Episode 106: Pyrrhonian Skepticism According to Sextus Empiricus

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 106 are something like, what is skepticism? And does it make sense? And we'll be discussing some ancient Greek skepticism as reported by Sextus empiricus in book one of his outlines of purinism, written somewhere around 200 AD. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots more information@part partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Klinsen Meyer, seemingly from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:39 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:41 Jessica: And this is Jessica Barry in Atlanta, Georgia.

0:43 Mark: Welcome back, Jessica.

0:45 Jessica: Thanks for having me. It's nice to be back.

0:47 Mark: Yes, Jessica was on our Nietzsche Truth and Lie episode, one of our most popular episodes to date.

0:52 Jessica: Ooh, really? That's great.

0:53 Mark: Yes, most downloaded. And I will blame you, not Nietzsche.

0:57 Jessica: Well, you should probably blame Nietzsche.

1:01 Mark: And we were talking about this episode even way back then, because at the time you had just done a, what, a seminar or something on Nietzsche and Montaigne and skepticism or something like that,

1:10 Wes: and wrote a book on it as well.

1:12 Jessica: Yeah, I think that was around the time that I had a book either out or coming out, and it was on Nietzsche and the ancient skeptical tradition. But I'd also just taught a seminar on Nietzsche and skepticism, and for that we read some Sextus Empiricus, something I've been interested in for a long time, and I just thought it would make for a good discussion. So I'm glad you guys did too.

1:32 Mark: Yes, well, I was surprised in actually reading the Sextus that this is the only. So this is the only evidence that we have, you know, the only full text, I guess, of the ancient Greek skeptical tradition. But Sextus is writing here a few hundred years into it.

1:48 Jessica: Right.

1:49 Mark: Pyrrho, the one that he's writing about, Pyrrhonium, skepticism is, you know, just post Aristotle. He traveled with Alexander the Great at some point.

1:58 Jessica: So Pyrrho is century figure. He's a sort of shadowy guy, like Socrates BC he left no writings. And so we really don't know a lot about him except what we hear from his student who I think accompanied him on lots of his travels, a guy named Timon of Phleus. And that guy wrote extensively. We don't have any of that either, except what is quoted in another later account. And so all of this is very much second or third hand, but Sextus writing in about the second century in the common era. Wrote a lot of works. He's got an 11 volume work against all the people of all the professions who profess anything at all. And then after that he sort of sits down and systematizes what skepticism is all about. And that's his outlines of Pyrrhonism, part of which we read today.

2:49 Mark: So we know Sextus was a doctor, right?

2:52 Jessica: Yeah, he's a physician, weirdly enough. Just imagine why you might ever want to go to a doctor who professes to have no beliefs or wants to make no causal claims about what will work or not or what's causing anything at all. It's sort of a strange proposition.

3:09 Dylan: Well, it's evidence based medicine, right?

3:12 Jessica: Yeah, basically. Well, if by that you mean trial

3:14 Wes: and error evidence in quotes.

3:16 Jessica: Yeah.

3:18 Dylan: Well, I mean, yeah. Have you seen Galen's theory of the heart? If I went to a guy who observed exactly what was happening to me, making conclusions based on that rather than Galen's theory of the heart, I might be a little happier about it.

3:29 Mark: Is that the one with the. It's like a tic tac toe board and you connect the ventricles by doing a slice. I don't know anything about Galen's theory of the heart, but I assume it's very a priori sounding. Is that what your point is?

3:41 Wes: There are a lot of humors involved, right?

3:43 Jessica: Yes, yes, there are a few mentions of the humors in book one of Sextus.

3:48 Wes: Right.

3:49 Jessica: And there's actually a big overlap between medical traditions in antiquity and skeptical traditions in antiquity. A lot of the figures who are prominent in one or prominent in the other. And I think it has to do with the practical bent of skepticism. It's sort of anti philosophical, which I find interesting.

4:08 Dylan: This is completely off topic. But you raising that makes me think of the rise of modern science and the role of anatomists in that. A lot of times people talk about the physicists involved in that and the alchemists. But this is also coincident with a lot of grave digging and the development of the theory of the heart by Harvey, which was very practical in his case. And just the idea of going out and looking at stuff, be them dead bodies or partially alive bodies, was very radical. But also seems to be like the skepticism you're talking about.

4:44 Mark: You're not off topic. It sounds off topic, but it's not off topic. Because the great point here that we're trying to put over is what kind of skepticism this is. That ancient Greek skepticism got a bad rap through a Lot of the history and philosophy, at least according to the editor of the volume that I have, Philip Kelly, who spends the whole time raging about how Diogenes and you know, other people writing about Pyrrho just slandered the whole business and saying it was absurd and that those guys, if you're not going to have any beliefs at all, then you have no basis on which to even eat. You know, how do I know that this food is really in front of me? So maybe I just won't do anything. Maybe I'll just starve. Maybe I'll just not walk out of the way of the car that's speeding down the street at me. But this kind of skepticism is inquiring skepticism, like you were saying, Dylan.

5:27 Jessica: Right, right. That very criticism is raised by Hume strangely. Right. Though he should know better. Just reiterates this criticism that goes all the way back to antiquity, that essentially if there were more skeptics like this, there'd be fewer skeptics like this because they'd all have starved to death by

5:44 Wes: now because they nature is too strong for principle or something like that.

5:48 Jessica: Exactly. But you know, if you Notice in chapter 11 of book one, Sextus has a reply to that. They have a standard for living their everyday lives. So this is again proving that it's not a merely academic exercise.

6:02 Wes: Right. And whether or not Sextus is telling us that we can't believe anything is itself up for discussion.

6:09 Jessica: Yeah, that's probably the most discussed interpretive problem with Pyrrhonian skepticism. Whether to take the skeptics as arguing that all beliefs are off limits. They have no beliefs at all, even the everyday ones. Like that this bread in front of me will nourish me rather than poisoning me, or that the ground in front of me will support my feet rather than allowing me to just drop through. If we take that really global approach, it looks like skepticism is just unlivable. So that's been proposed as the kind of rustic interpretation, the really crude all beliefs interpretation. But some people, including myself, support the more urbane, sophisticated interpretation according to which skeptics just oppose certain sorts of philosophers, namely dogmatists.

6:57 Mark: Well, I like that your examples there were all in the future tense that they're still about even though they're everyday examples. You know, will, will I step on solid ground or not? They're in a sense non evident sexist talks very explicitly about. I'm not worried about evident things. You know, I'm not really about doubting whether I feel cold.

7:16 Jessica: Right.

7:17 Mark: You know, it's obvious That I feel cold. I'm just concerned with doubting the things that philosophers and scientists, because those were the same thing back then, argued about, which are the non evident things. But you've already pointed out some examples. Whenever you're talking about anything that's in the future tense, it's non evident, but yet still it's every day in a sense.

7:35 Dylan: Yeah.

7:35 Jessica: I mean, these skeptics, they don't run around worrying about whether the external world exists. They don't worry about abstract problems. In section 19, Sextus basically says, look, we just take for granted that the things that appear appear. We take the appearances for granted. And what we suspend judgment on is why they appear as they do or what people say to explain why they appear as they do or why we must think of them as we do. So it's the explanations that support those appearances.

8:06 Dylan: This is also another diversion which maybe isn't a diversion.

8:10 Jessica: Well, the last one wasn't a diversion, so you may have to try harder to diverse.

8:14 Mark: It appeared to be a diversion.

8:17 Dylan: The response here sounds a lot like the pragmatic response to the relativists in that way, the Surbane skepticism sounds like it has an awful lot in common with pragmatism as we would understand it from the 1900s in modern era. It does, both in its relationship to science and its relationship to epistemology and ontology and the criticism that it's not even really a philosophy, that it's a way of doing things, but not a philosophy.

8:43 Jessica: Right. Well, if that's true, I mean, if that criticism holds, I think that that's probably not a bug, that's a feature.

8:50 Dylan: Exactly.

8:51 Jessica: My question about pragmatism is whether it is or isn't a philosophical position. I tend to think of ancient skepticism, pureanism as not a position in philosophy, but as a metaphilosophical position. So it's not an epistemology, it's not a theory about truth. And maybe pragmatism is the same sort of thing. I always thought it was a theory of truth.

9:13 Mark: Well, yes. William James explicitly has, you know, the Meaning of Truth is the name of an essay in one of his collections.

9:19 Jessica: Yeah, if so that it's still inside. He's one of the dogmatists. It's still inside philosophy. And to that extent not a form of skepticism in Sextus sense.

9:29 Mark: I totally see where you're coming from, Dylan, but I also see at least many formulations of pragmatism as a way of short circuiting skeptical concerns by saying, yeah, well, we can't know truth out there. But truth out there is an incoherent concept in the first place, which is a way of saying that global skepticism is incoherent and so we're directly in touch with the phenomenal world and that's all there is. So it's a way of redefining truth to be about appearance.

9:56 Dylan: I have a response to this thing because I think they actually have a lot in common and I think it all comes down to what variety of how you understand pragmatism and skepticism. But they have a lot of the same axes to grind and a lot of the same answers for that. But we probably ought to understand Sextus before we do that.

10:17 Mark: Well, I thought maybe it might be good to start us off with an example of the Sextus approach to a belief that people often argue about in this context in the modern day, which is the existence of God. So you might say I believe in God, I have faith or something, or I don't believe in God, I'm an atheist. And people criticize atheists and say well how can you know that there is no God? That's not cautious enough epistemologically. And so they might say well I'm an agnostic, which I just think you can't know whether there's a God or not. And the skeptic would go one further than that person and say how do you know that you can't know? All I'm saying is that we don't know.

10:56 Jessica: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

10:57 Wes: I just feel that I don't know.

11:00 Mark: Well I guess that's a question. Can you know something but not know that you know it?

11:05 Wes: Well, he does repeatedly talk about it as a feeling, right?

11:08 Jessica: Absolutely. I mean that's not by accident. He repeats it over and over and over again that equipotence. When you see two arguments, one for P, one for not P and ah, they seem sort of of equal to you. You're not quite sure which direction to go. That's the feeling that he associates with equipoilence and it's that on which suspension of judgment and then freedom from psychological troubles is supposed to attend.

11:34 Dylan: Equipolence is something I'd like to articulate a little bit more.

11:37 Jessica: Yeah, sure.

11:38 Dylan: Because it can't be as simple as multiplicity of arguments.

11:43 Mark: Right. They have to be equal of force, power or validity. I looked up equipollant. We have.

11:49 Jessica: Well where did you look it up, Mark?

11:51 Mark: Just in the dictionary there is apparently a non philosophical.

11:56 Jessica: Well, that's not going to help us. We're reading Sextus.

11:59 Wes: The dictionary that Sextus was using, or

12:03 Mark: when he spoke it in English. Yes, exactly.

12:05 Wes: I think that was Merriam Webster. Yeah.

12:08 Mark: All right, tell us how different the Greek is from what I just said then.

12:12 Wes: Well, it's actually a cool Greek word, so, yeah, it is.

12:15 Jessica: Equipolens is just what it sounds like. It's a sort of the appreciation of the equal weight of arguments. But as has already been pointed out, that's equal with respect to feeling. So when I'm presented with two arguments, I might feel torn as to which one to accept. This results, for instance, in Sextus. This is book one, section 201. It's in the middle of Sextus's explanation of how the skeptical phrases are supposed to be used. And he says, look, the phrase is I have no apprehension and I don't apprehend. Show the skeptic's own feeling, in virtue of which he refrains for the moment from positing or rejecting any of the unclear matters being investigated. This is clear from what we've said about all of the various phrases. So these are just kind of reports. The skeptic reports to us that he or she feels torn between these various phrases. Equipment is not, crucially, it's not an epistemic state. It's not a state where two positions have somehow brought about exactly equal warrant. It's not about warrant.

13:26 Dylan: It's not aperatic.

13:28 Jessica: An aporetic state is one where you're literally sort of up against a wall. You're stopped. So in a sense it is because you've got no further to go.

13:37 Wes: Yeah, and he specifically says that in section three. Yeah, that's part of the nomenclature of Pyrrhonian skepticism as the aporetic.

