Pyrrho's pigs

"Skepticism began with Pyrrho of Elis, who lived from 365 BCE to about 275 BCE. He wrote nothing, as far as we know, and offered his followers not a system but a manner of living. Pyrrho studied the ideas of the great philosophers and came to the conclusion that a really smart person could convince him that any substance was the primary matter of the universe. What is more, all the philosophers’ systems were vulnerable to argument. Pyrrho believed that nothing can be known, because the opposite of every statement could be asserted with plausibility. Also, our senses and minds provide false or merely narrow information. We should attempt to have no opinions. Since we know nothing for certain, we must behave as such, affirming and denying nothing, no matter what the subject. We thus stand aloof from life and thereby attain peace of mind. Not much of Pyrrho’s recommended manner of living is known and, amusingly, what we know conflicts. There is one tradition in which he seems to have been trying to shed human emotion. In that tradition, he was marked by an imperturbability and “oriental indifference” that, at times, had him pass by friends without noticing them. Once, when he was attacked by a wild dog and scurried up a tree, he later apologized to friends for his fear and announced that it was difficult to strip oneself of humanity. In the other tradition, he was not trying to strip himself of humanity but merely to live a moderate life. There is a story of his calming passengers on a storm-tossed ship by pointing out that the pigs on board were quietly munching their food. He recommended such serenity for all. Here Pyrrho seems less the indifferent ascetic and more the caring teacher. Stories of his life support both versions: In 334 BCE he joined the court of Alexander the Great (Aristotle had left the young man, after an eight-year stay, only about a year earlier) and traveled with Alexander to India, where he studied with the philosophers and ascetics of the Indus Valley. In the same court was a philosopher who was a follower of Democritus—a materialist, an atomist, and a believer that sense experience is always flawed by such things as tricks of light and tricks of the human body. When Alexander died, Pyrrho went back to Elis and lived with his midwife sister, and although he taught philosophy to large crowds and regular students, he also helped out at home by cleaning house, washing pigs, and taking fowl to market. Elis named him a high priest. He lived to the age of ninety and, in his honor, the city instated tax exemption for all philosophers. His best student, Timon, was more of a cutup than Pyrrho, writing satires that portrayed anyone who seemed to know anything as an arrogant buffoon. Yet he also wrote beautifully on the Pyrrhonic approach to knowing the world. It was Timon who wrote, “I do not lay it down that honey is sweet, but I admit that it appears to be so.” Timon had a wife and kids, and loved food, drink, and a good time as well as philosophy and solitude. Early Pyrrhonism was ascetic, but not exclusively so. Skepticism became more important in the second century BCE when the philosopher Arcesilaus brought it into the Platonic Academy. This created what we know as the Middle Academy and is the reason that Academic philosophy became a synonym for Skepticism. We do not know much about his opinions on theism either, but his successor, Carneades of Cyrene, left us much more to work with. Carneades was arguably the best philosopher in the five hundred years after Aristotle, and his contribution to Skepticism was immeasurable because he replaced the refusal to believe anything with a sophisticated notion of probability. What he said was that we cannot know anything for certain, but we can carefully determine whether one conclusion is more likely than another. This allowed the Skeptics to bring all their studious doubt to bear on philosophical questions, whereas the old model restricted them to judicious silence. Carneades did not insist that the gods were a fairy tale, but he unraveled most of the common proofs that they exist. Theists often said, for instance, that there must be gods since so many people had seen them and had described them in a similar manner. As we have seen, even the rationalist Epicurus bothered to offer an empirical explanation for such claims. Carneades dismissed the reports of sightings, both ancient and contemporary, as stories with no basis in reality. Against the claim that the universal belief in gods proved that they existed, Carneades responded that this proved only that people believed in gods—another proof would be needed to show that the gods exist."

From "Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson" by Jennifer Hecht  https://a.co/eUxuBR3