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A Skepticism Meant to Be Lived, Not Argued

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A Skepticism Meant to Be Lived, Not Argued

What separates Pyrrho from the skeptical philosophers who came after him and adopted his name is that he left no arguments at all, only a reputation for a way of living. Ancient biographers, writing generations later, describe him accompanying the philosopher Anaxarchus on Alexander the Great's campaign into India, where he is said to have met gymnosophists, naked ascetic philosophers, whose radical indifference to comfort and pain reportedly impressed him deeply. Returning to Elis, he taught, by report rather than by text, that things in themselves are equally indeterminate, unmeasurable by reason, and undecided by the senses, so that no honest person can truly say this is so rather than that is so about how the world ultimately is. His response was not despair but suspension of judgment, epoche, which he held brings the very tranquility, ataraxia, that dogmatic certainty promises and fails to deliver. Stories, some clearly exaggerated for effect, describe him walking near cliffs and oncoming carts without flinching, said to be prevented from harm only by watchful students, illustrations his own follower Timon of Phlius likely helped circulate as much to make a philosophical point as to record fact. Centuries later, Aenesidemus revived his name for a fully argued skeptical system, and Sextus Empiricus preserved the fullest surviving account of Pyrrhonism, by which point the historical Pyrrho and the movement bearing his name had become difficult to fully separate.

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