Search all journal & book content

Home Journals The Classical Review Volume 70 Issue 1 PYRRHONIAN SCEPTICISM - (R.) Be... English Français
Share

Information:
PYRRHONIAN SCEPTICISM - (R.) Bett How to Be a Pyrrhonist. The Practice and
Significance
You are viewing a shared of Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Pp. xvi + 263. Cambridge: Cambridge
and read-onlyUniversity
version of Press, 2019. Cased, £75, US$99.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-47107-7.
this article.

Please visit the article

page if you would like to
activate or purchase
access to the full version.
THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 67
For more information, highlights the political motives underlying the links that individuals or groups drew
please view the between themselves and Galen, who often metonymically represented Greek medicine.
Cambridge University As she explains, Indo-Muslim physicians in the nineteenth century presented Unani
Tibb as a continuation of Galenic/Greek medicine to stress their connection to European
Press content sharing
culture and thus legitimate their practice in their rivalry with the ‘modern’ medicine of
policy. the British Raj (p. 600).
Since C. Martindale’s Redeeming the Text (1993) the notion of reception as a two-way
Export citation flow that illuminates aspects of not only the ‘receiving’ culture but also the ‘received’ text
has become almost proverbial. There are excellent papers in this collection, such as those
from P. Koetschet (Chapter 10), N. Fancy (Chapter 14) and many of the authors mentioned
The Classical Review,
Volume 70, Issue 1 above, from which I learned a lot about the cultures reimagining Galen as well as what
April 2020 , pp. 67-69 attracted them to him in the first place. The majority of the contributions, however,
focus on what their ‘receiving’ cultures could read of the ‘original’ Galen, and neither sup-
Roger E. Eichorn (a1) ply enough historical context to ascertain the sociocultural and intellectual ambitions of the
translators, patrons and readers who found Galen relevant, nor ask how Galen establishes
(a1)University of Chicago his authority over the subjects in which these later individuals are interested. In their intro-
duction, the editors express the wish for the companion to stimulate more research on
Galen’s reception (p. 2). Their volume lays the foundation for such work and most import-
Copyright: © The Classical
Association 2019 antly encourages a global approach to Galen.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.101
7/S0009840X19001781 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor AILEEN R. DAS
Published online by ardas@umich.edu
Cambridge University
Press: 11 October 2019

PYRRHONIAN SCEPTICISM
B E T T ( R . ) How to Be a Pyrrhonist. The Practice and Significance of
Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Pp. xvi + 263. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2019. Cased, £75, US$99.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-47107-7.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X19001781

B. is perhaps best known for his English translations of Sextus Empiricus and for his work
on the development of Pyrrhonism in Hellenistic times. He has also, of course, written
numerous articles touching on various aspects of ancient scepticism. This volume collects
twelve of these, all but two from the last decade. Two others are very recent (‘Humor as
Philosophical Subversion, Especially in the Skeptics’ [2019] and ‘Can We Be Ancient
Skeptics?’ [2019]), and one was written specially for this volume (‘The Modes in
Sextus: Theory and Practice’). The purpose of the collection, B. states, is to ‘allow the
more obscure [of the papers] to become better known’ and ‘to highlight themes that
I have touched on repeatedly from different angles, and that seem to me important’ (p. vii).
By those criteria the collection succeeds admirably. Three of the papers appear here in
English for the first time (‘The Sign in the Pyrrhonian Tradition’, ‘Living as a Skeptic’ and
‘Can We Be Ancient Skeptics?’), while several others hail from collections that scholars
of ancient scepticism may have overlooked. As for thematic coherence, there is a clear
line linking B.’s choice of papers. They all focus mainly on Pyrrhonism, as opposed to
Academic scepticism, particularly the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus. (Henceforth, I shall
mean by ‘Pyrrhonism’ the position described by Sextus.) The papers can be divided more
or less neatly between those that deal principally with Pyrrhonism as a philosophical practice
and those that deal principally with Pyrrhonism as a way of life (an agôgê).

The Classical Review 70.1 67–69 © The Classical Association (2019)