13:45 Jessica: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting in this context to note that all the Socratic dialogues are aporetic in that sense. They don't usually end with Socrates giving us a dissertation on what he really thinks, but with a kind of stalemate where the person he's talking to is just, you know, they run off into the distance or remember they have another appointment somewhere else because they no longer know what to say.

14:07 Dylan: Okay, so maybe I'm using the wrong word. I would want to contrast that with the idea of the true thing being the thing that is held in tension between the two equipolent. So let's just say for argument's sake, right now we have just two options that are equipment. The solution for the skeptic is not that the truth of the matter somehow lies in between them or in some way of holding them together.

14:35 Wes: It's just that they're equally attractive at a psychological level.

14:38 Dylan: They're equally attractive and then judgment is

14:40 Jessica: suspended regarding them by appreciation of their being relatively equal in weight. So there's a section the early chapter four, what is skepticism? Just says by equipotence we mean equality with regard to being convincing or unconvincing. It might take different arguments to cause me to feel equipment between them than it takes for you to feel equipotent between them. So it's meant to be a kind of subjective criteria.

15:09 Mark: And he's saying there are always more arguments available to us on either side.

15:13 Jessica: And that's why you gotta keep looking.

15:14 Mark: And there's no proof of that or argument really for that in this text through a bunch of examples through. So that you would then come to the. Yeah, okay, I see. So that would be sort of the long term training in this kind of skepticism is to actually can imagine a high school debate team with a skeptical orientation. This way you got to keep arguing that the pro we need tighter speed limits side or whatever the thing you're arguing about until it's equally convincing.

15:42 Wes: Today we will debate whether snow is

15:44 Jessica: white, whether honey is sweet.

15:47 Wes: And there is a counter argument. Surprisingly, yeah.

15:49 Mark: And if you're, if you're put on the. In the con side, you're really screwed. You have to do a lot more work.

15:54 Jessica: Well, not unless you're jaundiced, in which case you know, or you have blood suffused eyes, in which case then you're fine. Everything is different to you. The question about whether the skeptics study natural science, the context is that Athens especially and Greece itself is just rife with philosophers who are studying the natural world and propounding theories like atomism and a whole variety of theories about reality and how it works. And the skeptics are really inquisitive about that. They never stop being curious. And their complaint about everybody else is that all they want to do is stop asking. They want to find the answer so they can quit investigating. But the skeptics actually answer to the demands of reason in ways that nobody else does. And so I think this is section 18 or something. We don't study things, they say, in order to propound theories and make assertions and have firm convictions. We do it enabled to further equip.

16:54 Wes: Right. Studying natural science is necessary to setting up these oppositions, kind of relentlessly achieving equipments. What's interesting though is the Talk of tranquility or Ataraxia as a goal, or at least a sort of a fortuitous consequence. Right. Of equipo lens and suspension of judgment. Apparently, since the investigative impulse or the zetetic impulse is maintained, which is a critical part of Pyrrhonian skepticism, it's not like it gets rid of one's curiosity.

17:24 Jessica: It's parasitic on curiosity.

17:27 Wes: You might think, well, it's curiosity that's irritating and must be sort of gotten rid of. Because he talks about people initially seeking out the truth. That's our initial motivation for doing these things and getting rid of. What does he call it? The disturbances of the soul. Because we're bothered by, I think by implication, by not knowing the truth. But nevertheless, even in the state of suspended judgment, we maintain curiosity. So I think that's an interesting part of this.

17:54 Jessica: Yeah, well, you have to maintain the curiosity or else the suspension of judgment goes away. And if suspension of judgment goes away, then ataraxia goes away. It's really unlikely that at any point, whatever arguments you have for P and not P are going to balance each other out. And so if you stop at any given point, you're going to be tilted or swayed toward P or toward not P. So in order to maintain the balance, you sort of have to keep seeking out new arguments, looking to strengthen the arguments you have. So it's a really active kind of thing.

18:28 Wes: You at least have to wonder, even though you're saying, well, this appears to me to be this way. You have to be wondering about the truth of that.

18:34 Jessica: Yeah, Skeptics do not give up thinking of themselves as pursuing truth. Sexist never describes himself in that way, but I think that that's got to be the case. And they never rule out that they could find it.

18:46 Wes: Exactly.

18:47 Dylan: This is where tranquility doesn't seem to be. I mean, maybe it's the right word to describe sort of their state of being. But all the talk about balance and stuff like that doesn't seem quite right because it's not getting to the force of direction that has to be there in order for there to be curiosity. Curiosity and this inquisitive nature is an activity and is a direction that is maintained. And so it does make sense to say, well, dogmatism squelches that and leads to a. In tranquility. In that things quite jive at all. And you're constantly defending yourself and they still don't completely make sense. On the other hand, to simply say the skeptic in being an investigator, that leads to tranquility it sounds like the claim has gone too far towards soulful peacefulness, which, given the other claims they want to make about skepticism, that's not quite right either, because they still left over with this visceral activity of the intellect to want to know more and to continue to feed that.

19:57 Jessica: Right. But that's only a problem if you think that curiosity and not knowing of uncertainty is an unpleasant state intrinsically. If it's unpleasant to you and you want to get rid of it, that's going to be a problem. But ataraxia, which gets translated as tranquility, I think, by Cicero, there are some Latin authors that just take this up and say, ah. A bunch of people describe the highest good in different ways. I'm just going to use tranquillitas. And so ataraxia gets picked up that way. But it really means just freedom from trouble, from psychological maladies, from discontent.

20:30 Wes: Let's say what the trouble is in the first place. And I think section six gets at this. What is it that we're troubled by in the beginning? So he says, men of talent, troubled by the anomaly in things and puzzled as to which of them they should rather assent to, came to investigate what in things is true and what false thinking, that by deciding these issues they would become tranquil. So that's kind of ambiguous. The question is what types of things are troubling. So one might think from the later context that it's principally evaluative judgments. Right. Judgments about what's good and bad. This is a question.

21:03 Jessica: I don't know. He does spend a lot of time on those lately. But I think he's just as focused on people who have theories like democracy and atomism, people who think that things are really made of atoms and voids. It's physical theories, ethical theories, it's.

21:17 Dylan: Well, but even before theories, isn't it stronger than that? This is men of talent troubled by the anomaly and things puzzled as to which of them they should rather assent to. It seems to me that that doesn't even mean you have to have some kind of deep theory. It's just that you see something that doesn't make sense.

21:33 Jessica: Yeah, yeah. So I think that's just native curiosity. Everybody begins in the same state. And you know, Aristotle says all men by nature desire to know. So that's how we get started.

21:43 Wes: But this suggests that trouble and curiosity are related, which would lead to somewhat of a contradiction. So, troubled by the anomaly of things.

21:51 Jessica: Right. Well, what the skeptics discover, though fortuitously for them, is that trouble and Curiosity are not related. There are people who have a certain kind of talent or ability to oppose one argument to another and one thought to another. And when they discover equipence, what happens is, fortuitously, ataraxia follows. So they're just reporting their experience and how they achieved this state.

22:14 Wes: Right.

22:15 Dylan: Now, I buy the notion that a dogmatist has a troubled soul in a much deeper way than a skeptic. Like the way in which a tyrant is much more unhappy than a democrat.

22:26 Jessica: Yeah, it's a nice analogy, but I

22:29 Dylan: don't buy the fact that being curious is unassociated with being troubled. It seems to me that it is absolutely involved with discontent, and that discontent is part of the drive towards resolving the anomaly. It's like an itch that you have to scratch.

22:48 Jessica: But where the dogmatists go wrong and the skeptics don't is not in feeling that curiosity, but in thinking that, ah, answering my questions, satisfying my curiosity will make me happy. And then they hinge their happiness on the answering of the questions.

23:05 Wes: Yeah.

23:05 Jessica: And so that's why, when they're so susceptible, when they hear a good argument about how things work or in a good explanation, they just latch onto that and become deaf to counter arguments and they begin to defend it. Their happiness is staked on not being thrown back into curiosity. The skeptics remain indifferent about that and that's why they're happier. It's not that they're placid, but. But they're not as easily able to be knocked off balance.

23:31 Wes: Right. You know, it's a sort of old cliche about being focused on process. In this case, the process of inquiry as opposed to the outcome, even though you have to maintain a sort of directedness towards truth or towards a possible outcome and the possibility of that outcome. It's the idea that one must be miserable or without it. That's the problem.

23:49 Dylan: Often balance and the way in which you might use the word tranquil would be a kind of placidness, as Jessica pointed out, but it's not. So you can have, in this case is an example of balance that's full of motion. That's why I think Wes is exactly right that you go down this road of process where the process itself is what's at work, and then that, of course, falls into the hands of it not being a philosophy at all, but a way of doing things.

24:15 Jessica: Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you talk about balance and the motion that's involved with this particular process, because we started out talking about Ataraxia and what it really is. And that word, this trouble free state thereafter has a number of precedents, including some in the medical tradition where the components of your psyche, whatever that is, can be taken to be in balance or out of balance. And achieving the best good is to achieve a state that's kind of a dynamic equilibrium where it's not an anesthetic state, but it's one that is restless but stable. It's achieved a tension. That's a stable tension, yes.

24:58 Wes: This reminds me of the, from the symposium. Who's the doctor? Eryximachus.

25:03 Dylan: Heraximachus, Yep.

25:04 Wes: So it seems to be a doctor thing.

25:06 Jessica: Yeah, it's a dynamic balance, unsurprisingly.

25:10 Mark: Also sounds like Heraclitus, of course.

25:11 Wes: Right, of course.

25:12 Dylan: Well, Heraclitus is always at war though. There's times where that balance is dynamic, like in the bow. But there is an aspect of where it's fulminating balance. It's not as tranquil.

25:24 Mark: So we've painted a picture of this kind of skeptic as being completely compatible with a ever seeking, open minded scientist. But then when we get to section nine here, does the skeptic theorize about nature? I think we get a different picture. We reply in the same vein, as if asked whether the skeptic needs to theorize about nature. On the one hand, if there's a question of making an assertion with firm confidence about any of the matters dogmatically treated in physical theory, we do not theorize. But on the other hand, in the course of opposing to every statement, an equal statement, and in connection with ataraxia, we do touch upon physical theory. So neither of those is the option of the actual physical scientist as we think of them today. Yes, of course we don't think of the physical scientists as today as dogmatically treating of matters, although frankly, to do any serious theorizing you have to say there is causality. You have to actually assume a large.

26:15 Wes: Well, you have to propose a model, A model, let's say a theoretical model to explain the appearances.

26:21 Mark: You have to have a big amount of stuff that's given.

26:23 Jessica: You know, it's kind of interesting how we might think of contemporary scientists, say in universities, people who have to run labs and apply for grants as being to some extent having their intellectual openness compromised by the practical position they have to take as a member of the profession. And I think that that's not unlike what Sextus is getting at. He's looking at a lot of different dogmatic schools and insofar as they Affiliate with those schools. They've got to take this or that position. And part of the skeptical complaint is, look, that actually compromises your intellectual integrity. It makes you less open minded.

27:01 Mark: But it's not a matter of like a chemist. Now, while not dogmatic about the atomic theory would say, all right, this is at least the model that everything that I'm going to now investigate presupposes. That's still going to be what the skeptic is recommending is not just to keep in mind that it's just a model. Don't dogmatize. It's just a model. That would be a very conservative way of taking it. Exactly saying it as the skeptics positive goal is to just come up with statements opposing to every. Right. So the scientists would be spending a lot of time.

27:30 Wes: Mark, I had the same reaction as you. Yeah, I expected and I read Sextus a long time ago, I think Jessica. We both took Woodruff's class at ut.

27:39 Jessica: I never took a class from Woodruff.

27:40 Wes: Oh, you never took the. You weren't in the ancient skepticism class.

27:43 Jessica: So I was not in that. But there was a lot of Sextus. There was a whole lot of Sextus going on at the time.

