ABSTRACT
After outlining some important differences between skepticism as understood today and ancient Greek skepticism, the chapter describes a major disagreement in contemporary Anglophone philosophy concerning the naturalness of skepticism. No one doubts that our everyday attitudes concerning what can be known or justified may be considered natural. But the skeptical reasoning that puts those attitudes into question is also often seen, under the influence of Descartes, as entirely natural, a simple consequence of views about the world and ourselves that we take for granted. Against this, others have urged that skepticism is the product of a particular philosophical perspective that is neither necessary nor natural. After detailing this contemporary disagreement, foreshadowed in Hume, the paper considers where the ancient Greek skeptics, especially Sextus Empiricus, would have stood on this issue. One key difference is that Sextus sees no difficulty in combining an acceptance of skepticism with a set of everyday attitudes needed to live a normal life. He describes these everyday attitudes in terms that strongly suggest that he thinks of them as natural. As for whether skepticism itself is natural– at least, for those who are intellectually curious—he seems to give conflicting signals. There is a further ambivalence as to whether the everyday attitudes that he himself adopts, and finds natural, are attitudes that he would attribute to human beings in general. Thus the question that, in the modern case, seemed sharply focused seems to have no simple answer in the ancient context.