68 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

The collection’s title is apt, then – but only to an extent. The papers do not, alas,
coalesce into a philosophically satisfying account of how to be a Pyrrhonian. Perhaps
that is too much to ask of a set of papers as opposed to a monograph, especially when
the papers represent, as B.’s do, the author’s evolving views on ‘numerous issues’
(p. x). Even so, it is hard not to feel that the volume’s title is misleading, setting up as
it does expectations that it fails to satisfy.
Bearing this in mind, it seems to me that these papers suffer from two general, pos-
sibly related shortcomings. The first has to do with B.’s scholarship, the second with his
philosophising. First, for B. (as for many classical scholars) the Pyrrhonian tradition ends
with Sextus (cf. p. 152). B.’s earlier Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy (2000)
likewise suggests that Pyrrho’s legacy ends with Sextus. As is well known, however,
that is far from true. There exists a vast scholarly literature, generally associated today
with the groundbreaking work of R. Popkin,1 devoted to detailing the formative role
of Pyrrhonism in shaping modern and contemporary Western philosophy. B. ignores
this literature, and its underlying primary sources, entirely.
That being said, the volume’s limited historical scope impacts its quality only to the
extent that its content suffers from shortcomings that a broader historical perspective
might have mitigated. Either way, however, the more serious problem is not with B.’s
scholarship, but with his philosophising.
There is little question that B. knows Sextus’ texts as well as anyone alive. The closer
his arguments and analyses stick to these and related texts, the better they are. Many of the
essays, particularly among the first six, abound with top-notch scholarship wedded to prob-
ing often novel exegetical approaches. Where exegesis gives way to evaluation, however,
B. has a tendency to stumble. This is especially evident in his treatment of the sceptical
way of life. Approached in B.’s manner (i.e. without recourse to the works of modern
inheritors of the Pyrrhonian tradition), the question ‘How to be a Pyrrhonist?’ is not
historical – it is not a question to be settled by close study of how ancient Pyrrhonians
actually lived, for we have no first-hand accounts (and, I would argue, no reliable second-
hand accounts) intended to demonstrate in concrete terms how ancient Pyrrhonians actually
went about living their scepticism. Rather, the question demands extrapolation based on
generally abstract or rhetorical suggestions about the Pyrrhonian agôgê drawn from
Sextus’ surviving works; and this requires in turn some degree of philosophical ingenuity
and imagination, for the character and viability of the Pyrrhonian ‘way’ has been a matter
of dispute wherever and whenever it has emerged. It seems to me that B.’s understanding
and evaluations of Pyrrhonism suffer in particular from a failure to distinguish adequately
between the ‘philosophical’ and the ‘everyday’ and from failing to work out an account of
the relation between the two.
To be sure, it has been claimed (notably by M. Burnyeat) that this distinction, at least as
we can or do understand it today, is foreign to Sextus and perhaps even to the ancients
generally. That response, however, begs the question at issue unless it is supported by con-
vincing arguments. As it happens, neither B. nor Burnyeat offer any such arguments, let
alone convincing ones.2 Whatever the reason for it, a cloud of question marks hangs

1
Popkin’s seminal History of Scepticism first appeared in 1960, bearing the subtitle
From Erasmus to Descartes. The second, expanded edition of 1979 is subtitled From
Erasmus to Spinoza, while the third and final edition, of 2003, extends From
Savonarola to Bayle.
2
For Burnyeat’s claims regarding what he calls ‘insulation by levels’, see his ‘The
Sceptic in His Place and Time’, reprinted in vol. 1 of M. Burnyeat, Explorations in
Ancient and Modern Philosophy (2012), pp. 316–45. Regarding this aspect of

THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 69

over B.’s work on account of his failure either (a) to utilise the conceptual resources that a
robust philosophical / everyday distinction makes available or (b) to present an argument,
whether historical or philosophical, as to why those resources are not in fact available in
interpreting Sextus.
For example, the claim that ‘Sextus is not trying to promote any conclusions’ (p. 8)
strikes me as wildly implausible unless by ‘conclusions’ B. means ‘philosophical conclu-
sions’, where ‘philosophical’ refers to some kind of privileged mode of inquiry. Whatever
that mode of inquiry is, it cannot be treated, as B. does (cf. p. 216), as synonymous with
‘abstractions and theorizing’, where these are contrasted with some sort of non-theoretical
‘everyday engagement’ with the world (p. 18), ‘a non-reflective adoption of certain prac-
tices and forms of speech’ (p. 19). Doing so would render Sextus’ account of everyday life
hopelessly inadequate simply on phenomenological grounds (cf. p. 216 n. 18). It would
also leave him unable to explain how sceptics can engage in everyday occupations.
B. argues that ‘learning medicine’ can be (or could be in Sextus’ time) ‘like learning to
ride a bicycle – it is know-how without any accompanying propositional knowledge’
(p. 141; cf. p. 177). This conclusion strikes me as so implausible as not to merit serious
consideration. The basic problem, here as elsewhere, is that B. fails to distinguish between
a philosophical and an everyday understanding of ‘the real’ as it figures in questions such
as ‘What is really the case?’ or ‘What really matters?’. In this connection, readers of Sextus
would do well to supplement their interpretations of the opening chapters of Outlines of
Pyrrhonism with a close reading of the sorely neglected later chapter ‘Sophisms’
(Outlines 2.229–59).
Returning to my first concern, about the volume’s limited historical scope, the problem
with relying on Sextus to provide us with the insight needed to understand how to be a
Pyrrhonian is that we never see him away from his desk. We never see him, as we see
Hume, playing backgammon with his friends. Montaigne’s Essays (to pick just the most
obvious example) strike me as a far more promising place to look for an account of a per-
son trying to live in the world while suspending judgement in the Pyrrhonian manner – and
few readers of Montaigne are likely to come away from his work thinking that he lives a
‘washed-out existence’ (p. x n. 2); that he ‘striv[es] for a condition in which a key aspect of
what makes up [the self] of any full-blooded human being is discarded’ (p. 150); that he
lives an ‘ ethically impoverished’ life (p. 152); that he is ‘not fully an agent’ (p. 179; cf.
p. 180 n. 234); or that ‘nothing really matters to him to more than a minimal degree’
(p. 143). Neither, it seems to me, are any of these claims true of Pyrrhonians as Sextus
describes them.
Anyone interested in ancient scepticism will find much of value in B.’s work, and these
papers are no exception. That said, they are not, it seems to me, a good place to look for an
account of how to be a Pyrrhonian sceptic.

University of Chicago ROGER E. EICHORN

reichorn@uchicago.edu

Burnyeat’s article, I am in agreement with T. Brennan and C. Roberts, ‘Sextus Empiricus’,

in D. Machuca and B. Reed (edd.), Skepticism: from Antiquity to the Present (2018),
pp. 136–7.

This article has been provided by Cambridge University Press, via the Cambridge Core platform. For information on our sharing policy, click here.