Aristocles on Timon on Pyrrho: The Text, Its Logic, and Its Credibility

Abstract

Abstract A Comprehensive understanding of Greek scept1c1sm must include an understanding of its origins. I think we are at present nowhere close to this position. Greek scepticism was traditionally supposed to have begun with Pyrrho of Elis; but it is not at all clear why he was accorded this status, or how far it was justified. This is partly because the evidence concerning Pyrrho is scarce and often suspect. But it is also because the interpretations of this evidence which have recently been offered are quite bewildering in their diversity. In the last fifteen years, for example, Pyrrho’s ideas have been assimilated to those of the Eleatics, the Megarians, the Cynics, the renegade Stoic Aristo, the unnamed targets of Aristotle’s polemic in Metaphysics Γ4, and certain Buddhist and other Indian thinkers, as well as the later sceptics who actually called themselves ‘Pyrrhonean’; these possibilities have been embraced both individually and in various combinations. It is widely recognized that a passage from the Peripatetic Aristocles of Messene, preserved (like almost all of Aristocles’ surviving words) in quotation in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica, is crucial to any attempt to understand Pyrrho; it purports to describe Pyrrho’s philosophical outlook in the most general terms, and it purports to be a summary of an account of this outlook by Timon, Pyrrho’s biographer and immediate disciple. Not surprisingly, this passage has received a great deal of scrutiny; yet its meaning is subject to as much dispute as anything in this area.

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