ABSTRACT
Following Alexander’s death in 323 b.c., Pyrrho returned to Elis and spent the rest of his life teaching there. Pyrrho left no writings, but his philosophy is well represented by the works of the third-century a.d. author Sextus Empiricus. Little is known about this writer other than that he was apparently a Greek physician, that he was the head of a Skeptical school in some major city, and that he wrote the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. The selection reprinted, in the R. G. Bury translation, begins by dividing philosophers into three categories: “Dogmatists,” who claim to know the truth; those inheritors of Plato’s Academy, such as Carneades, who made the opposite dogmatic claim that no truth is possible; and the Pyrrhoist skeptics, who suspend judgment while looking for the truth. Sextus Empiricus goes on to explain the nature of such a suspension of judgment and concludes with a discussion of how this suspension leads to “quietude”.
