B. is perhaps best known for his English translations of Sextus Empiricus and for his work on the development of Pyrrhonism in Hellenistic times. He has also, of course, written numerous articles touching on various aspects of ancient scepticism. This volume collects twelve of these, all but two from the last decade. Two others are very recent (‘Humor as Philosophical Subversion, Especially in the Skeptics’ [2019] and ‘Can We Be Ancient Skeptics?’ [2019]), and one was written specially for this volume (‘The Modes in Sextus: Theory and Practice’). The purpose of the collection, B. states, is to ‘allow the more obscure [of the papers] to become better known’ and ‘to highlight themes that I have touched on repeatedly from different angles, and that seem to me important’ (p. vii).
By those criteria the collection succeeds admirably. Three of the papers appear here in English for the first time (‘The Sign in the Pyrrhonian Tradition’, ‘Living as a Skeptic’ and ‘Can We Be Ancient Skeptics?’), while several others hail from collections that scholars of ancient scepticism may have overlooked. As for thematic coherence, there is a clear line linking B.’s choice of papers. They all focus mainly on Pyrrhonism, as opposed to Academic scepticism, particularly the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus. (Henceforth, I shall mean by ‘Pyrrhonism’ the position described by Sextus.) The papers can be divided more or less neatly between those that deal principally with Pyrrhonism as a philosophical practice and those that deal principally with Pyrrhonism as a way of life (an agôgê).
The collection's title is apt, then – but only to an extent. The papers do not, alas, coalesce into a philosophically satisfying account of how to be a Pyrrhonian. Perhaps that is too much to ask of a set of papers as opposed to a monograph, especially when the papers represent, as B.’s do, the author's evolving views on ‘numerous issues’ (p. x). Even so, it is hard not to feel that the volume's title is misleading, setting up as it does expectations that it fails to satisfy.
Bearing this in mind, it seems to me that these papers suffer from two general, possibly related shortcomings. The first has to do with B.’s scholarship, the second with his philosophising. First, for B. (as for many classical scholars) the Pyrrhonian tradition ends with Sextus (cf. p. 152). B.’s earlier Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy (2000) likewise suggests that Pyrrho's legacy ends with Sextus. As is well known, however, that is far from true. There exists a vast scholarly literature, generally associated today with the groundbreaking work of R. Popkin,Footnote 1 devoted to detailing the formative role of Pyrrhonism in shaping modern and contemporary Western philosophy. B. ignores this literature, and its underlying primary sources, entirely.
That being said, the volume's limited historical scope impacts its quality only to the extent that its content suffers from shortcomings that a broader historical perspective might have mitigated. Either way, however, the more serious problem is not with B.’s scholarship, but with his philosophising.
There is little question that B. knows Sextus’ texts as well as anyone alive. The closer his arguments and analyses stick to these and related texts, the better they are. Many of the essays, particularly among the first six, abound with top-notch scholarship wedded to probing often novel exegetical approaches. Where exegesis gives way to evaluation, however, B. has a tendency to stumble. This is especially evident in his treatment of the sceptical way of life. Approached in B.’s manner (i.e. without recourse to the works of modern inheritors of the Pyrrhonian tradition), the question ‘How to be a Pyrrhonist?’ is not historical – it is not a question to be settled by close study of how ancient Pyrrhonians actually lived, for we have no first-hand accounts (and, I would argue, no reliable second-hand accounts) intended to demonstrate in concrete terms how ancient Pyrrhonians actually went about living their scepticism. Rather, the question demands extrapolation based on generally abstract or rhetorical suggestions about the Pyrrhonian agôgê drawn from Sextus’ surviving works; and this requires in turn some degree of philosophical ingenuity and imagination, for the character and viability of the Pyrrhonian ‘way’ has been a matter of dispute wherever and whenever it has emerged. It seems to me that B.’s understanding and evaluations of Pyrrhonism suffer in particular from a failure to distinguish adequately between the ‘philosophical’ and the ‘everyday’ and from failing to work out an account of the relation between the two.
To be sure, it has been claimed (notably by M. Burnyeat) that this distinction, at least as we can or do understand it today, is foreign to Sextus and perhaps even to the ancients generally. That response, however, begs the question at issue unless it is supported by convincing arguments. As it happens, neither B. nor Burnyeat offer any such arguments, let alone convincing ones.Footnote 2 Whatever the reason for it, a cloud of question marks hangs over B.’s work on account of his failure either (a) to utilise the conceptual resources that a robust philosophical / everyday distinction makes available or (b) to present an argument, whether historical or philosophical, as to why those resources are not in fact available in interpreting Sextus.
For example, the claim that ‘Sextus is not trying to promote any conclusions’ (p. 8) strikes me as wildly implausible unless by ‘conclusions’ B. means ‘philosophical conclusions’, where ‘philosophical’ refers to some kind of privileged mode of inquiry. Whatever that mode of inquiry is, it cannot be treated, as B. does (cf. p. 216), as synonymous with ‘abstractions and theorizing’, where these are contrasted with some sort of non-theoretical ‘everyday engagement’ with the world (p. 18), ‘a non-reflective adoption of certain practices and forms of speech’ (p. 19). Doing so would render Sextus’ account of everyday life hopelessly inadequate simply on phenomenological grounds (cf. p. 216 n. 18). It would also leave him unable to explain how sceptics can engage in everyday occupations. B. argues that ‘learning medicine’ can be (or could be in Sextus’ time) ‘like learning to ride a bicycle – it is know-how without any accompanying propositional knowledge’ (p. 141; cf. p. 177). This conclusion strikes me as so implausible as not to merit serious consideration. The basic problem, here as elsewhere, is that B. fails to distinguish between a philosophical and an everyday understanding of ‘the real’ as it figures in questions such as ‘What is really the case?’ or ‘What really matters?’. In this connection, readers of Sextus would do well to supplement their interpretations of the opening chapters of Outlines of Pyrrhonism with a close reading of the sorely neglected later chapter ‘Sophisms’ (Outlines 2.229–59).
Returning to my first concern, about the volume's limited historical scope, the problem with relying on Sextus to provide us with the insight needed to understand how to be a Pyrrhonian is that we never see him away from his desk. We never see him, as we see Hume, playing backgammon with his friends. Montaigne's Essays (to pick just the most obvious example) strike me as a far more promising place to look for an account of a person trying to live in the world while suspending judgement in the Pyrrhonian manner – and few readers of Montaigne are likely to come away from his work thinking that he lives a ‘washed-out existence’ (p. x n. 2); that he ‘striv[es] for a condition in which a key aspect of what makes up [the self] of any full-blooded human being is discarded’ (p. 150); that he lives an ‘ethically impoverished’ life (p. 152); that he is ‘not fully an agent’ (p. 179; cf. p. 180 n. 234); or that ‘nothing really matters to him to more than a minimal degree’ (p. 143). Neither, it seems to me, are any of these claims true of Pyrrhonians as Sextus describes them.
Anyone interested in ancient scepticism will find much of value in B.’s work, and these papers are no exception. That said, they are not, it seems to me, a good place to look for an account of how to be a Pyrrhonian sceptic.
