Outlines of Pyrrhonism

The book that gave Europe its modern crisis about knowledge, fourteen centuries after it was written. Sextus assembled the whole apparatus of ancient scepticism into a usable manual, it was almost entirely lost to the Latin Middle Ages, and when it was printed in 1562 it produced the argument that Montaigne popularised and Descartes set out to answer. Every list this section was checked against omitted it while having Descartes answer scepticism in the abstract.

Date: c. 200
Author: Sextus Empiricus
Region: Alexandria or Rome; uncertain
Language: Ancient Greek

The translation record

1562 Latin, Henri Estienne Geneva; the edition that began the early modern revival Attested
1933 English, R. G. Bury Loeb Classical Library; widely available Attested
2000 English, Annas and Barnes 2nd edition; the scholarly standard, in copyright Attested

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
Form: Treatise
Method: Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
Transmission: Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Years to the reply: 1441 years

Effectively unread in the Latin West for a thousand years, printed in Latin in 1562, and the direct cause of the early modern crisis about knowledge.

What the book says

A manual of doubt in three books. The first explains what a sceptic is and, more importantly, what a sceptic is not: not someone who claims that nothing can be known, since that would itself be a claim, but someone who has found that for every argument there is an equally good argument on the other side, and who therefore suspends judgement. Sextus then sets out the machinery. Ten modes, inherited from Aenesidemus, show how appearances vary - the same water feels warm to one hand and cold to the other, honey tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the jaundiced, an oar looks bent in water. Five further modes, credited to Agrippa, are more formidable and more general: any claim can be met by disagreement, by an infinite regress of justifications, by relativity, by the objection that its starting point was merely assumed, and by circularity. Books Two and Three then apply all this to logic, physics and ethics in turn, taking each dogmatic position and constructing the opposing case until neither can be preferred. The point is not despair. Sextus reports that the sceptic who stops trying to settle these questions finds that tranquillity follows, unlooked for, the way a shadow follows a body.

What it argues

That for any claim about how things really are, an argument of equal force can be produced for the opposite, and that the honest response is to suspend judgement rather than to pick a side. Scepticism as Sextus presents it is not a doctrine but an ability - the ability to set appearances and judgements against each other until neither wins. He is careful to exclude the self-refuting version: the sceptic does not assert that nothing is knowable, since that would be one more dogma. Nor does the sceptic stop living. Appearances still guide action; what is suspended is the further claim about what is really the case behind them.

What answered it

Descartes answers it in the Meditations, and does so by conceding almost everything first. He takes the sceptical arguments, strengthens them past anything Sextus attempted, and then hunts for a single point that survives - which is what the cogito is for. Hume answers differently, accepting that the arguments cannot be refuted and observing that nature does not permit us to believe them for long. In the twentieth century the modes returned under the name of the regress problem, which is Agrippa's third mode with a modern label.

How it argues

By construction, not assertion. Sextus states a dogmatic position, builds the strongest opposing case he can, and leaves them balanced. Because of this method the book is also the single richest surviving source for the Hellenistic philosophies it opposes - a great deal of what we know about Stoic logic and Epicurean physics exists only because Sextus needed something to argue against. The five modes of Agrippa are the sharpest instrument in it, and they remain a standard problem in epistemology: any justification must stop somewhere, go round in a circle, or continue for ever.

The moment

Sextus was a physician, and the medical background shows in the structure: philosophy as diagnosis and treatment, with suspension of judgement as the remedy and tranquillity as the recovery. By his time the Hellenistic schools had been arguing for four hundred years without resolution, and the Outlines is a summary of that stalemate written by someone who regards the stalemate itself as the finding.

How it travelled

By a near-miss and then a printing press. A few Latin manuscripts existed in medieval collections and more arrived from Byzantium in the fifteenth century, but the text was effectively out of play; Savonarola used it against pagan philosophy, which is one of the few medieval traces. Then in 1562 Henri Estienne, a Calvinist printer in Geneva, published the first Latin Outlines; Gentian Hervet, a Catholic counter-reformer, followed in 1569 with the complete works. Both prefaces recommend scepticism as a weapon for religion against reason, and both sides used it against each other. The Greek was not printed until 1621. Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond of 1580 is saturated with it, and the line from there to Descartes is direct.

The strongest objection

That it cannot be lived, and the ancient critics said so first. If you genuinely suspend judgement about whether the cliff edge is really there, you walk off it; and if you do not walk off it, you have made a judgement. Sextus' reply - that the sceptic follows appearances, custom and the ordinary practices of life without endorsing any claim about what lies behind them - is subtle and has convinced some careful readers and not others. The difficulty is that the distinction between acting on an appearance and believing something is doing a great deal of work, and Sextus never says quite enough about it.

Why read it

Because it is the most efficient philosophical toolkit ever assembled, and because the five modes will change how you read every argument afterwards. It is also, for anyone interested in what the Stoics and Epicureans actually said, one of the fullest surviving sources - which is a strange fate for a book written to leave nothing standing.

Where to read it

First printed: 1562
First in English: 1591
Digitised: Yes

Preserved in Greek manuscripts and printed in Latin before the Greek: Henri Estienne's Latin Outlines appeared at Geneva in 1562, Gentian Hervet's Latin of the complete works in 1569, and the Greek text not until 1621.

Bury's Loeb translation of 1933 is widely available. Annas-Barnes and Bett are in copyright and are what scholarship uses.

Where it stands

Live. Agrippa's modes are taught as the standard formulation of the regress problem, Pyrrhonism is recognised as a position distinct from both Academic scepticism and Cartesian doubt, and there is a substantial scholarly literature reconstructing what a sceptical life would actually involve.

On quoting this book

The Greek is public domain; the accurate modern English is in copyright and the older versions render the technical vocabulary loosely. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Sextus' dates, home and identity are all uncertain, including whether Empiricus refers to his medical school or was taken as a name. How much of the Outlines is his own and how much is compiled from Aenesidemus and later sceptics is unresolved, and it may be closer to an anthology than to an original work. Whether Descartes read him directly is an active dispute in current scholarship, with the sceptical answer being that the ideas were common property by 1641 and the direct route need not be assumed. And whether Pyrrhonian suspension is compatible with ordinary life, or is a philosopher's pose, has been argued since antiquity without resolution.