27:48 Wes: Exactly. You know, I was expecting something with regards to science, more of what Mark is describing as the conservative approach. Right. So Niels Bohr comes up with the model of the atom and he understands, you know, that he's trying to explain certain phenomena, spectra for instance. And he's not under any illusion that when he draws a picture of an atom that this is the way things really are. Right. Quote unquote, at some deep metaphysical level. So that seems to be consistent with the kind of skepticism. But so it is surprising if we in this section on do skeptics study natural science? You might expect that sort of approach. But instead, and I mean it is a short section, so it leaves us, I don't know if it's entirely clear, but again he seems to be saying that we touch on it only for the sake of opposing accounts to each other. You might think, well, curiosity ought to include as a scientist wanting to propose models to explain phenomena. Even if I do this in a tentative, non dogmatic way, let's say.

28:47 Jessica: Right. Well, it's really tough to try and project or imagine what Sextus might say in our contemporary scientific landscape. This section, even though it is really short, do skeptics study natural science? I think it's meant to belong with the previous two sections. So Sextus is just concerned here to clarify and answer various critics or forestall various objections. Do skeptics hold belief? Well, it depends on what you mean by belief. Do they belong to a school? Well, it depends on what you mean by a school. Do they study natural science? Well, it sort of depends on what you mean by studying natural science. And then do they reject what's apparent? That's a segue to these various standards of skepticism. It is short. I don't know that we're meant to make a whole lot out of it. It's just that we have to see Sextus as against the background of people at the time propounding various theories. I have no idea what he'd make of the contemporary fallibilistic landscape. I mean he'd probably be pretty friendly to it, I imagine.

29:47 Mark: I want to point out the one sentence that I didn't read from that section and the translation that you all have in front of you is this is also the spirit in which we approach the logical and ethical parts of what they call philosophy. And this other one that I'm going to send people, the link to by Benson Mates just happened to be one that we found online, that's the one I was actually reading. And the last sentence of that is this too is the way we approach the logical and ethical parts of so called philosophy with scare quotes around it. So like the translator adding that sexist is trying to be snarky.

30:18 Wes: He also uses noumena for objects of thought. Noeta. So that's interesting.

30:26 Jessica: Wow, now that's completely unwarranted. Well, it just Kantianizes things in a really confusing way. It's very anachronistic, I think.

30:34 Wes: So do we want to say more about 7 and 8? So especially with beliefs, this idea that, well, the answer to skeptics hold beliefs is yes and no, depending on how we define beliefs. I mean, I know we've touched on this, but I don't know if we fully.

30:46 Jessica: That's kind of the crux of the issue for a lot of people. It's where this, the rustic and urbane interpretations, the broad and the narrow ones are really going to be sorted out. Although I think there are other sections that bear on it.

30:59 Mark: This other translation does it as does the skeptic dogmatize, in other words, in such a way that it answers its own question? Of course they don't.

31:07 Jessica: Come on, what seems more plausible that the skeptics are advocating we suspend all belief or just beliefs on a certain class of explanations and if so, what defines that class?

31:23 Wes: So it's interesting, the Barnes introduction gives A good example of there's the possibility one can separate judgment and belief and say we hold all sorts of beliefs that we haven't made conscious judgments about. So I think the example in the Anison Barnes introduction has something to do with more than three trees in my garden or something like that. But I've never thought that before. But on some level I've always held that belief. So we can believe things without judging them at some reflective level to be true. So that's one way of getting at this.

31:57 Jessica: Yeah, that way of taking belief seems to be an explanation of how we can get through our daily lives with lots of these unreflective judgments and how it might be possible to live as skeptics. So that, I think, would push us toward the urbane interpretation. We suspend judgment on some things, but not with respect to those unreflective beliefs. I still act as if there are three trees in my garden, even though I've not consciously formulated or articulated the thought, there are three trees in my garden.

32:29 Wes: Right.

32:29 Dylan: Isn't part of the question there whether even that's properly called a belief?

32:34 Jessica: I think Sextus would say it's not.

32:36 Dylan: Yeah. These unreflective judgments aren't beliefs, strictly speaking, and that there's something reflective required for it to be a belief. Those other things are acts of intellect as well.

32:46 Mark: That would be very surprising to Plato if Socrates is trying to show people that their beliefs are not properly grounded. Well, if you then say because you haven't reflected on your beliefs, you don't have any beliefs at all, that would be a very surprising result.

33:01 Dylan: Okay, so I think those are different. The notion of. What do you call them? Everyday opinion, you know, where you have. I guess I want to have multiple categories here.

33:10 Jessica: The Sextus recognizes two broad categories, but there might be multiple ones in there that will help us out. We should look at the very first sentence of this section. Do skeptics hold beliefs? It's chapter seven, but most texts have this broken up at an almost sentence by sentence level. So I'm going to chapter seven, sets 13. So when we say that skeptics don't hold beliefs, we don't take belief in the sense in which some say quite generally that a belief is acquiescing in something. Skeptics assent to the feelings forced upon them by appearances. So they acquiesce in all sorts of things. For example, text continues, they would not say, when heated or chilled. I think I'm not heated or chilled. Rather, they say that they do not hold beliefs in the sense in which some say that belief is assent to some unclear object of investigation in the sciences. For pyranists do not assent to anything unclear. That last clause has lots of qualifications. So to assent to something is not just to have formulated it propositionally in your head, but to have thought that it is true and that you're endorsing it somehow. And this unclear object of investigation in the sciences is also important. But skeptics can do all sorts of things. They can negotiate their garden because they know there are three trees there. They can take the roast out of the oven when the timer goes off because they believe it's done. And all of those things are sort of forced on them by appearances. As I read Sextus, they can do a whole lot of stuff. They just don't do it with any heavy theory.

34:45 Wes: It sounds like they can have beliefs then, of a certain sort. They can hold certain things to be true as long as they don't have this kind of metaphysical baggage associated with.

34:54 Jessica: Exactly. I think that the skeptical phrases are helpful here, too, in chapter 24, under the heading everything is undetermined. Right. I mean, that sounds pretty dogmatic. Everything is undetermined. That really sounds like a pronouncement about, you know, we can't know anything. Everything is indeterminate.

35:12 Dylan: Everything.

35:13 Jessica: But Sextus tells us specifically we're not to take it that way. Indeterminacy, he says, is an intellectual feeling in virtue of which we don't deny and we don't posit anything investigated in dogmatic fashion. So he gives us this translation. When I say everything's undetermined, we take is. There's some real Bill Clinton kind of Donald Rumsfeld parsing going on here. When we say is, I mean, it appears to me, by everything we mean not whatever exists, but those unclear matters investigated by the dogmatist, which I've considered. And by undetermined, the skeptic means that they don't exceed what is opposed to them in convincingness or lack of convincingness. So basically, where you see everything is undetermined, we should read those of the matters investigated by the dogmatists, which I've considered appear to me such that none of them seems to me to exceed in convincingness or lack thereof what conflicts with it.

36:12 Wes: That is ironclad. He drafted that with his lawyer. President.

36:15 Jessica: Yeah, definitely. The skeptics are slippery people.

36:19 Dylan: Joseph, can you say more about why it matters that he's talking about the dogmatists here? Because when I read that, the fact that he throws in dogmatists, I can Take it a couple of different ways. One, I can take it as specifically referring to the school, the dogmatists, when

36:36 Jessica: there is no school. He's referring to a whole cluster of them. Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, you know, Democratians, what have you.

36:43 Mark: Was this taken as a slur? I'm just.

36:44 Jessica: Well, it kind of is.

36:45 Mark: Like now we use this as a slur, but at the time, but at

36:48 Wes: a literal level, it just means having beliefs. A dogma is a belief.

36:52 Jessica: Oh, right. So when we say that somebody's being dogmatic, we might mean that they're being stubborn. We're describing their attitude in some way. Sextus is using the term in a much more technical way. It's laid out in the first few sentences of book one. Dogmatists are just anybody who has a philosophy to propound, who thinks that they've settled the big questions about reality. Obviously, I'm paraphrasing there.

37:16 Wes: And not just any kinds of beliefs.

37:17 Jessica: But yeah, if we look at the Section 10, do skeptics reject what's apparent? That's the first place where it becomes really clear. Skepticism is about opposing dogmatism. It's basically a metaphilosophical stance. And it's anti philosophical in Sextus. Relevant sense of philosophical in the context of his time.

37:40 Wes: Anti metaphysical.

37:42 Jessica: Yeah, I think that's what we would probably call it today. But he's against the Stoics, he's against the Epicureans, he's against the Peripatetics, you know, followers of Aristotle.

37:51 Mark: He wants to suspend judgment on matters of logic and ethics. So it's a little unclear to me.

37:57 Jessica: Right. But the only people around him who've got views on logic and ethics are people who've got a way of life that they want to sell to you and they want to get you to believe that way of life or that theory about reality. And Sextus finds all of that stuff suspicious. He doesn't think that we have any clear way of deciding which of these guys has the true story about what you ought to do or how reality is or how logic works or anything else. This is part of what interests me about skepticism, its kind of metaphilosophical stance. If we look at that chapter, I was just pointing out chapter 10, Sexist says, Look, if we propound arguments directly against what's apparent, it's not because we want to reject what's apparent that we set them out, but rather to display the rashness of the dogmatists. In a later book, he says, we're basically philanthropists. We're just trying to cure the rashness and conceit of the dogmatists because that keeps people from achieving atorexia or tranquility or the best good.

39:03 Dylan: So there's a way in which this guy could be someone really interesting that is making clear things in the world.

39:11 Jessica: I think he is really interesting.

39:12 Dylan: Or could be the most obnoxious dweeby ass who's sitting in there. Well, Devil's Advocate says that. I think that.

39:22 Jessica: Really you're confusing him with Descartes or some modern skeptic.

39:28 Dylan: No, what I'm saying is it could go either way.

39:30 Jessica: Yeah.

39:30 Dylan: No, especially when you have phrases like our whole point is to oppose the dogmatist.

39:35 Jessica: Yeah. This whole thing is ad hominem.

39:38 Dylan: That in some ways, I have to say makes it less interesting. If I take it seriously as being ad hominem. That becomes less interesting than a claim about the disposition one ought to have with regard to everything.

39:49 Mark: To expand on that, it seems like a little contrary to say, on the one hand, oh, we're driving toward peace of mind, a settled, stable curiosity. And then to provide this guidebook exhaustive. We haven't gotten to the exhaustive part yet. But when he goes through all these different ways in which everything is relative or that you could come up with counter arguments for any given thing, it looks like a guide for if you ran an anti abortion group or a climate change. It doesn't, you know, liberal or conservative.

40:22 Wes: If you're trying to people stopping you on the street with literature asking for donation.

40:26 Mark: Yes. You want to train people. Yes. Of how to argue for this point of view in a very militant, obnoxious way. That doesn't seem to go with the ataraxia here.

40:35 Wes: I didn't take the 10 modes in that spirit. I just saw it as someone who wants to do a very exhaustive job of giving us all the different reasons for equipolen.

40:46 Jessica: Here's the basic philosophy is bad for you. I've discovered that through my practice and through long practice I can now kind of articulate what that practice is about. And so here's this guidebook. The practice actually precedes the axiomatization or the description of what I'm doing. I came to it through practice. But here's what I discovered that what you're doing is exhaustive attempt to explain and then defend your explanations reality and what the good is and what people ought not not to do. It's not only misguided or false, it's pernicious. And it's harming people.

41:25 Mark: Sextus, thank you, but could you just fix my broken leg?

41:28 Jessica: I can picture he can do that too, but he doesn't have any theories about why it's broken or what's going to fix it. He's just going to sort of do what he's seen work in the past.

41:36 Wes: But here again, there seems to be some tension with stable curiosity. It seems for curiosity to be active, we have to be proposing these theories on some level. Right. Trying to understand things and engaging in arguments with each other. Even if we take what maybe it's correctly described as a more fallibilist stance towards all of that, that, to me is a little bit of a puzzle still.

41:56 Jessica: But if you're a skeptic, you don't think that the highest good is winning the argument.

42:01 Wes: Right.

42:01 Dylan: But now the skeptics seem to be arguing. The way you're talking about it right now just sounds just like the way in which Socrates talks about the sophists.

42:09 Jessica: Well, that's interesting.

