Sextus Empiricus - How to Keep an Open Mind: An Ancient Guide to Thinking Like a Skeptic

Sextus Empiricus and His Works

A skeptical person, as the term is normally used today, is someone who is inclined to be doubtfulwho doesnt accept what others tell them without a good deal of persuading. The ancient Greek skeptic with whom we will be concerned here, Sextus Empiricus, certainly has something in common with this person, but he is quite a bit more single-minded about it. He has a series of ready-made techniques for making sure that he (or whoever these techniques are applied on) never accepts anythingor at least, anything put forward by someone who claims to understand how the world works. Instead, he suspends judgment about all matters of that kind. And the payoff for this suspension of judgment, he says, is that you are much calmer and less troubled than other people; skepticism actually has a beneficial effect on your life. I will explain all this in more detail shortly. I will also suggest some things we might be able to learn from this outlook, as well as a few difficulties it may cause. But first, a word about who Sextus was and what he wrote.

About Sextus as an individual, we know almost nothing. We know that he was a doctor, and a member of one of the major schools of medical thought at the time, the Empirical school. He lived during the period of the Roman Empire, and presumably somewhere within its boundaries. The best guesses place him as active around 200 CE, or maybe a little later, but this is far from certain. We dont know where he was from or where he lived. He wrote in Greek, but that really doesnt tell us much. In the Roman imperial period Greek was widely understood, especially among the educated classes, and widely used for intellectual purposes; for example, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, with whom Sextus was perhaps more or less contemporary, wrote his reflections to himself (usually called the Meditations) in Greek.

Sextus claim to fame rests on his extensive surviving writings. He identifies himself as a member of the Pyrrhonist tradition of skepticism, and his are the only complete surviving works from that tradition. Pyrrhonism traces its origins to the obscure figure (I mean, obscure to us) of Pyrrho of Elis (c.360270 BCE), who we are told accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaigns and met some naked wise men in India who supposedly inspired him. It is a fascinating and controversial question whether Pyrrhoand thereby, indirectly, the Pyrrhonist traditionwas actually influenced by some form of early Buddhism. But quite apart from the question of historical influence, many readers of Sextus do sense a certain affinity with aspects of Buddhism. I will touch on this again when we have seen some of the details.