Episode 4: Aine – Pyrrhonic Scepticism

Generous Questions

This is a conversation with a final-year student in Philosophy. Aine graduated from Queen's University Belfast in the summer of 2019, and like many students she used her final year of studies to work on an extended independent research project. Dissertation students write about a philosophical topic of their own devising, working alongside individual members of faculty who help to steer their project. Aine worked with my colleage Roger Clarke on an epistemology project to do with ancient skepticism – the philosopher Sextus Empiricus tells us about the Pyhrrohnic skeptics, who thought that there's something desirable about freeing oneself from the tyranny of 'dogmatic' beliefs and making a concerted effort to free oneself of any knowledge.

Here are some things you might like to look up to find out more about Aine's topic:

• Peter Adamson's excellent podcast 'The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps' has an episode dedicated to Pyrhho and the Skeptics, and another one dedicated to Sextus Empiricus and his approach to belief.
• Katja Maria Vogt has a number of excellent introductions to Hellenistic skepticism on her webpage here.
• She's also the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry to Ancient Skepticism, which you can find here.

Aine's dissertation is exploring the question of whether a Pyrhhonic skeptic is 'practical', whether they can 'act normally' or 'live their skepticism', and for this specific question she recommends the following papers:

• Burnyeat, Myles F (1979) 'Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?' From Schofield Malcolm & Burnyeat M.F. & Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology. (1979) Oxford: OUP. (Google Books link)
• Vogt, Katja Maria (2010) Scepticism and Action. From Bett, Richard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism. (2010) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wieland, Jan Willem. ‘Can Pyrrhonists act normally?’ Philosophical Explorations 15 (3), pp. 277-289. (Seems to be available online here)

Please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact page.

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

A transcript of this conversation is available from the episode website, just go to this episode and click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for each episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci. Thanks Becci!