42:10 Dylan: The Epicureans, the Stoics, the dogmatists in general, they're all forms of sophists. The way this argument would play out in other times, or maybe even hallways of academia nowadays, would be, you're not being philosophical, you are a partisan of a school rather than a partisan of philosophical inquisitiveness. It surprised me when you said that he was juxtaposing skepticism against philosophy.

42:37 Jessica: Yeah, that's what he means by dogmatist.

42:40 Dylan: But it seems to be an understanding of philosophy that's. We have to understand it as being dogmatist in the way that other people, lovers of wisdom, would have considered themselves being the true lovers of wisdom, rather than being sophists, people who make arguments for the sake of making arguments.

42:56 Mark: That's why it was helpful at the end that he contrasts himself very carefully the Pyrrhonian tradition with other schools that were going on, including Plato, that he says when Plato is in the early Socratic dialogues, he's actually being quite a good skeptic according to his definition. It's only when Plato goes on what we'd call the later Plato actually just laying out, here's how it is. And whenever we have one of these discussions, Wes says he's actually not saying that here's how it is anyway. He's still being proper, but.

43:26 Wes: Right. I am always trying to defend Plato as a Pyrrhonian skeptic.

43:30 Jessica: I think you can defend Socrates as a skeptic. So Wes mentioned Paul Woodruff before at Texas and He's got a view that Socrates is an aporetic skeptic. He's got a great paper on this.

43:40 Dylan: He's not the only one.

43:42 Wes: Yeah.

43:42 Jessica: And I think it's a very plausible view.

43:44 Wes: Yeah.

43:44 Jessica: Plato has much more of an axe to grind, but Socrates is more genuinely interested in people and in their views and in why they hold them and what good it does us to hold them. And the skeptics are interested in lots of those questions too.

43:59 Wes: Yeah.

44:00 Jessica: So the distinction between a sophist and a philosopher, it seems to me, is cashed out mostly in terms of motivation. Sophists are teachers of rhetoric and they're interested in successful argumentation, whereas philosophers take themselves to be pursuing the truth about what really is the case. And most of them do that. They pursue that truth to some sort of end. They get to a theory they think works and they dig their heels in and they stick to it. And my reading of Sextus is that he opposes that heel digging tendency. He thinks it's bad for us.

44:40 Dylan: Is Sextus fundamentally non or apolitical? Would you say that that goes along with this?

44:47 Jessica: That sort of really sounds like a loaded question to me.

44:51 Mark: We have to inch into that. That's why I brought up the ethical before and in general, talking about traditional beliefs that it seems like if he's saying that among the, what I'm not even going to call a belief because it's just inherited from society or just he says explicitly, like it's okay to follow the customs of your country and worshiping the gods, say for instance, and from that you could say all other matters political. If you're objecting to the current political order, then it seems like you have to come up with a metaphysical backing for that in some way by saying, you know, everybody has the right to freedom and this government isn't allowing me freedom and the skeptic is going to be only hostile to that kind of charge.

45:29 Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the skeptic cannot in good conscience say, yes, our Athenian democracy is the best way to live. You know, they're going to be much more kind of, when in Rome do as the Romans do, sort of people. That's a really mixed historical metaphor there. But this charge was level at them even in antiquity.

45:47 Wes: I was puzzling through that.

45:49 Jessica: One of the sources for this material, Eusebius, in a work called Preparation for the Gospels, attacks the skeptics for being particularly immoral. And he says, look, these people have no views. They've got to be dangerous to society. If you told a skeptic to kill and eat his own father. If a tyrant told him that, the skeptic, yeah, he's just following the appearances and doing what's done in this country would have no principled way of saying no. And so he would kill and eat his own father if commanded to do so by a tyrant. And this seems to me in many ways an unfair charge, but it was one that goes all the way back to antiquity.

46:29 Mark: So let's defend him.

46:30 Dylan: Yes, well, it also is directly reminiscent of charges against relativists in general that they're dangerous.

46:38 Jessica: Not just wrong, but dangerous.

46:39 Dylan: And incidentally, pragmatists as well.

46:41 Jessica: Right, that's true. And I do think it's important to keep relativism, pragmatism and skepticism in this sense, Pyrrhonism, distinct. But they're certainly over on one end of the spectrum that leaves them susceptible to this kind of complaint or charge or allegation. I do think there are ways of defending Sextus from this or defending the pyranist from this. You have a natural, probably inclination not to kill and eat your own father. If you've grown up in a society that doesn't do that kind of thing, there are natural aversions. You're going to have. The skeptic just has to raise questions about why this or that practice is this or that practice in the place that it's practiced. And that's where he gets his sort of skeptical wedge in. And needn't succumb to just whatever they're told to do. They're not robots.

47:31 Dylan: There is something going on in the fact that the skeptic is willing to make this argument at all. I mean, it might not go quite as far as the way in which the tables are turned on a skeptic and say, well, clearly you have beliefs because you are making assertions. It might be more fine than that. But the notion that they don't have opinions, or I don't know why I wouldn't want to say, beliefs about better ways of proceeding, at the very least that may or may not result in conclusions that's related to. The political question is that once you are in a state of having to choose between one thing and another, what does a skeptic do? This would be related to what Mark was asking about ethical questions. It might be not so hard to say, be skeptical in this way and may lead to tranquility regarding ontological questions or metaphysical questions and stuff like that. But ethical, moral, political questions, it might be a bit harder.

48:27 Jessica: Well, if we're Worried about whether the skeptic is going to be a good citizen or not. There's not much to worry about. In the chapter 11, the standard of Skepticism, Sextus tells us how the skeptic gets by in his everyday life, attending to what's apparent. This is sentence 23. We live in accordance with everyday observances, but without holding opinions. So they do what most of us do through most of our lives. They just do it without a lot of heavy theorizing. And he says, you know, of course, we're not able to be utterly inactive. This actually anticipates Hume's charge centuries later. The everyday observances seem to me to be fourfold, he says. They consist in guidance by nature, necessitation by feelings, the handing down of laws and customs, and teaching of kinds of expertise. So you might ask, how are skeptics able to make inferences and perceive that there's, you know, a table or a glass of water in front of them? Well, by nature's guidance, how are they able to eat when they're hungry or drink when they're thirsty? Well, that's the necessitation of feelings. Also, you're outfitted with those by nature. And so here we get to our question, the handing down of laws and customs. So we accept, he says, from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety is bad, and those are going to be differently practiced in different places. That's less of problem, probably for the Greeks than it is for us. But still, it's going to keep the skeptic from doing anything unthinkingly and completely radically opposed to social custom.

50:05 Dylan: Well, in a funny way, it makes them a very benign, uninteresting conservative.

50:09 Jessica: Don't say conservative. You said conservative. No, it doesn't. I think, because I think that would be an equally worrisome charge, that, yeah, the skeptic is the perfect conformist, you might say, because they're just going to go with the flow and do what everybody else does.

50:24 Dylan: Because the conservative would be a dogmatist, because they would be seeking to preserve the ways of the past.

50:31 Jessica: Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, a principled conservatist would, but

50:34 Wes: the skeptic is a collaborationist. I'm sorry,

50:39 Mark: there's no grounds that a skeptic could draw on to disobey a tyrant or something, but typically a tyrant doesn't just tell you what they want you to do. They have a whole machinery that is itself pretentious and dogmatic that you can then knock down. So if you're thinking about the fascists and their talk of the master race and their, you know, you can easily. A skeptic is very well armed to say, wow, that's a lot of bullshit that's coming out of the ruler's mouth. And to point that out.

51:08 Wes: Well, can they really point out it's bullshit?

51:10 Jessica: Yes, absolutely.

51:12 Wes: They can say, it appears to me to be neither neither the case nor not the case.

51:16 Jessica: Well, so the ancient skeptic is distinguished from modern skeptics in many ways, but the ancient skeptic is not, you know, unlike the Cartesian skeptic, who has to sort of doubt everything and level everything, raze everything to the ground until something can be erected back up again. The ancient skeptic, the Pyrrhonian skeptic, just needs to do his thing. And if you're a skeptic and you're told, well, you gotta start with that fork and work your way in, you know, through various courses of your meal, or you've gotta drive on this or that side of the road. There are lots of harmless conventions that are really pretty arbitrary that guide our everyday lives. The behavior we adopt in elevators or on the street, and there's really not a deep reason behind them. So if the skeptic says about any of those things, well, why do we use this fork rather than that fork? He's going to hear something like, you know, I don't know, that's just kind of the way it is. And that's just how things worked out. But as Mark was saying with the tyrant, you have to obey the tyrant. Well, why? Well, because he's a dictator. His words are the will of God or something. Why does everybody in this town go to church on Sunday or on Wednesday night? You know, what are they doing? Like, the skeptic can be perfectly happy to do that, but if it occurs to him to inquire why people are doing it, then he's going to get a bunch of answers that are going to involve a lot of metaphysical baggage. And that's where his skeptical haggles are going to be raised. And he's going to say, well, how do they know this tyrant is put here by the will of God? Or how do they know that we have to go to church on Sunday? Because this text that was written by God wills it. So not all conventions are alike. The skeptic is pretty happy to be a conformist, I think, with respect to the arbitrary, reasonless ones, but the ones that require deep metaphysical explanation and belief. Then it's a matter of do I want to follow these or not.

53:09 Mark: Or the ones that cause conflict.

53:11 Wes: Yeah, it's not so clear to me that we can distinguish those which require metaphysical belief and those which don't. But go ahead.

53:17 Mark: Mark not always say slavery.

53:19 Wes: He himself talks about human sacrifice, for instance.

53:21 Mark: But yeah, so you could see him being okay with slavery. That. Oh, well, it's just. It's something that we have. There's not a great reason for it. But then it becomes a political issue. If there are slave revolts, if the slaves are standing up and writing poetry and singing songs and saying, we are people, we are people, then you might say, well, okay, maybe the slaves are not pointing out some great metaphysical truth. They're not grasping that we all have inalienable human rights or making something like that. But still they're raising something that points this out as not the harmless kind of thing, that you should just obey that at least this is worthy of further study. They're casual activists. Let's see how it goes. Let's see how this political thing work out. Well, I guess that sounds reasonable. I mean, yeah, it would disrupt our economy to let the slaves free. But on the other hand, I mean, they sure look like people. They sure. It sure seems like they deserve this.

54:16 Jessica: I don't know about casual activists, but they're humble activists.

54:20 Wes: Well, I think the way out is to say that law and custom, although standard of action, isn't the only one. There's also feeling there are many different ones, nature and so on and so forth. It's entirely plausible that there would be conflicts that would have a skeptic rejecting the status quo. But that doesn't depend on some theoretical stance that goes against the prevailing theory.

54:40 Mark: As a politician, a skeptic would feel like, well, if everybody was a skeptic like me, it would be fine because we could all kind of talk reasonably about these things and nobody would be really dogmatic. But given that we live in a society where people on every side are being dogmatic, then, yeah, you could, as a way of trying to bring about the equipolence, take a side against the prevailing mode because nobody else is.

55:05 Jessica: Oh, possibly. I hadn't thought about that.

55:07 Wes: Yeah. The idea of producing equipolence in a society is something different, I think.

55:12 Jessica: Yeah. I wanted to go back to human sacrifice.

55:15 Wes: Okay, please.

55:17 Jessica: So Wes mentioned Sextus mention of human sacrifice, and he does bring that up in one of those late chapters in book one in much the way that Herodotus does it in his histories, just canvassing the views and the practices of many different cultures. Greece at this time, it's open to the world.

55:38 Wes: It's also, it's in the 10th mode as an example, when he's setting different sorts of oppositions, right?

55:44 Jessica: And so there are different kinds of relativity that we have to consider. And one of the ways in which things can appear differently to different peoples is evident in their different practices. And so it's kind of interesting to think about what contemporary philosophers would make of them. So observing that many different cultures have many different practices, some of which we find barbaric, one might be led to the conclusion that, oh, there is no truth, right? You might be a moral anti realist because of that. The skeptics aren't quite willing to go that far. But they're suspending judgment, right? They're not willing to go as far as J L Mackey and say, look, there are just no objective values. I think they are willing to go so far as to say it's not bloody likely that there are objective values.

