Sextus Empiricus

A physician of the Empiric school, nicknamed "the Empiric", Sextus takes as his sole guide in life what shows itself: the phenomena (phainomena), the affections, the repeated observation proper to the arts. But this empiricism carries no dogma: he does not assert that the senses deliver the real, only that they deliver what appears, the one ground on which the skeptic consents to move. Against the rationalism that claims to infer the hidden from signs, he refuses any passage from the apparent to the non-apparent. His leaning is thus empiricist, but held short of the extreme, for he founds no theory of knowledge at all.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21-24 (the criterion of the phenomenon) · Against the Mathematicians, VIII (Against the Logicians)

The skeptic's first move is to withhold assent from whatever is not self-evident: while the reasons remain balanced, to grant belief would be rash. This restraint meets the evidentialist spirit, to believe in proportion to the reasons. The Pyrrhonian nuance is that he suspends even where the dogmatist believes he has proofs, and that he makes of this restraint not a moral duty but the lived effect of the balance of arguments: not a duty to believe only the proven, but the impossibility of assenting when nothing tips the scale.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 13 (assent) · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 19-20

The torment of desire comes, for Sextus, from holding certain objects to be good or bad by nature: one pursues or flees them with vehemence, and is disturbed. By suspending this value judgment one is freed from anxious pursuit, without aiming at the complete Stoic extinction of feeling. The skeptic keeps the natural inclinations, hunger, thirst, and answers them with measure: a detachment from supposed goods, tempered by acceptance of the unavoidable affections, which holds him a little short of strict asceticism.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238

The skeptic holds that the greater part of suffering comes not from the affections themselves but from the added opinion that they are evils by nature: it is this belief that doubles a pain with moral distress. To withdraw the judgment lightens it accordingly: the forced pain remains, but the surplus of anguish is removed. The position meets the "median" indifference toward the meaning of suffering, neither fruitful nor to be abolished on principle, but defused by suspending the value judgment.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238

Hope, like fear, bears on a future held good or bad by anticipation: yet it is precisely this judgment on the non-evident to-come that the skeptic suspends. With no dogma about what tomorrow must bring, he does not hang his rest on an expectation, and welcomes what presents itself. The tone is thus one of tranquil lucidity rather than a principle of hope, yet without tragic despair, foreign to one who has given up judging the future.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30

Skepticism is first an activity of examination: skepsis is inquiry, an attentive weighing of opposed reasons before any suspension. This reflective discipline, turned toward the testing of opinions rather than the world-transforming deed, leans toward the examined life. But it stops short of moral interiority in the Socratic sense, for the skeptic has no doctrine of the self to deepen: an examination without metaphysical introspection.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 1-4 (the three kinds of philosophy)

In his ethical books, Sextus sets the inexhaustible diversity of peoples' laws, customs and beliefs against the claim that anything is good or bad "by nature": were anything so, all would hold it such. Lacking a criterion, he suspends judgment on the existence of universal norms and regulates his conduct by the "law and custom" of his country, without holding them true. From this relativism-by-suspension follows a null universalism and only a thin constructivism, since following convention is not grounding it: it is conforming to it in the absence of any established moral truth.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 168-238 (things good and bad) · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 145-163 (the tenth mode, on customs)

Having no truth in whose name to reform the established order, the skeptic regulates himself by default on the laws, customs and received institutions of his country, which he observes without dogmatic belief. This conformism is conservative by abstention rather than conviction: not love of tradition, but the absence of any criterion that would justify overturning it. The position thus leans conservative, but without the value-grounding a Burke would give it.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 17 and 23-24 (following law and custom)

Sextus shares with the Stoics the idea that disturbance arises from a judgment, the opinion that a thing is good or bad by nature, and that withdrawing that judgment brings calm. This is an intellectualism of the passions: the cure runs through the suspension of opinion. But he parts from them on one decisive point: he does not suppress all feeling, granting that the skeptic still suffers cold or thirst, "forced" affections that no suspension abolishes. Hence a clearly intellectualist position, held back from the extreme by this share of irreducible affect.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238