productive doubt seeking understanding.
The first great skeptical philosopher in the ancient world was Pyrrho of Elis (c. 310–270 BCE). It is said of him that, after traveling with Alexander the Great as a court philosopher, he returned home to teach great crowds of admirers and wisdom seekers. Pyrrho was known for presenting philosophy as a way of life that aims at a calmness of the spirit and happiness of the heart.
This philosopher believed you should always be quick to question and slow to believe. He seemed to think that people too easily can become convinced of things that trouble their minds and disturb their souls. So he practiced and preached withholding judgment, or assent, as much as possible.
Some stories from his time portray Pyrrho as perhaps far too calm, and even indifferent about real dangers in his daily environment. Apparently, his friends were constantly saving his life, pulling him from the paths of speeding carts, from the edges of cliffs, and away from other dangers. Commentators ascribe this to his skeptical disinclination to trust his senses, and thus to a philosophical reluctance to believe anything that appeared to be going on around him. But it’s easy to doubt this, appropriately enough. In graduate school, my best friend and I frequently saved each other’s lives, alternately pulling each other back from the paths of oncoming cars as we walked the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, deep in thought. Our apparent indifference to the dangers around us came about just because we were lost in the intricacies of philosophical reasoning, constructing an argument concerning some abstract issue, and it had nothing to do with the peculiarities of skeptical doubt. Philosophers just tend to get lost in thought, in cities the size of New Haven. Or even Elis.
The city of Elis exempted all philosophers from taxes in honor of Pyrrho, because of his example and his service to the community. And his fellow thinkers would all have been thrilled at this great news, if they just could have brought themselves to actually believe it.
One other notable ancient skeptic was the physician Sextus Empiricus. Little information about his life survives, but it’s assumed that he was Greek because of his knowledge of the language and of places in the Greek world. His works have been very influential and are the best sources for the arguments and positions of classic Greek skepticism. Like Pyrrho, Sextus was no dogmatic naysayer about human knowledge. He didn’t deny its possibility or actual occurrence. He was just extremely careful about committing belief to anything that went beyond immediate appearances, beyond what seems to be, as distinct from what really is, and he urged others on to similar caution.
Any skeptic who was like Pyrrho and Sextus thought people should live in accordance with appearances, or what their senses seem to indicate, but should refrain from drawing any conclusions from those appearances, or avoid any firm beliefs based on the appearances. The point of this caution was always a goal of calmness of spirit, and ultimately a sort of peaceful happiness in life.
THE DOGMATIC NAYSAYERS
Some curmudgeonly ancient thinkers like Carneades boldly declared that, “Knowledge is impossible.” Others averred, a tad bit more humbly, merely that “Nothing is known.” But what’s the most obvious, embarrassing question you could ask such a person? Right: “How do you know that?” Another related negative position might maintain only that, “No beliefs are rational.” But all these claims are examples of propositions that, in one way or another, are self-defeating or self-undermining. Consider these statements:
No propositions are true.
This sentence is not made up of words.
No, I don’t speak any known language.
All these statements are self-undermining as well. Self-undermining sentences or statements fall into these categories: those that can’t possibly be true; those that can’t be rational to hold; and those that in some way defeat themselves when expressed. They are linguistic curiosities, but not much else.
The skepticism that is consulted and examined here is not self-defeating like some form of dogmatic naysaying. Proper skeptics do not deny. They just hesitate to affirm, and they question the affirmations that everyone else naturally make. The current world of social media, commercial hype, and nonstop political propaganda could use a little more healthy skepticism.
This is the ancient heritage of skepticism. But the use of skeptical questioning in this chapter is a bit different. What you’ll see here isn’t directed toward the attainment of spiritual peace. It’s about intellectual enlightenment. In other parts of the book, you can put this into service with matters of the spirit. (See for example chapters 10-12, 13-15, 16-18 and 19-21.) But for now, the task is merely to probe into the foundations of what normally is considered to be human knowledge. There are some important realizations to be had. You’ll see what Cicero had in mind when he once intimated, “By doubting, we come at the truth.”
Asking Questions We Can’t Answer
The skeptic asks some deep and challenging questions to which there are no quick and easy answers. As a result of studying these questions, you can come to a much deeper understanding of some really fundamental things that most people have long taken for granted.
To put it as simply as possible, philosophical skeptics want to ask why you believe what you believe. They want to know why you think you know the things you claim to know. They will ask you to investigate how you can have the knowledge you assert. And the particular way they choose to ask these questions can shed considerable new light on the foundations for all human beliefs and all the knowledge claims ever made.
In order to introduce the questions the skeptic urges people to ask, it will be useful to start off by making some simple distinctions. All beliefs ever held can be divided into three nonexclusive categories. This is a list of those simple categories and will be explained with examples in Table 5-1:
Past Oriented: Beliefs about the past
Present Oriented: Beliefs about the present
Future Oriented: Beliefs about the future
TABLE 5-1 Examples of Three Belief Categories
| Past Oriented | Present Oriented | Future Oriented |
|---|---|---|
| I believe Socrates taught Plato and Plato taught Aristotle. | I believe many nations are having economic trouble. |