Pyrrhonism

Pyrrhonist skepticism was never simple doubt for its own sake. Its practitioners developed structured sets of arguments, known as the modes, cataloguing the many ways that appearances conflict, the same object looks different colors in different light, tastes different to a healthy and a sick person, seems differently sized from near and far, so that no single appearance can be trusted over another without an arbitrary and unjustified choice. Faced with equally balanced arguments on every side of a question, the Pyrrhonist practice was to suspend judgment altogether, a state called epoche, neither affirming nor denying the disputed claim, rather than forcing a conclusion the evidence does not actually support. The promised reward for this discipline was ataraxia, an untroubled calm that Pyrrhonists claimed followed naturally and, they said, almost accidentally once the exhausting effort to settle unsettleable disputes was finally given up. Ancient sources distinguish Pyrrhonism sharply from the skepticism of the Academy under Arcesilaus and Carneades, since the Academics were willing to argue that certain knowledge is impossible, which the Pyrrhonist treated as itself an overconfident dogmatic claim, refusing to assert even that much. The systematic version of the school known from later sources, chiefly the surviving works of Sextus Empiricus in the second century CE, is separated from Pyrrho himself by roughly five centuries of transmission and elaboration.

Sextus Empiricus, the second century physician and philosopher whose surviving works are the fullest record of developed Pyrrhonism, applied the school's method of suspended judgment to theology with unusual persistence, devoting a substantial portion of Against the Physicists to the question of the gods specifically. His approach was not to argue that gods do not exist, a dogmatic claim the Pyrrhonist treats with exactly the same suspicion as any other positive assertion, but to lay competing arguments about the gods side by side, that the concept of god is self contradictory, that different peoples hold wildly conflicting and equally unproven conceptions of what a god is and does, that no agreed method exists for settling which account is correct, until the arguments balance and neither side can be affirmed over the other without an arbitrary leap the evidence does not support. He extended the same treatment to arguments for providence, for divination and for the very possibility of proving a god's existence from the created world, cataloguing objections rather than resolving them, since resolution was never the Pyrrhonist's goal. The result reads less like ancient atheism, which does make the positive claim that no gods exist, and more like a catalogue of everything a confident theology or a confident atheism would have to answer before either could claim to know rather than merely believe. Later skeptics revived his arguments against both Catholic and Protestant certainty during the Reformation's own disputes.