"Skepticism is the first step toward truth."
- Denis Diderot
Diderot, born #onthisday in 1713, is probably best known for editing the "Encyclopédie" - the 'dictionary of human knowledge'.
Find here Diderot's Wikipedia entry (oh irony
)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
Learn more in a 1.5 minute video about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C71vkrsiyKE
Pyrrho
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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Pyrrho not an idiot
"Pyrrho ignored all the apparent dangers of the world because he questioned whether they really were dangers, ‘avoiding nothing and taking no precautions, facing everything as it came, wagons, precipices, dogs’. Luckily he was always accompanied by friends who could not quite manage the same enviable lack of concern and so took care of him, pulling him out of the way of oncoming traffic and so on. They must have had a hard job of it, because ‘often . . . he would leave his home and, telling no one, would go roaming about with whomsoever he chanced to meet’.
Two centuries after Pyrrho’s death, one of his defenders tossed aside these tales and claimed that ‘although he practised philosophy on the principles of suspension of judgement, he did not act carelessly in the details of everyday life’. This must be right. Pyrrho may have been magnificently imperturbable—Epicurus was said to have admired him on this account, and another fan marvelled at the way he had apparently ‘unloosed the shackles of every deception and persuasion’. But he was surely not an idiot. He apparently lived to be nearly ninety, which would have been unlikely if the stories of his recklessness had been true."
"The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb -- a very good history of western philosophy.
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A character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, identified as The Ruler of the Universe, has been called a solipsist. I think he sounds more like a Pyrrhonian skeptic... "I say what it occurs to me to say when I hear people say things. More I cannot say..."
