho, Arcesilaus (c. 318–c. 243 BC), Carneades (c. 219–c. 129 BC), and Aenesidemus (fl. first century BC), three wrote nothing at all (Arcesilaus and Carneades aped Pyrrho in this regard: Clitomachus was the latter’s Timon), and of Aenesidemus’s writings we possess only a very brief précis of his Pyrrhonian Discourses, preserved in the ninth-century Byzantine scholar Photius’s account of the contents of his library (Photius, Bibliotheca 212). Aenesidemus’s organizing hand is often discerned behind the bulk of Sextus’s argumentation—but the attribution of much of it to him is fragile (Chapter VII, 120–1).

For Arcesilaus too we must rely on indirect testimony, again from Sextus, as well as Diogenes, Cicero (106–43 BC), and Plutarch (c. 40–120 AD): no even remotely contemporary records of his discourse survive. Arcesilaus is important because it was under his guidance that the Academy of Plato took a sceptical turn in direct reaction against the newly-developed and highly optimistic early Stoic epistemology of Zeno of Citium (c. 340–264 BC); for two centuries the Academy and the Stoa remained locked in dialectical conflict (Chapters V and VI). Things improve somewhat with Carneades, since much of Cicero’s philosophical writing is devoted to the exposition and defence of Carneades’ version of Academic scepticism. But even so what we have is at two or three removes from its source (Cicero had studied with Philo, a pupil of Clitomachus). And our knowledge of later Academics is equally sketchy (Chapter VIII).

Moreover, there may well be other philosophers whose importance we cannot now even guess at, such is the tradition’s capriciousness. One of the most crucial developments in the systematization of Greek scepticism as a methodology of destructive argumentation, the enumeration of the so-called ‘Five Modes’, is attributed by Diogenes to one Agrippa (DL 9 88); but Sextus makes no mention of him in the same context—and he is referred to nowhere else (Chapter X).

Sextus Empiricus

As for Sextus, whose presentation of Pyrrhonism will occupy Book II of this work, scholars disagree as to how far if at all he is an original thinker.⁷ In the introduction to his best-known and most influential text Outlines of Pyrrhonism (PH: this conventional abbreviation, puzzling to the non-classicist, derives from the work’s Greek title Purrhōneioi Hupotupōseis), he claims simply to offer an account of ‘the Sceptical way’, rather than any new form of it. Even so, Sextus was recognized in late antiquity as an important figure and his version of Pyrrhonism became canonical, which accounts for its unique survival. Diogenes considered him a leading Pyrrhon-1st (DL 9 116); and St Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330–c. 390 AD) mentions Sextus in the same breath as Pyrrho as a progenitor of the ‘vile and malignant disease’ of arguing opposing positions which had infected the churches (Orationes 21 12; cf. 32 25).

Sextus was by profession a physician, which may be found surprising on two counts. First, some will wonder at the connection between medicine and philosophy—theoretical speculation (except perhaps of the fiscal sort) not apparently being one of the major concerns of the modern medical practitioner, ‘medical ethics’ notwithstanding. But medicine and philosophy grew hand in hand in the ancient world, and many important sceptical arguments are of medical provenance (Chapter XIII). Yet one might still ask how could a sceptic be a doctor? Doctors are in the business (ostensibly) of curing people—and doing that surely requires knowledge, or at least well-grounded beliefs, which the sceptic refuses to countenance. Nor can the ancients be allowed the Humean defence that sceptical doubt is the province of one’s intellectual hours, to be left behind on leaving one’s study, or the Cartesian response that scepticism is purely methodological, and not to be used as a guide to practical life. The Greeks took their scepticism more seriously than that. Nevertheless, they have intriguing answers to these objections—and how successful the sceptics are in outlining a way of life (as opposed to merely offering an intellectual divertissement) turns to a large extent on how well they can defuse them (Chapters XVII and XVIII).

None of Sextus’s medical writings survives. However, in addition to PH, we possess either completely or in substantial part two other philosophical works. There is an attack on various alleged branches of knowledge and those who lay claim to them in six books (‘book’ here in the ancient sense: the whole text occupies no more than about two hundred printed pages), each one devoted to a different alleged ‘art’ (technē: ‘skill’, ‘science’, or ‘expertise’ are sometimes better renderings of this notorious term) and its practitioners: grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, astrology, and music. The collection, which is clearly intended as a comprehensive attack upon academic pretensions in all disciplines, is known collectively by its Latinized name of Adversus Mathematicos (henceforth conventionally ‘M’) 1–6, ‘mathēmatikos’ here meaning anyone with pretensions to learning (Chapter XV).

Sextus’s final extant work consists of five books which in their essentials offer fuller and expanded versions of the material to be found in PH 2–3, as well as a reworking of some of the material of the final paragraphs (210–41) of book 1.⁸ Our text is almost certainly incomplete, and is missing at least one book that would have corresponded to the bulk of PH 1.⁹ The five surviving books divide into two Against the Logicians (M 7– 8), two Against the Physicists (M 9–10), and one Against the Ethicists (M 11).¹⁰ Despite their titles, M 7–11 are not directed primarily ad homines (although they contain a wealth of ad hominem argument), but are rather topically organized.

This division of philosophy into logic (construed broadly to include epistemology), physics, and ethics is a commonplace of post-Aristotelian philosophy, and the Stoics offered a variety of colourful images to illustrate the supposed relationship between the three branches of wisdom. Philosophy is like an orchard: logic is the fencing, physics the trees, ethics the f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Arguments of the Philosophers
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Book I
• Book II
• Biographical Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography