Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Friday, September 2, 2022

Pyrrho faces reality

It's hard to take the legend of Pyrrho seriously. 

 

"Rather appropriately for a man who claimed to know nothing, little is known about him..."*


Pyrrho

First published Mon Aug 5, 2002; substantive revision Tue Oct 23, 2018

Pyrrho was the starting-point for a philosophical movement known as Pyrrhonism that flourished beginning several centuries after his own time. This later Pyrrhonism was one of the two major traditions of sceptical thought in the Greco-Roman world (the other being located in Plato’s Academy during much of the Hellenistic period). Perhaps the central question about Pyrrho is whether or to what extent he himself was a sceptic in the later Pyrrhonist mold. The later Pyrrhonists claimed inspiration from him; and, as we shall see, there is undeniably some basis for this. But it does not follow that Pyrrho’s philosophy was identical to that of this later movement, or even that the later Pyrrhonists thought that it was identical; the claims of indebtedness that are expressed by or attributed to members of the later Pyrrhonist tradition are broad and general in character (and in Sextus Empiricus’ case notably cautious—see Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.7), and do not in themselves point to any particular reconstruction of Pyrrho’s thought. It is necessary, therefore, to focus on the meager evidence bearing explicitly upon Pyrrho’s own ideas and attitudes. How we read this evidence will also, of course, affect our conception of Pyrrho’s relations with his own philosophical contemporaries and predecessors... (Stanford Encyclopedia, continues)



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1 comment:

  1. The introduction and therefore, enduring characterization of Pyrroh as an extreme sceptic is one that is comical. However, Pyrroh's characterization as One with no beliefs has proven very provocative. the philosopher puts into perspective just how capable a person is in "fooling" themselves to "believe" whatever it is they want, even if they believe it makes no sense to believe anything.

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