SEXTUS EMPIRICUS

FOOTNOTES

 1. Carneades (213BC – c.128BC) was Head of the Academy, and Cleitomachus was his pupil. Although the Academy was founded by Plato, in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC it promoted scepticism. For the structure of his argument, Sextus makes them out to be what one might call ‘dogmatic sceptics’, asserting positively that nothing can be known.

2. Literally ‘historically’; but until the 18th-century, the word ‘historical’ was generally used for what we now call ‘empirical’ (for example, the ‘plain historical method’ of the Royal Society). The word ‘empirical’ or ‘empiric’, both in Greek and in early modern English, referred to a school of medicine which based treatment on successful experience, and rejected all medical theories. Hence Johnson’s definition of ‘empiricism’: ‘Dependence on experience without knowledge or art; quackery.’ Sextus was called ‘Empiricus’ because he belonged to this sceptical medical school — although later he points to some relatively minor differences between empiricism and scepticism.

3. This is, in effect, an abbreviated index to Book 1.

4. My translation is anachronistic. Although both the words ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ existed in ancient times, it was not until later that they were used as a contrasted pair. This usage was adopted by Kant in the Antinomies of Pure Reason, and popularised by Hegel. Nevertheless, it precisely represents the sceptical technique of balancing any dogmatic claim (the thesis) with equally good reasons for its opposite (the antithesis), and vice versa. The distinction is entirely relativistic, since the same claim could be either thesis or antitheses. For example, if a dogmatist propounds the thesis that God exists, the sceptic will provide arguments that he does not. But if another dogmatist propounds the thesis that God does not exist, the sceptic will provide arguments that he does exist.

5.The same word as I translated ‘look for’, above. It is sometimes transliterated as ‘zetetic’.

6. ‘Sceptic’ comes from the Greek for ‘to think’. The sceptical philosophers were so called because they paused for thought rather than assert anything positively. Instead they merely had opinions, or ‘opined’, Cicero called them ‘opinators’ (opinatores). Note the neat transition from one name to the next, if you read ‘sceptical’ as ‘thinking’.

7. Sometimes transliterated as ‘ephectic’.

8. i.e. suspension of judgment.

9. Sometimes transliterated as ‘aporetic’. The noun aporia was the Socratic word for the state of mind induced by his inconclusive questioning — that of knowing that you do not know the answer.

10. The Greek terms phainomena and nooumena were later used by Kant. In order to maintain the parallel, I have translated them as ‘objects of experience’ and ‘objects of thought.’ There is a good case for translating phainomenon as ‘appearance’, since it maintains a different parallel with the verb phainomai, ‘to appear’. However, I prefer ‘experience’, or sometimes ‘the world of experience’ in order to emphasise that phenomena are things as they appear to us, and not mere appearances or mental images, for which Sextus uses words like phantasia (‘fancy’ or ‘image’), or pathos (an affectation of the mind). Note that in Greek a passive participle with an article functions as a noun, whereas in English we have to insert a noun. For example, in Greek you can say ‘the seens’, whereas we have to use expressions like ‘the things which are seen,’ or ‘the objects of vision.’ It’s difficult to avoid injecting metaphysical implications which are absent from the Greek formulation.

11. Sometimes transliterated as ‘ataraxia’ or ‘ataraxy’ — literally, it is ‘not being troubled.’

12. i.e. he is not asserting the existence of some faculty of the mind, since that would be a theoretical entity. He is using the word in its everyday, ordinary-language sense.

13. ‘Dogmatise’ just means to assert anything dogmatically, or as objectively true.

14. The primary meaning of the Greek word dogma is ‘that which seems true to one’, or an opinion. It only later came to mean a philosophical opinion asserted as true. Sextus is quite happy to express what seems to him to be true at any time, but not to make any claims about objective reality.

15. The word adelos is often translated as ‘non-evident’. Literally, it is ‘not-revealed.’ What Sextus means is anything which is not or cannot be directly given in experience, so I translate it as ‘imperceptible’.

16. The Greek phone means the sound of the voice, usually in contrast with the meaning it carries. By choosing this term, Sextus is emphasising that the sceptic’s utterances are not to be taken as propositions intended as true or false, but merely as moves in a linguistic game. This is crucial to the sceptic’s defence against the charge that scepticism is self-defeating. The term is usually translated as ‘formula’, but since there are other Greek words with that technical meaning, I prefer ‘slogan’. ‘Motto’ or ‘catch-phrase’ might also do.

