Pyrrho and the birth of Skepticism

Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 to 270 BCE) wrote nothing, and what we know comes from his student Timon and from later accounts, chiefly Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus. He joined Alexander the Great's army and traveled as far as India, where, according to Diogenes Laertius, he met Persian magi and Indian ascetics, and came home with a new way of life. His teaching, as Timon reports, says that things are equally undecidable, unmeasurable and indifferent, so neither our senses nor our beliefs tell us true from false. The wise person therefore holds no opinions, says of each thing that it is no more this than that, and withholds assent. The result is a tranquil, untroubled mind, ataraxia.¹⁴

A story in Diogenes Laertius shows the ideal: during a storm at sea, while passengers panicked, Pyrrho pointed to a pig calmly eating and said the wise person should be as untroubled. The school he began lasted into the Roman era. Aenesidemus revived it in the first century BCE, and Sextus Empiricus preserved it in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism around 200 CE. The Latin translation of Sextus printed in 1562 spread skeptical arguments through Renaissance Europe, where they influenced Montaigne and Descartes, and later Hume. Modern skepticism about knowledge descends from this tradition.²³⁴