GMR’S INTRODUCTION
This document is approximately 2 sides of A4.
This introduction is mainly about the text and translations.
Sextus Empiricus (very roughly 150–225 AD) gained his name because of his association with the ‘empirical’ school of medicine, which held that remedies should be based on past experience, and not on theories about how the body works. Only some of his works survive, and they are the only extant writings of the ancient sceptical, or ‘Pyrrhonian’ school of philosophy, named after its founder. They are Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and the more detailed Against the Logicians, and Against the Mathematicians (also known as Against the Professors).
His works were virtually unknown in the West, until the Outlines was translated into Latin by the French publisher and scholar Henri Estienne in 1562. It had tremendous influence in France, especially through the writings of Montaigne. It was this fashionable scepticism which Descartes sought to refute with his cogito argument.
The Greek text of the Outlines was not published until 1621. For my translation from the Greek, I have used the edition by R.G. Bury in the Loeb Classical Library, Sextus Empiricus, 4 volumes (London, Heinemann, 1933–1936).
The Loeb edition is accompanied by an English translation, which is not very accurate, and barely intelligible A more recent translation by P.P. Hallie (ed.) and S.G. Etheridge (trans.), Sextus Empiricus, Selections from the Major Writings on Scepticism, Man, and God (Wesleyan University Press, 1969; revised edition, Hackett, 1985) is hardly any better. Long after I originally produced my translation, there appeared Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1994), which is a vast improvement on Bury and Etheridge. For the future, I intend to retranslate the work from the Latin, since it is the Latin text which was so influential at the time modern philosophy was born. I also note that this is one of the few texts in which I have used ‘he’ to mean ‘he or she,’ and I shall try to do something about it.
I have selected the following extracts from Book I of the Outlines:
1. Chapters 1–13, which summarise the basic principles of scepticism.
2. Sextus then presents a traditional list of ten ‘modes of suspension of judgment,’ namely:
differences among living beings;
differences among human beings;
differences in the structure of sense organs;
the state of the observer;
the environment of the object, and the medium through which it is perceived;
the quantity of the object, and what it is combined with;
relativity;
the frequency of the occurrence of events;
differences in ways of life, customs, laws, and mythical beliefs.
I have selected part of Sextus’s discussion of the fourth mode as an example (part of chapter 14).
3. I omit chapters 15–17, in which Sextus discusses ways of reducing the principles of scepticism to a smaller number of modes. Chapters 18–28 are philosophically very significant, since they tackle head-on the question of whether or not scepticism is self-defeating. The principles of scepticism are treated as a series of ‘slogans’, rather than as a set of propositions which are true or false. I have included the more significant parts.
Go to Introduction to the Outlines of Pyrrhonism
4. Finally, I have selected a passage from Against the Logicicians, in which Sextus distinguishes sharply between what is known by the senses, and what is known by the understanding. Interestingly, Sextus uses Greek terms which were later used by Kant for the same distinction: phenomona and noumena.