Book Review: Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism: Skepticism as a Rationally Ordered Experience

Finally, an academic book that debunks the mischaracterizations of Pyrrhonism

Neo-Pyrrhonist philosopher Plínio Junqueira Smith’s new (March 2022) book, Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism: Skepticism as a Rationally Ordered Experience, brings a breath of fresh air into the fetid miasma of academic papers and books on Pyrrhonism, so many of which are written by scholars who despise, distort, or dismiss Pyrrhonism, and about which I said in my book, Pyrrho’s Way, “…much of what the Western academic literature has to say about Pyrrhonism is about as accurate about Pyrrhonism as descriptions of bicycling would be if they were written by someone who has never ridden a bicycle, never seen one being ridden, never spoken to someone who has ridden one, and who has decided that they can figure it out based on the analyzing the contents of a bicycle assembly manual.” Smith’s book is a tour de force of systematically cataloging all of the major misinterpretations and patiently laying out how to properly interpret Sextus Empiricus.

Pyrrhonism, like the other philosophies such as Stoicism and Epicureanism with which it competed in the ancient Greco-Roman world, was not simply a school of philosophical thought; it was a practice, a way of life, a method for achieving eudaimonia. Hence my criticism above: what kind of understanding of a method would one expect to see produced by those who have never practiced that method? While, of course, such a basic failing is a huge problem, it’s also true that the method is explicitly counter-intuitive, making it not easy to understand.

The works of Sextus Empiricus are our principle surviving description of ancient Pyrrhonist philosophy. What survives represents only a portion of his works. His most thorough and extensive work, Skeptical Treatises, was an encyclopedia of Pyrrhonist thought, of which a large portion has survived. Also surviving is a much-condensed version of the same material, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. This condensed version covers, in order, the following topics:

1. A description of Pyrrhonism

2. A description of Pyrrhonist practice