56:35 Wes: It appears to me that I can't say whether there are objective values in this case.

56:39 Jessica: I think they're willing to say more than that if this is stronger, namely that it's not likely that there are objective values. I mean, there might be, you know, something could happen to convince me that there are. But if there were objective values, it would be a very weird phenomenon for so many people to have a such. So many different practices that disagreed so strongly. That would be very, very strange.

57:03 Dylan: And the reason why a skeptic would say that those that sacrifice human beings, they're not willing to say they're wrong.

57:10 Jessica: Well, Sextus doesn't say one way or the other. He just uses this as one among many examples.

57:15 Wes: This is in the 10th mode. He's using this as an example of oppositions that you use to produce equipolant, to produce suspension of judgment. So the idea that there's human sacrifice in one place, this is opposition of law to law, it's forbidden in one place, but required in another place, is meant to be one of the examples of the way in which we're led to a suspension of judgment that requires

57:38 Dylan: you to take those laws as being equal just by the mere fact that

57:42 Jessica: they exist equal in appearance, they appear to me to be equal. I feel that they're equal. Remember the skeptical phrases?

57:48 Wes: There would have to be that they seem equally convincing to you. That's part of the whole, which obviously

57:53 Mark: they don't in a given circumstance.

57:55 Jessica: All Sextus has to say is that there is no clear criterion for us to prefer the one as being true over the other.

58:05 Dylan: Okay, I'm just going to repeat that. It sounds an awful lot like mere multiplicity. And if it isn't mere multiplicity, then we have to make much more clear what we mean by clear. So there's a clear and distinct argument going on.

58:22 Wes: Well, there's a rejection of the clear and distinct.

58:24 Dylan: There's a rejection of it, and there's an embracing of it. Right. So regarding feelings about two opposing arguments as being equipotent and matters that are not clear, then the skeptic is required to suspend judgment. Or that's what they do. They suspend judgment. So you have, on the one hand, how we come to understand these things as being equipotent. Okay. And not just being merely multiple possible arguments, but actually equipotential arguments.

58:51 Jessica: Right, but I thought we sort of covered this before. Like, equipotence is not a statement about the objectively equal warrant that two opposing arguments have.

59:03 Dylan: I wasn't saying that at all. I was saying that these are feelings.

59:07 Jessica: Yeah, yeah, we're just talking about our feelings here, man.

59:13 Dylan: But it's more. The claim is it's more than multiplicity.

59:16 Wes: Well, the eplique is the feeling, and the equipolin is a character of the appearances. I think they have a convincingness or level of convincingness.

59:25 Dylan: Yes. So they have a clarity and convincingness, and it may be as minimal. Jessica, you can just tell me if this is a correct understanding of what sexist would be saying, is that it is solely up to my own feelings that that is the criteria of clarity.

59:44 Mark: Well, you're getting at a systematic ambiguity in here, which is, as we've been saying throughout. Well, it seems to me that these things are equal. Does the. Seems to me. Is it actually referring to the individual or is it making a phenomenological claim? That it seems to me, and it would seem to anybody else that sort of thinks about this enough and talks about it.

1:00:03 Wes: You're right that that's a systematic ambiguity, because for the modes to work, they have to work for more than.

1:00:08 Dylan: It's clearly a systematic ambiguity.

1:00:11 Wes: I've used that word a lot, actually, in this podcast. I noticed.

1:00:14 Jessica: Yeah, it does seem like that. But the skeptic, unlike the dogmatist, does not have a high stake in proselytizing. He's not an evangelist like everybody else is. What Sextus is doing is reporting to him that he was really curious. He had this itch, this uncertainty. He thought scratching it would satisfy that itch. And in the process of trying to do that, he came across equipolence, this feeling that then fortuitously led to atorexia, like a shadow follows a body. It just happened upon him. But he's axiomatized all of the stuff he's written, this description of what worked for him.

1:00:53 Wes: And it could be entirely personal to him though.

1:00:55 Jessica: It could be entirely personal to him. The skeptic makes no causal claims. He can't. And so this isn't a prescription, strictly speaking. So the most he can say is, look, if you have that itch, try this out, maybe it'll work for you. But it might not. So there's no guarantee about this at all.

1:01:17 Wes: And he put that right on the DVD set that he was selling along the way.

1:01:20 Jessica: Exactly, exactly. Try the risk free money back guarantee. Just try this, try. This might work for you.

1:01:28 Mark: Can I just say what a bad analogy that Ataraxia is going to follow this procedure as a shadow follows a body. Because a shadow always follows a body in a law like way. If there's a light source. And he's saying that. Well, just you kind of. You're surprised that, oh, ataraxia followed from this.

1:01:45 Jessica: It reliably. Does it? They don't have to have an explanation for why, just they appeal to its reliability.

1:01:51 Dylan: Doesn't it mean that it's completely natural? I mean, and I agree with Mark's point about it being an odd one because it seems to be a kind of natural law that you're pointing to.

1:02:00 Jessica: Well, we know that.

1:02:01 Wes: And then reliably what? Reliably for me, Reliably will for you as well.

1:02:06 Mark: Exactly. That sounds.

1:02:07 Dylan: Yeah. And there's a kind of causality argument going on in there. Right?

1:02:10 Jessica: There is a strong implication of causality and we'd love to hold Sextus to it, but he really avoids us being able to pin him down on that. In book three he says, look, as a physician, he says the skeptics are philanthropists. We're just trying to cure the pride, the conceit, the self satisfaction of the dogmatists, their rashness and so on. And this is why we propound arguments, some of which are really lame and others are really good because different people require different strengths of drugs. And he's making no causal claim about whether this will be guaranteed to work. They're just trying this cure and reporting what has worked for him.

1:02:53 Mark: Right. Just like he would do as a doctor, that no guarantees.

1:02:57 Wes: Exactly.

1:02:58 Jessica: This might work for you. It might not. Probably. I mean, I tend to think this is me rather than Sexist. I think when they call the skeptical persuasion an ability, and notice they never call it a philosophical position. It's always an ability or a talent. And some people have it and some people don't. So you're sick. You probably haven't realized that. Probably you're going to leap to dogmatism as an attempt to cure yourself. That didn't work for me. Here's what worked for me. And maybe this will work for you. But if not, so much the worse for you.

1:03:29 Dylan: So a skeptic would never put themselves in the position of understanding themselves as a teacher, even in a Socratic way, because a lot of what you've just

1:03:38 Jessica: described as your schools. Absolutely.

1:03:41 Dylan: Okay, well, so then a lot of what you've been talking about sounds very much like Socrates claiming not to know. But one characteristic of Socrates understanding of his own work is that of being a midwife. And that his form of teaching, in contrast to the Sophists, is not one of telling you what to do and professing anything, but is to bring out from you your own knowledge. So you have it in the Meno, with the myth of recollection, you have it in Theotetus, with midwifery, you have it all through the dialogues. So this makes me wonder what kind of disposition regarding teaching you would have, because the way you're describing it, Jessica makes it sound like there's a kind of take it or leave it attitude that is distinct from what Socrates would do.

1:04:29 Mark: The different analogy that Sextus use is instead of a midwife, it's like that the skeptical philosophy, or the skepticism serves as a purgative. You're not giving birth to something, it's getting in there.

1:04:42 Jessica: You're curing a disease, and then it

1:04:44 Mark: itself will flow out with the disease.

1:04:47 Jessica: Dogmatism is a disease. Yes.

1:04:49 Dylan: It's like taking a crap.

1:04:51 Jessica: Exactly. Dogmatism is exactly like that. They're trying to cure dogmatists. So they're not. They don't have anything to teach. They're not gurus, they're not life coaches. They don't have a doctrine.

1:05:03 Dylan: So this image of the school for the skeptics, you know, lined with marble statues of the dogmatists sitting on toilets, is like the gauntlet of the giant craps that the dogmatists would be taking.

1:05:15 Jessica: Here's your blog graphic.

1:05:18 Mark: This is a historical ambiguity that the academic skeptics that he criticizes as not being sufficiently Pyrrhonian. The introduction to my version. This edited by Philip Halley. Selections from the major writings on skepticism man and God. Sextus himself talks about at the end how very much like some of those scholastics, his actual views were, that where he thought that they went wrong was that they weren't satisfied in just going for equipolence. But one of the historical trends was to talk about the probable and have a whole sort of science about. Some things are more probable than other things. And this stuff, which you can see from the discussion we've been having, why one would be driven to that.

1:05:58 Jessica: Yeah, but I don't know any textual basis for it. Where does this guy get that?

1:06:02 Wes: Well, he's talking about other academics, not Sextus, other skeptics.

1:06:06 Jessica: You mean academic skeptics, not Pyrrhonian skeptics?

1:06:08 Wes: Yeah, sorry, other skeptical schools, but principally the academic.

1:06:13 Jessica: Oh, right, okay.

1:06:13 Mark: Yes, we're messing with these things. And you can see from our discussion why someone would be pushed to that. That if we're saying, well, I'm going to accept the everyday, but I'm going to reject the abstract and metaphysical, then the line is not so clear. And this is the big problem. So you might start wondering about the issue about is it okay for slaves to be in their position and start arguing about, well, that's kind of likely, or then that's not. Or maybe that's not even an ethical one, is not the best example he brings up. The example toward the end of this is, you know, something one of his predecessors had come up with.

1:06:46 Wes: This is section 33, the modes.

1:06:49 Mark: The modes of certainty that you sort of have to be satisfied with in different situations so that, like, if you think a wild animal is chasing you, you have to decide right then are you going to run away or not? You're going to be satisfied with even just a notion. Because if you stop and like, well, let me examine more closely, then it's

1:07:04 Speaker: going to eat you.

1:07:04 Mark: If there was something there that's sort of a different level of certainty and a different situation in which you would be satisfied with this level of certainty, then I'm going to actually take the time and look closely at this thing. And so there's the foundation in all that we've been saying to come up with these more subtle distinctions of probability and stuff. Sextus just brings this up to reject it all, to say, I know that there's whole schools built on skepticism in this way, but that's not really Pyrrhonian. That's betraying the spirit in just the same way that Plato betrayed the skepticism of Socrates.

1:07:36 Jessica: I'm not sure what to say about that except to pick up on this bit about politicians. What kind of politicians could we expect Pyrrhonian skeptics to be if they would get involved at all? I am not like a lot of readers of Pyrrhonian skepticism insofar as they often think that skeptics have to be hermits or have to be completely apathetic and have to be dispassionate about everything. I don't think that's the case. I don't think anything requires that. Could they take a stand on interesting and weighty political issues? I think that's entirely possible for them, in part because although I distanced Sextus from the view that somebody like J.L. mackey describes when he says there are no objective values, there are only subjective values, that still leaves a lot of values. So I think that the skeptics are willing to go so far as to say, look, values, claims about what's good and what's helpful and what's healthy and what will create a flourishing person in society. Those are all claims that aren't written to the fabric of nature. And if they are, we haven't determined what they are so far, but they seem to depend on truths about human beings. And what in this society or that society is the case about human beings? I think they're actually fairly psychologically sensitive people and they could be sensitive things like suffering and the plights of various people. They're not indifferent to humans, they're indifferent to certain kinds of argument.

1:09:17 Wes: But to make a full fledged normative claim. Right. You have to make some demand for assent from others. And I don't know if we can find a way to categorize that where we save the skeptic and allow them to make a normative.

1:09:30 Jessica: I don't think we need to save the skeptic. So if what you're saying is that in order to make robust normative claims, we have to have some kind of claims about reality, we've got to have some kind of metaphysics.

1:09:40 Wes: No, just that we have to be able to claim that others ought to believe the same thing. Otherwise it's not really a full fledged normative claim.

1:09:47 Jessica: Right, but that's going to be a metaphysical claim.

1:09:50 Wes: Yeah.

1:09:50 Jessica: I think that those kind of claims take us beyond science.

1:09:54 Wes: So if I go out with my picketing sign and I write, it appears to me that this is bad, that's not actually a protest. There's nothing inconsistent with something happening that appears to me that I don't like.