17. Unfortunately, the modern English ‘determine’ has lost the wide range of meanings common to the Greek orizo, the Latin determinare, the French determiner, the German bestimmen, and the older English ‘determine’. They all mean ‘delimit’, ‘define’, ‘particularise’, or ‘decide’. It is one of the most difficult concepts to handle in the history of philosophy. Here it probably means ‘decide’ — ‘I do not decide whether anything is true or false.’

18. The word hupokeimenon is standard Greek for a grammatical or logical subject, to which predicates are attributed. I translate it as ‘object’, since English isn’t logical about the distinction between subject and object. If I say ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ ‘the cat’ is the subject of the sentence, and the cat is the object referred to by the sentence. Another point is that hupokeimenon literally means ‘that which lies underneath’ — the metaphor is that the subject underlies the predicates which are attributed to it. Sometimes the word ‘underlying’ creeps into other people’s translations; but I have tried to avoid this, since it begs the question of whether Sextus was sceptical about any reality behind the ‘veil of perception’ (underlying reality), or whether he was merely sceptical about any rational knowledge of reality. He makes it clear that we are compelled to believe in a world of outer experience; what he is doubting is that it includes any knowledge of the true nature of external objects.

19. Literally, to remove or abolish phenomena. Since no-one could deny that we have sense impressions, this must mean denying that they constitute a genuine world of experience. So the sceptics are not saying that the world of experience is a dream or illusion (unlike Plato, for example).

20. Literally: ‘in so far as in respect of the logos.’ Logos has many meanings (principally ‘word’ and ‘reason’), and here it is impossible to translate it so as to retain the parallel between logos and lego, meaning ‘to say’. Sextus assumes that the objects of experience have two aspects: the experiential (Aristotle’s matter) and the rational (Aristotle’s form). He is sceptical only about the latter. It is important to note that there is no suggestion here that experience is only in the mind.

21. In other words, there is no place for any theoretical disciplines, since they cannot attain the truth.

22. Court painter to Alexander the Great, around 350–300 BC.

23. The Greek tuche can mean fate, necessity, chance, or good or bad luck. Other translators say ‘chance’ here, presumably because Apelles had extraordinary good luck. But a Greek (sceptic or no) would almost certainly interpret it as in instance of divine intervention. Just as Oedipus killed his father and married his mother as the result of trying to avoid doing so, similarly Apelles succeeded only when he tried to ruin his painting. Sextus’s point is that there is nothing we can do either to facilitate or to hinder the progression from suspension of judgment to serenity. It follows inexorably, just as our shadows follow our bodies.

24.i.e. if the theory is objectively true, as the sceptic’s dogmatic opponent believes, then it must have been true before anyone knew it was true.

25. pp.61ff. in the Loeb edition.

26. That is, the mental or physical state of the observer while perceiving.

27. A proposition which asserts that something is true or false, as contrasted with possible (problematic), or necessary or impossible (apodeictic). See chapter 20.

28. He has just said that some sceptics avoid seeming to make an assertion, by asking questions instead (the Socratic technique).

29. As always, Sextus accepts that we occupy a real world of experience. What he is denying is that there is a rational element to reality, about which the intellect can make true or false propositions. The only proper object of the intellect is the rational; and if reality has no rational dimension, then the intellect has no object to concern itself with.

30. Sextus takes advantage of a special feature of the Greek language, which has a wide range of active verbs of perception, where the thing perceived is the subject, and the perceiver is the object. In English we can sometimes choose which way round to express ourselves — for example, ‘I experience the apple as sweet,’ or ‘The apple appears to me as sweet.’ Sextus stresses that we are passive with respect to our sense impressions, or pathe, which literally means ‘that in respect of which one is passive,’ or ‘suffering.’ In some contexts, the translation ‘sense impression’ is too specific, and I use instead expressions like ‘being affected by’ (unfortunately, the English words ‘affection’ and ‘affectation’ have changed their meanings, and the psychological technical term ‘affect’ refers to emotion rather than perception). Here, the Greek equivalent of ‘imagine’ or ‘have a perceptual image of’ (phantazomai) is passive; so the active verb phantazo means that the thing imagined actively works on the imagination, or our faculty for having perceptual images. Similarly in the next sentence, to have a sensation of sweetness (it could be taste or smell) is the passive glukazomai, so that the sweet object actively ‘sweetens’ me. It may read oddly in English, but it is not at all silly to think that, when I drink a cup of sweet coffee, it does to me something analogous to what I do to it when I stir in the sugar.

31. Literally, Sextus says ‘. . . . the whip hurts the flesh, but is not itself pain,’ and similarly with pleasure in the next example. What he clearly means is that there does not have to be anything in the cause which resembles the effect. For example, fire may warm us because its particles are in rapid motion; but a rapid motion of particles is utterly unlike the sensation of warmth.