PYRRHONISM. - It is the school of thought that traces back to the skeptical doctrine of Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-270 B.C.). It was summed up in the thesis that nothing can be known, and therefore one must doubt everything and refrain from any judgment about any object. Ἐπέχεια (to withhold assent) and the corresponding noun ἐποχή are the Greek terms denoting this attitude (cf. Diogenes Laertius, Prooem., 16; IX, 76).
The immediate disciples of Pyrrho (who transmitted his thought only orally) were Philo of Athens (date uncertain), Nausiphanes of Teos (b. c. 360 B.C.), and the famous Timon of Phlius (c. 320-330 B.C.), a true προφήτης of skepticism, who in the burlesque poems called Σύλοι mocked the dogmatic philosophers and exalted the master, and in the Ἰνδαλμοί reaffirmed the Pyrrhonian conception. In Timon, as in Pyrrho, the epistemological decline is closely joined to the ethical ideal of ataraxia, that is, of the imperturbability of the soul. In fact, abstention from every theoretical judgment leads, according to the skeptics, to considering all things as indifferent in the practical sphere. Ἀταραξία is a consequence and almost a shadow of ἐποχή (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 107). With Timon one may say that the original Pyrrhonian school comes to an end; and skeptical thought instead flourishes in a less radical form in the Middle and New Academy. Integral Pyrrhonism was taken up again by the new skeptical school (from the last times of the Republic to the 2nd century A.D.): its first representative (or at least the first who is known) was Aenesidemus of Knossos (c. in the Ciceronian age), author of Πυρρώνεια λόγοι (Pyrrhonian Discourses) in eight books, of a Ὑποτόπυσις εἰς τὰ Πυρρώνεια (Sketch of the Pyrrhonian theories) and of other works, and particularly notable for having set forth the ten fundamental arguments (τρόποι, that is, "modes" of ἐποχή: cf. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrh.
hypot., I, 36) of skepticism. Subsequently, the school was represented by Agrippa (1st century A.D.), who condensed the motives of universal doubt into five rather than ten tropes (ibid., I, 164), and then by the physician Sextus Empiricus (v.), whose philosophical writings contain an extensive polemical presentation of Pyrrhonism. In the Middle Ages Pyrrhonism was not known at all. Rediscovered with the Renaissance, it exercised great influence on various thinkers (among them M. de Montaigne and Charron in the 16th century and P. Bayle in the 17th century) and the word was used as a synonym for skepticism (v.).
Bibliography
Raffaello Del Re