1:10:07 Jessica: You know, if it appears to 99% of the citizenry that X is bad, then if our politicians are skeptics, they'll listen to us. This is going down a really wrong road. This is making them utilitarians. That's also going to be problematic.

1:10:23 Wes: Yeah, but when I. It's not. I'm not really making a normative claim by simply saying something causes me pain or something. Right. The normative claim has to come with some demand that others ought to see it the same way. I think.

1:10:36 Jessica: Correct. And so the skeptics are not going to be moralists in that sense, they will be immoralists.

1:10:43 Mark: So I took Dylan's question to be. Then could you actually, as a Pyrrhonian skeptic, found a skeptical school?

1:10:50 Jessica: Well, the question would be why would you want to?

1:10:52 Mark: In the same way that he. Why would you spend the time writing this book? I mean, it's the same motivation.

1:10:57 Jessica: Well, it might help some people. Look, I'm a physician if I'm sexist, right. I mean, I was bothered by this problem. Here's what I did to solve it. Maybe this will help some people.

1:11:04 Wes: So it wouldn't be a school, it would be a hospital. Yeah, come to the skeptical hospital.

1:11:10 Jessica: Yeah, maybe. And maybe you'll be cured, maybe you won't. If not, we'll just, you know, release you on your own recognizance. Fare as well as you can with the dogmatists.

1:11:20 Dylan: I'd like to turn back to the curiosity question and the tranquility question again. And what kind of inclination. What's left with the skeptics about their motivation? So we started out talking about this as being a drive towards, I want to say inquisition, but that's not the right. That's not the right word. An inquisitiveness, an investigation, a drive to investigate.

1:11:45 Jessica: Yeah.

1:11:46 Dylan: And I was pretty tranquil and content with that at the beginning. But now the way we're describing the not completely placidness, but the sort of neither here nor thereness of the skeptic,

1:11:59 Jessica: the neither this nor that ness.

1:12:01 Dylan: Okay, then neither this nor that ness.

1:12:03 Jessica: That's the official phrase. But it is unbecoming of a skeptics to fight about phrases. So I won't.

1:12:07 Wes: Okay, or can't you just say no more or something. I like to shorten it no more this shortest foot.

1:12:11 Jessica: Just no more in no way more no more.

1:12:14 Dylan: Or how about just meh. So that seems to be more at odds with the drive of curiosity and even inquisitiveness. And so it makes me think that either they are not quite understanding even themselves quite right. Or if they are misrepresenting themselves as being genuinely inquisitive. Because besides my wanting to say that curiosity involves scratching an itch and involves a kind of discontent that one is trying to resolve. And I would agree that there is something that goes wrong with the dogmatist's mode of scratching that itch. It doesn't seem to be as neither this nor that, that there is a. Well, there's a desire to find out the truth about what's going on. And even if. If you're skeptical about it, I don't even want to say skeptical that you could have the point of view that you don't get the answer and that you're constantly feeding that fire of curiosity in that you are unsettled. It's not exactly tranquility. It might be a certain kind of motion of contentment, but it doesn't seem to be as neither this nor that. It doesn't seem to be the same thing.

1:13:33 Wes: Well, what did we call it? Or you called it Stable.

1:13:36 Dylan: Stable curiosity.

1:13:37 Wes: Yeah. I'm reminded here of. Because I've always associated Pyrrhonian skepticism with a phrase that Keats used in describing people of genius, negative capability. So quote unquote, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, and he thinks this is sort of a prerequisite to artistic genius. And he mentions Shakespeare specifically and. But of course, any careful reader of Shakespeare knows that Shakespeare is in some sense deeply concerned with truth. He's also a thinker, which is part of what makes him so interesting. He's thinking through things and I think Keats is right. But on the other hand, you have to square that with the curiosity part and the directedness towards truth part. I mean, I think we all agreed in the beginning it's certainly possible to be non dogmatic and highly interested in the truth. And perhaps one is actually required for the other. Thinking you have the truth is a way of not being interested in the truth. What you're interested in is not having the anxiety of being in that tense relationship to the truth. So there's got to be some sort of compromised position here where you have that curious state, but you don't demand the immediate collapse of that tension in the seeking.

1:14:50 Jessica: Yeah, I think we're confusing two things here. I think we should go back to section six, the principles of skepticism. Sextus gives us two of them. The causal principle of skepticism is how it appears in my translation and then a few lines later, the constitutive principle of skepticism. So I think in this chapter, what Sextus is trying to do is answer two questions. One, how does anybody get to be a skeptic in the first place? And then secondly, what does it mean to be a skeptic when you are a skeptic? So the first question, how do you get to be a skeptic in the first place? Is answered by this appeal to. Well, you know, you start out from where everybody else starts out from. You just. You're curious about things and you think mistakenly that what's going to make you happy is answering all your questions and not being uncertain anymore. And so you go at your investigations that way. Skeptics are those who discover almost by accident that once they gather enough arguments, they achieve this feeling of equipotence. It just comes upon them and then that yields what they were looking for in the first place, Ataraxia. So that's how they come upon it. But the constitutive principle of skepticism, that is what's constitutive of being a skeptic. Sextus says it's the claim that to every account an equal account is opposed. And we looked at that one a little bit earlier. That's the one that has the really long translation from everything is inapprehensible to. Well, in all of the things that I've investigated so far, it appears to me that I have no better reason to prefer this dogmatist's account rather than that dogmatist's account.

1:16:39 Wes: That translation is section 27, by the way.

1:16:43 Jessica: Yeah, it actually reappears in the 200s somewhere. And I'm not going by chapter numbers, I'm going by sort of sentence numbers. But, yeah, 27 sounds like chapter 27, a very late chapter.

1:16:54 Dylan: Yeah.

1:16:54 Wes: Yes. So opposed to every account I have inspected there is. Which means appears to me any equally convincing opposed account.

1:17:01 Dylan: Sentence 202.

1:17:02 Jessica: Right. And so that's what it is to be a skeptic. So there's how you get there, and then there's what it is to be a skeptic. But maintaining what it is to be a skeptic, maintaining these equal accounts, requires that you cannot stop investigating. And this is why I think, kind of interestingly, all the dogmatists who claim to be these rational investigators who have their views for good reasons, the skeptics are going to say, no, you're actually not responsive to the demands of reason. You've actually stopped investigating. You're closed off to counterexamples. You've dug your heels in, you're not really open to the possibilities. So the only people who are still investigating this is by definition skepticos just means investigator. That's only one group of people and that's the skeptics.

1:17:54 Mark: And I think I could see a motivation why one would be a pugilistic skeptic. He sees himself as surrounded by these pretentious dogmatists and he wants to take them down. And you know, it is worth starting a whole school and well, depends on

1:18:10 Jessica: what you mean by school with this

1:18:13 Mark: coming up with a discipline that will.

1:18:15 Jessica: Depends on what you mean by discipline.

1:18:16 Mark: These modes about. Because he wants to give people the tools and he wants to use himself to take down these pretensions.

1:18:24 Jessica: It's not take down, it's cure. They're trying to cure. They're philanthropists.

1:18:29 Mark: I see that in a lot of the approach that we take on this podcast, often to things that we've had the criticism in the past, most overtly in the Ayn Rand episode of like, isn't it weird that people aren't just like into Ayn Rand, but they are Randians or libertarians, that they proclaim themselves be part of the school or Marxists? You know, the way we put it is more. Isn't that non philosophical? Isn't that unscholarly that you really need to keep open to these things?

1:18:55 Jessica: Yeah, exactly.

1:18:56 Mark: But you know, there's something sort of prissy about that way of putting it,

1:19:00 Jessica: about your way of putting it.

1:19:01 Mark: I can see how somebody that is not philosophically trained would, I think, rightly say, come on, you have opinions. You might not want to call yourself a Marxist or a libertarian or something, but if you actually wrote down what you actually think about things like surely the more research you do, in fact the more definite opinions you come up with. Not that they're unchallengeable, not that they're dogmatic in the modern strong, strong sense and you'll never hear anything against them.

1:19:27 Wes: Right. You can be a fallibilist about them, but still have them. Yeah, right.

1:19:31 Mark: So to pretend that you're above all that and just I'm just an ever inquirer is disingenuous.

1:19:36 Jessica: Wait, why is it disingenuous?

1:19:39 Mark: Because you do have opinions.

1:19:41 Jessica: Are they settled opinions? Are they ossified, fixed opinions you're never going to question.

1:19:46 Wes: But I think that's broader than the idea that we might not have ossified unquestionable opinions. That's a broader conception of skepticism than pyrrhonism.

1:19:53 Jessica: I think, why. But that's just what he means by.

1:19:56 Wes: That's equally applicable to fallibilism. And conceivably we could hold opinions but hold out. Okay, I might be wrong, which I

1:20:02 Mark: think is what most people do, but

1:20:05 Wes: in this case it sounds like we're not allowed to have theoretical beliefs.

1:20:09 Jessica: Right, yeah, no, that's a good question. I mean, I've been asked before, well, what's the difference between skeptics, pharonian skeptics and fallibilists?

1:20:16 Wes: Right.

1:20:17 Jessica: And I've never been able to come up with a really good distinction. I'm not. They don't have that term in antiquity, but I'm not totally sure that there is one. I don't think he gives us any principled way of saying that you shouldn't provisionally hold a belief while you're open to inquiring about other explanations, even a

1:20:37 Wes: theoretical belief like the humors. You know, I assert there are such things as atoms, but I'm only holding that provisionally for the sake of inquiry. See, that to me seems possible for the fallibilist, but not really for the pyranists.

1:20:50 Jessica: But it has to be possible for the pyranist because they don't rule it out. They can't rule it out, but they

1:20:55 Wes: have to be able to say, I'm not convinced either way.

1:20:57 Dylan: But isn't ruling it in part of the problem? It's not ruling it out. It's also the problem of ruling it in. And that's what we're talking about.

1:21:04 Jessica: Well, they don't rule it out. Ruling it in turns out just to be harder than most people make it out to be.

1:21:10 Mark: So the pyranist has a positive duty and mission for himself to, if something seems settled or is socially prevailing, is settled. So I use personally the example of the dominance of economics, economic thinking in our society, that this is like the paradigm that we treat them as the new theologians or something. So this makes me, as a skeptic, want to learn more about it so that I can debunk, so I can say this is not as scientific as you think it is. This is all, you know, you're being all haughty in an unwarranted manner. So it's not just, I'm just going to not have an opinion either way. It's a positive command to fight for the other side, at least to establish that and to keep doing that even. Maybe you've succeeded in taking down economics. Well, then maybe you'd want to go back to the other side and achieve the equipolence in that way that it's an everlasting.

1:22:00 Jessica: Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not totally sure. I mean, part of that depends on what we take the extension of the term philosophy to be. Because I think that Pyrrhonists are mostly negative in their metaphilosophy in a kind of Wittgensteinian way. They really think that metaphysics is kind of misguided or that is what they take themselves to have discovered for themselves. How does this bear on other kinds of modern inquiries like what we call economics or the exact sciences? I'm not sure. I mean, Sextus just does not have those divisions available. But going back to a passage that somebody. I think it might have been Dylan, a distinction he brought up earlier between kind of theoretical and practical attitudes in the chapter, the early one on the standard of skepticism, chapter 11, Sextus, you know, distinguishes two senses of criterion or standard. There's the kind that you adopt to provide conviction about the reality or unreality of something that is a sort of metaphysical claim, a claim that takes you to the hidden things, the things beyond our ability to verify them empirically. And then there are just standards of action, like the kind of guidelines you use to perform actions in everyday life. They're not against the latter. It's the former that bother them. And what bothers them really are just the people who hold them strongly more than anything else, because they take it to be inconsistent with the aim that those people also have of becoming tranquil or achieving the highest good. It's sort of an internal critique of philosophy. Look, you think that the highest good is becoming tranquil. I'm going to show you how you're not going to get there doing what you're doing.

1:23:48 Dylan: That makes it sound like, at least in this time, the call of philosophy is the whole of the self help section of philosophy nowadays. That was the mode of it. Or.

