PYRRHONISM. — This is the tendency that took its inspiration from the sceptical doctrine of Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–270 B.C.). It was summed up in the thesis that nothing can be known, and hence that one must doubt everything and refrain from making any judgment concerning any object whatsoever. Ἐπέχεια (withholding assent) and the related noun ἐποχή are the Greek terms denoting this attitude (cf. Diog. 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 (born ca. 360 B.C.), and the famous Timon of Phlius (ca. 320–330 B.C.), the true προφήτης of scepticism, 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 gnoseological asceticism is closely joined to the ethical ideal of ataraxy, that is, the soul’s imperturbability. Indeed, according to the sceptics, abstention from every theoretical judgment leads one to regard all things as indifferent in the practical sphere. Ἀταραξία is a consequence and almost a shadow of ἐποχή (Diog. Laertius, IX, 107). With Timon, one may say, the original Pyrrhonian school came to an end; sceptical thought instead flourished in a less radical form in the Middle and New Academy. Integral Pyrrhonism was taken up again by the new sceptical school (from the final years of the Republic to the second century A.D.): its first representative (or at least the first known to us) was Aenesidemus of Cnossus (active around the Ciceronian age), author of Πυρρώνεια λόγοι (Pyrrhonian Discourses) in eight books, of a Ὑποτόπυσις εἰς τὰ Πυρρώνεια (Outline of Pyrrhonian theories), and of other works; he is particularly noteworthy for having formulated the ten fundamental arguments (τρόποι, that is, “modes”) of ἐποχή: cf. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrh.
hypot., I, 36) of scepticism. Subsequently, the school was represented by Agrippa (first century A.D.), who condensed the grounds for universal doubt into five tropes rather than ten (ibid., I, 164), and Sextus Empiricus (v.), whose philosophical writings contain an extensive polemical presentation of Pyrrhonism. In the Middle Ages, Pyrrhonism was not known at all. Rediscovered during the Renaissance, it exerted a great influence on various thinkers (among them M. de Montaigne and Charron in the sixteenth century and P. Bayle in the seventeenth century), and the word was used as a synonym for scepticism (v.).