1:24:00 Jessica: Oh, maybe. Well, I mean, the purists definitely are interested in what philosophy can contribute to living a good life. And they already think that philosophy, professionalized as it's become in their era, has lost sight of how it can contribute to living a good life.

1:24:19 Dylan: I was thinking of something that you have been bringing up earlier, and I guess I had too, Wes is the way in which theoretical matters would be held, but in a qualified manner that allow you to investigate even behind the appearances. So I'm thinking of something like Galileo thinking about the motion of a falling object and extrapolating away from transient motions. From wind and stuff like that, to try to see behind it a fundamental motion. Now, putting aside whether or not Galileo was a dogmatist with respect to that, that theoretical activity can be undertaken even in kind of what seems to me like a skeptical mode, that is a provisional mode. You would undergo that and you would make not just one but many steps, steps that would take you much further away from the appearances that are put forth in chapter 11. It could be just simply that that kind of activity Sextus would consider to be dogmatic.

1:25:20 Jessica: I don't know. I'm not sure. My hope is that there's room for what you're describing.

1:25:24 Wes: Yeah, I think it's really hard to say, though, based on chapter seven, where he says, if by beliefs you mean ascending to feelings forced upon you by appearances, okay, but if you mean ascending to some unclear object of investigation in the sciences, then no, we don't do that. Which sounds like it rules out even the holding and a fallibus way of provisional theoretical beliefs of any kind, scientific beliefs. So, for instance, going beyond science, just taking philosophy, for example, I think most of us have the experience not of reading Descartes or Kant or Nietzsche and saying, yes, now I'm a member of this school and I'm going to dogmatically argue for this point of view. Most of us value those thinkers because we think they have some profound insight. Even if we don't take Kant as true whole cloth or Descartes as true whole cloth, we see them as coming up with ingenious kinds of theories to address real philosophical problems. And those theories shed light on and deepen our understanding of those problems. So we sort of. Do you understand what I'm saying? It's not like I'm saying, well, the empiricist school simply just cancels out the rationalist school. It's that both have their points, both have something insightful about them. And it's unclear to me whether the way things are set up in chapter seven, whether Peronian skepticism as it's described by Sextus allows for that sort of thing. I mean, Jessica, I agree with you. I hope it does, but it is unclear to me.

1:26:43 Jessica: Well, as it should be in respect of that. I mean, it occurs to me that we might be trying to make this text do more than it can do for us in even an early modern or modern or contemporary era, that we're forgetting that Sextus is in the second century A.D. and he's responding to what's going on around him. And in response to that, he's Going ad hominem. And I think it might have been Dylan who said earlier that that seemed to make this less interesting a project to him. But given that Sextus is surrounded by a lot of people who claim to have the truth about reality and they want followers and they want to be telling people what to do, and they want adherence, they want a stake in the intellectual culture of their day, I really think that it's a significant and important contribution and a kind of essential role for them to play to say, look, these people may all be charlatans. What criterion do you really have? Anybody, to decide which of these people has the best claim on your credence and the ultimate claim on your credence, and at least to keep people's critical faculties to the extent that they can open and active. And if you're going to do that, you can't stop in your inquiry and say, like, oh, yep, that's it. I'm a utilitarian or I'm a Kantian or whatever, it leads to all sorts of practical difficulties that I think the skeptics are actually alive to. And I also think that to a large extent, this text, even the first book that we've read, the first chapter, is a kind of clarion call to humility that is largely lost in philosophy and philosophical activity. And it fell on deaf ears then and it does today. That's one of the things that I appreciate about it.

1:28:42 Mark: So one of the things that was striking me as reflecting this disconnect between the ancient world and trying to apply this to modern science is just that he takes the distinction to be between the apparent and then things that are beyond our ability to verify empirically. Right. Whereas clearly, the way you just put it a little while ago, Jessica, was the hidden, or those things that are beyond our ability to verify empirically. But clearly those are different. Like the hidden is an in between. The hidden is what science studies. Largely. We're trying to see what atoms are. They're not metaphysical. Kantian Noumena.

1:29:18 Jessica: That's a good clarification.

1:29:20 Mark: The fact that he didn't have that middle ground, which is just tantamount to not having a distinction between science and philosophy. So then you can sort of see how this idea moved through the history of philosophy, that when you get to Kant, you have the phenomena is not just what is immediately apparent, but it includes everything that could be studied by.

1:29:39 Jessica: By studying the apparent.

1:29:40 Mark: Right, exactly.

1:29:41 Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

1:29:42 Wes: I don't know if he's totally without that kind of middle ground, though.

1:29:45 Jessica: Yeah, I don't think so. I think he includes that in science.

1:29:48 Wes: He's familiar with the Presocratics and.

1:29:50 Jessica: Yeah, exactly.

1:29:52 Wes: The attempt to explain things in terms of atoms and.

1:29:54 Jessica: Yeah, and actually buys into a lot of democracy and atomism. I think he actually has to make some efforts at the end of this book to distinguish himself from Democratian atomists, because people are always confusing the skeptics, the Pyrrhonians and the Democratians.

1:30:11 Wes: Right.

1:30:12 Jessica: And it always seems to me that the distinction was fairly thin.

1:30:15 Wes: Well, the atoms seemed to be the least appealing thing to him.

1:30:19 Jessica: Yes. He's like, well, it's because they're so settled about it. This is how reality is. And they have this line about reality. Democritus says, look by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention, by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, color. But in reality atoms and void. And it's just that strikes Sextus as a piece of dogma. The reluctance to regard that as fallible and the enthusiasm for building upon that idea, a whole system of ethics and recommendations for how to live your life, strikes him as suspect.

1:30:54 Mark: So I think we have to get a little bit into the modes before we get out of here. We don't have to go through them exhaustively, but just saying what I hope

1:31:00 Jessica: not, because one could take us a long way time. Should we start with dogs or bees or.

1:31:07 Mark: What these modes are, are the general modes of suspending judgment. So these are intellectual tools by which if somebody says something that you can come up with a counter argument.

1:31:17 Jessica: These are the jiu jitsu moves of the Pyrrhonian skeptic. That's all these are. These are the forms, the positions.

1:31:25 Wes: Yeah. And the basic idea is that you start with differences in the constitutions of animals and then the idea that they don't receive the same appearances from the same things because of those differences. And then in the second one, differences among human beings, and then differences for the third one within sense organs within the same human being. And then we go on and on to other sorts of very similar types of cases.

1:31:49 Mark: But you could see the kind of thing he's concerned with then, which we haven't gotten at that many examples of. The idea is that this tastes sweet. Well, is it in reality sweet?

1:31:58 Wes: Right.

1:31:58 Mark: That's the kind of question he thinks that the dogmatists have an answer to.

1:32:02 Jessica: Right.

1:32:02 Mark: Or want an answer to, which seems weird to us. That's not the kind of question we think is legitimate even. What is it? Of course it doesn't in reality have a taste. Of course it's, you know, we've sort of, I think, have decided most.

1:32:16 Wes: Well, yeah, we have a version of the Democratian position. So it's neither nor.

1:32:21 Jessica: Yeah, so we might say, oh, yeah, yeah, of course, you know, things aren' in themselves. Blue or red or sweet or bitter. Those are secondary qualities, as Locke might have called them. They're just produced by the arrangement of the real material stuff. We might just say these are just secondary qualities. But I think the skeptic is going to reply to that, that the person who asserts those are mere secondary qualities, that they aren't really in the object, has to support that response by adducing a theory about something that is unclear, why things appear in the way that they do.

1:32:58 Wes: Right.

1:32:59 Mark: By saying what really is in the object.

1:33:00 Jessica: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, today we say like, oh yeah, you know, things don't really. Color is not a surface property of objects. We're so over that. But that's because we have all these sort of heavy theories about what's really the case. And Sextus is going to say, even as regards our contemporary science, yeah, okay, fine, that's a pretty good explanation. But that, let's look at the past of scientific explanations, ones that we were really committed to, those get overturned all the time. And so he's got this principle in the 10 modes that helps us say this is in section 34, it's the end of chapter 13, the general modes of suspension of judgment. For someone who propounds an argument we can't refute, like, say, our contemporary scientific explanation, we're just going to say to him, well before the founder of the school to which you adhere was born, the argument of the school, which was no doubt sound, wasn't yet apparent, though it was really there in nature. In the same way, it's possible that the argument opposing one you've just given me is really there in nature but not yet apparent. So we shouldn't yet assent to what's now thought to be a powerful argument. I mean, that actually looks most like scientific fallibilism, probably of anything that we've looked at so far.

1:34:13 Dylan: The 10 modes end up being sort of various versions of a kind of relativity argument from this point of view or that point of view kind of thing.

1:34:23 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it's relative to the subject, or it's relative to the object, or it's relative to both. So the way things seem might depend on the composition of the object or the constitution of our cognitive faculties and so on.

1:34:35 Dylan: And then there's another group of Modes, the five modes. So in this way, the outline itself that Sextus has written is giving us different sets of jujitsu moves to use of Jessica's version. But the five modes seem a little bit more interesting.

1:34:52 Jessica: Well, if you notice, the 10 modes depend on them.

1:34:55 Mark: Can we just clarify that? He's recounting different ways that people have broken these things down over the history of skepticism. So if this sounds weird, 10 modes, 5 modes, 3 modes, it's because at different times in the scholastic history, a few hundred years here, people laid them out differently. So he's giving a historical overview. He's giving all these and seeing how they interact.

1:35:16 Jessica: Yeah, sure. Exactly. And for every single one, or almost every one of the ten modes, he ends up giving this battery of examples right about. For instance, Mode 1 is the longest one, right? The. Depending on the variations among animals, I think it's one of the most entertaining sections. You've got the animals that feed on grass, you've got ants, you've got pigs and, you know, various vipers and elephants. It's a whole menagerie in there. But after all these examples, what he does is to give us the general scheme of how these work together to produce suspension of judgment. So late in chapter. The chapter on the 10 modes is very long, and this is where it's helpful to have it broken up into tinier sections. If you've got numbers interspersed in your text, it's helpful to look at 59. So book one, chapter 14, section 59.

1:36:15 Wes: Which mode is this?

1:36:16 Jessica: This is in the first mode, okay? And he's saying sort of toward the end, the last third or so, this is after the vipers and the elephants, the ants, the mosquitoes and all of that stuff, where he turns to summing up what the point is of all of it. But if the same objects appear dissimilar depending on variation among animals, then we shall be able to say what the existing objects are like as observed by us. But as to what they're like in their nature, we'll suspend judgment. For we shall not be able ourselves to decide between our own appearances and those of other animals, because we are party to the dispute and for that reason, more in need of someone to decide than ourselves able to judge. So in almost every one of these modes, this just sets up a theme that recurs throughout this chapter. There are lots of different perceptions of things, and we have no grounds for preferring our own view, except if we're being arbitrary. And that's a violation of reason, as all the dogmatists will agree. So by the dogmatists own rules of the game, their own rational rules, they don't want us to beg the question or be arbitrary. That's what we have to do if we just choose our own perspective as the right one. And besides, Sextus says, we shall not be able to prefer our own appearances to those produced in the irrational animals, either without giving a proof or by giving a proof. Right. If we don't give a proof, we're going to be unconvincing. If we do give a proof, essentially we're going to need a sort of proof of the proof. We're going to need to demonstrate that it works. And in the attempt to do that, he demonstrates that we're going to run afoul of one of the five modes, the mode of hypothesis, where we beg the question, the mode of circularity, there's an infinite regress. The form of these 10 modes is all the same. He always gives us a huge number of examples and why we can't decide among the examples because we have no non arbitrary standard and because if we were going to try to give one, we would need a proof. If we didn't give one we would be unconvincing. And if we try to give one, we would will run afoul of one of the five modes. So they kind of all work together. They only work in combination. And it may be just that Sextus is a late skeptic and he's figured out how most effectively to use all of these in combination.

1:38:43 Mark: It only makes sense given that dung beetles come from donkeys.

1:38:47 Jessica: Yeah, of course.

1:38:49 Mark: And bees come from bulls and wasps from horses.

1:38:52 Jessica: Yeah. And that there's a rock that is the congealed urine of the links.

1:38:57 Wes: Yes, that's the interesting part of this. It's the idea that the reproductive difference, many of them bogus, but are a factor here.

1:39:04 Jessica: Hey, there are lots of pre Socratics with all sorts of crazy ideas about how things reproduce.

1:39:10 Mark: Well at least if you read some out of date science in this as opposed to any other dogmatic text, then you can just say yeah, Sextus would love the fact that some of the very arguments that he's giving, the examples he's giving to support his point have been proven very much less likely.

1:39:26 Jessica: Oh yeah, but he's taking these examples from his contemporaries. These theories are floating around at the time when he's writing and part of what he's doing. This is something else I love about Sextus and skeptics is that they never really lose their sense of Humor about what they're doing and they're intentionally appropriating and making fun of dogmatic arguments.

1:39:51 Dylan: One of the really interesting ones to me in the second mode there was when Sextus points to the variation among humans in body and physiology and from there concludes that there ought to be a variation amongst human beings in their souls. That actually has a lot of interesting possibility to it because it seems to me the more common thing is that we would say, well, the way in which all human beings are the same has to do with their souls and that that's something they hold in common or some part of their souls. Right?

1:40:27 Jessica: Yeah. But isn't your soul, if you had one, isn't that supposed to be what individuates you? That's where your personality is. And this is what all my students think. Right. That's what makes you you and not anybody else.

1:40:39 Dylan: Yeah, right.

1:40:40 Jessica: It can't be like everybody else's.

1:40:42 Mark: I think this is a rabbit hole. Can't we just suspend judgment on what the soul is?

1:40:46 Jessica: I think we should do that anyway,

1:40:47 Mark: given that we're trying to wrap this discussion up.

1:40:49 Wes: Up.

1:40:49 Dylan: Yes, I agree.

1:40:50 Jessica: One thing to love, and I will have to say this, is that given what I was saying before about sexist loving to make fun of the dogmatists in mode 2, the chief indication, he says, of the great differences among humans is the dispute among dogmatists that persists about what's true and what's not. He uses the dogmatist as the example of how different people are and why we should suspend judgment about what they all say.

1:41:16 Wes: Right.

1:41:16 Mark: It makes sense because the Epicureans come from donkeys and the Stoics come from tigers. They have different shaped heads. And probably we're talking about character, which

1:41:31 Jessica: is soft in the bird but hard in the air.

1:41:33 Wes: People are characterologically attracted to different theories. And I think he's right.

1:41:37 Mark: Yeah, this sounds like a great segue. So that you can very, very quickly, if you can summarize why you made the connection between this and Nietzsche, Jessica, in your big book.

1:41:49 Jessica: I'm worried that I might have done that in the last podcast. But let's just look, since we're in the modes of skepticism, at the mode depending on intervals and places, that's section five. So book one, chapter 14, or wherever we were, 118. This basically makes the point that your perception of things, that your cognitive apparatus is conditioned by your situation. I think that makes very much the same point as the celebrated Nietzschean point about perspectivism that Nietzsche says, is the condition of all life. And where philosophy goes wrong is with Plato, who turned perspectivism and truth on its head and established essentially a kind of realism, moral and otherwise, that completely outstrips human abilities to discern its truth and our interests in its being true, except insofar as one ascribes to ascetic ideals. The end.

1:42:54 Mark: Well, so that's just a taste of the connection to Nietzsche. And we've got several Nietzsche episodes that people can fill in the details themselves. I would also recommend that folks listen to our Montaigne episode, another, you know, somebody that took up this book, the sexist book, and ran with it.

1:43:09 Jessica: Right. You know, great episode.

1:43:10 Mark: Bring it back. And he's got a different take on what things you should be doubting and what things you should just go ahead and accept that. In fact, for Montaigne, even revelation falls under the like, yeah, it's a good thing we have revelation here because all this that the scientists come up with, you know, it's very dubious, but.

1:43:30 Dylan: And cannibalism.

1:43:32 Mark: And then of course, we've got the Hume episode. So you can hear his take on causality is pretty much right out of this book.

1:43:38 Jessica: Yeah, you guys have got a great skeptical background. Skeptical in antiquity and modern philosophy. Got a bunch of interrelated episodes on that.

1:43:46 Mark: But what really seemed to be added here is to look on skepticism as one of the virtue traditions, as one of the things that are looking after Eudaimonia, the good life. And you get that in here through the ataraxia. Even though we described him as arguing against the various people who say, ah, this is my recipe for the good life, and you just have to believe it. Well, he's by his own method, he's got his own version of that. We can't really say in depth what he thinks about ethical matters, but I think he thinks that the ethical, more or less, if you would take this epistemological approach and be humble and be at peace, then perhaps the other issues that we associate with virtue would maybe take care of themselves.

1:44:28 Jessica: Yeah, maybe. I mean, what's clear to him is we're not getting there the way we've been trying to get there.

1:44:34 Mark: Right. I mean, it's not clear how this would give you excellence in overcoming weakness of the will, you know, that kind of stuff that the ancients.

1:44:42 Jessica: No, well, he doesn't have any guarantees about that. You're on your own. I mean, he's just telling you what's worked for him. So good luck.

1:44:51 Mark: Does anybody else have Any other last topics or closing thoughts? They want to make sure we hit on this. What are you thinking, Wes? Are you convinced? Are you a skeptic of this sort?

1:45:01 Wes: Well, I've always thought of myself as very sympathetic to skepticism and Peronian skepticism in particular. And after reading this again after so many years, I think I realized I didn't fully understand it. I find it more puzzling now. So some of the issues we talked about, about whether we can think of it as more fallibilist or not and status of theoretical, provisional theoretical beliefs and so on. I'm more puzzled about that now. So he did his job.

1:45:29 Mark: Dylan, anything else?

1:45:30 Dylan: No, I'm pretty much in Wes's camp. I had not read it before but I found a lot that I recognized and I think I said all I need to say about the parts that I was skeptical about.

1:45:43 Mark: I think we need to emphasize the point again. I don't know if we've even made this explicitly but that he fully admits that this kind of skepticism is self undermining. He's trying not to be dogmatic about skepticism that just like he's not being, to return to the analogy, the agnostic who just says you just can't know. He wants to say that well, that's how things even about the skeptical precepts themselves that it seems when we do this that we could come up with an equally good argument against any given thing that you've already decided is definitely true. But I don't know, maybe not.

1:46:21 Dylan: Yeah. So if I may not actually be

1:46:24 Wes: done

1:46:27 Dylan: so the way Mark just put that reminded me about what I found just a little bit off, which is that that form of not making any judgment and that suspension of judgment leading to tranquility in the end it seems to be unavoidably placid in contradistinction to a way of understanding that intellectual activity, whether it be fallibilist or even consistently returning to and questioning what you're beliefs were. That seems to be a bit of a different take on it. That in the pursuit of truth you're constantly bringing something back up for grabs again and that even your most ardent and foundational beliefs really at the end of the day are up for question. And that's not the kind of skepticism I see described in Sextus and doesn't seem to me really in line with the notion of tranquility, but more of a kind of consistent itching.

1:47:22 Mark: Jessica, did you have any last point that you want to hammer home?

1:47:25 Jessica: I'm not sure. I mean, once you mentioned Here at the very end, tantalizingly, the self consuming nature of skepticism. I'm tempted to weigh in just to say that Sextus only ever describes as self consuming or reversing or self undermining the phrases and arguments that skeptics use. And that's precisely because they're trying to cure. Who are they trying to cure? Dogmatists. How are they trying to cure them? By giving them these drugs. And they're perfectly happy if the arguments are not of consistent strength. And if they turn out to be self undermining, they're more interested really in the effect, the immediate effect, than the lasting effect. They can be self consuming, they can be expelled like purgative drugs. And they're perfectly happy with that.

1:48:16 Speaker: That.

1:48:18 Mark: Well, thank you so much.

1:48:19 Dylan: Thanks, Jessica.

1:48:20 Wes: Thank you.

1:48:21 Jessica: Thanks to all of you guys. That was a weird last note to end on, but no, I enjoy talking about Sextus with you all.

1:48:29 Mark: Well, next time, despite my announcement last time that we were going to do more Kant on the sublime, this time actually we're going to do one of Kant's predecessors, Edmund Burke, his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the beautiful, parts one and two. It's from 1757. We're supported by your donations. Go to parsleyexaminelife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time have included Jason Holland, Marinell Maloney, Ruben Rodriguez, Meredith Gill, Nancy Thompson, C. Francis Jr. Judy Harris, Thomas Blair, Thomas Kearns, Tony Williams, Trenton Nall, Zachary Grabo, Jay Pemberton, Peter Thigpen, Elizabeth Rombe, Allen Anderson, Moises Lopez, Francine Bunton, Glenn Fuller, Robert Munro, Moira Teichert, William Jones, Stephen Norman, Woody Wiest, Alexander Bill, Jeffrey Hume, Sean Nickerson, Carl Orstad, Greg Wibbs, Chris Chani and Adrian Boxall. Thanks also to the many smaller donors, including those who are, on a newly or a continued basis, signed up for our $5 a month citizen site. People should also check out the blog partially examined, life.com, our Twitter feed, our Facebook page, and, and I want to remind you as you do your holiday shopping that we are Amazon affiliates. So if you go to any of the Amazon links on our page, click through to Amazon, Buy whatever you're going to buy anyway, then a cut of that will automatically go to us at no extra cost to you. Thank you so much for doing that. We can never thank you because we never get to see your purchases, but we think you're awesome.

1:50:01 Dylan: Thanks, Jessica.

1:50:02 Wes: It was great having you. It was great.

1:50:04 Mark: Good night, everybody.

1:50:05 Wes: Good night. Good Night.

1:50:06 Jessica: Thanks, guys. Good night, everyone.

1:50:09 Speaker: I just can't think right now. Maybe if you were all here, I would have the space I need. And I've settled this 15 times, right? And I couldn't have her if I wanted. And why would I want her? And I'm not trying to convince myself. I wish my life would just shut up and stop trying to teach me things. I've reached the point of confusion now where my problems are only vague enough to move forward. Just a certain uneasiness sometimes when I talk to myself in the shower, at you and at her. And I don't even know if I feel annoyed. I just can't talk right now. Not to you, not how I was. Cause she might overhear. She's not in this time zone either. But my loyalties are clear. I just want to scream at you for what you did to me. For blaming me, for shaming me, for leaving me, for believing me. Well, I promised you I'd be okay. For trusting me, adjusting me and pushing me away. Just admit you love me and I'll let you go to hell. Then you can condemn me. You've been doing it so well. You might say you're sorry, but you have no real regret. I was just an enemy that someday you'll forget. I'd lunch in with your conscience and poison its iced tea. If I just knew where you're at and what you ever felt for me. As long as I'm attempting to be helpful and mature, I'd love to take back every word and give them all to her. I'm sorry that I met you and I'm sorry you're alive. But I must admit I miss you. And I wish that we were five so you'd be more.

1:52:15 Mark: Much too old for me and a

1:52:17 Speaker: creepy girl at that. And nothing I could do would make me worse than just a brat. And you'd be just irrelevant instead of all of me. She'd fill my gaping void and set me, arguably free. I know I love her now. I knew I did before, but. Well, too much was a but. It's settled. 16 times now, right? And I wouldn't have you if you wanted me to. And that's the end, at least for you. When there's no need to convince myself. I think that I should just shut up and not overthink these things. I've reached the point of confusion now where my problems are all vague enough to avoid just a certain uneasiness on the sides when I talk to myself in the shower at you.

1:53:16 Mark: And it hurt.

1:53:18 Speaker: I'VE reached the point of confusion now where my problems all fog up and dissipate Leaving only a funky film here an anonymous ring to contemplate

1:53:33 Dylan: and I

1:53:33 Speaker: don't even know if I feel annoyed Though I rather suspect that I'm well overjoyed I've reached a point of confusion now which is enough for me I've reached a point of confusion now which is enough for me.

1:53:58 Jessica: What is this song?

1:54:00 Mark: Don't worry about it.