Back on the horse! I'm wading through The Hellenistic Philosophers, as I wasn't ready to take on Becker's A New Stoicism yet. The book starts off with Pyrrhonism, which I can't say I knew anything about before reading.
The lack of primary sources is quite simply depressing. That so many of the original texts are no longer exigent is a blight upon civilization. I maintain hope that somewhere, in a dusty mausoleum or cave, thousands and thousands of those texts survive. But anyway. Pyrrhonism is essentially disdain for desire. Pyrrho believed that everything, excluding virtue, was merely an extension of human habits and beliefs.
Pyrrhonist ethics thus resemble Stoicism somewhat, but takes things a bit further. 'Equability' is the target, to live free of disturbances. This translates to drifting aimlessly, never choosing and never desiring. Nothing is better than anything else. Some of the secondary texts, comments on Pyrrhonism by later writers, seem to indicate Pyrrho valued virtue and despised vice, however. At the very least, this extends to his 'scribe', Timon, much in the same vein that Socrates never wrote any of his work down.
So, I can't really agree with Pyrrhonist ethics. Virtue is certainly desirable, and vice is undesirable. I think the Stoics have that all figured out - there is the desirable and the undesirable. Some things in between are preferred - or maybe they are not, that is one of the major Stoic debates. Pyrrho's physical philosophy is much easier to disagree with, though a useful thought exercise. He maintains that nothing in the world is factual. Not, and this is important, that nothing can be known with certainty. No, Pyrrho claims there is no actual physical truth to things, that what we know about the world is human consensus instead. This is irreconcilable with modern science; it would be too much of a stretch to buy into this. Still, in a Descartes-inspired way, denying the truth in things is useful for philosophizing.
The lack of primary sources is quite simply depressing. That so many of the original texts are no longer exigent is a blight upon civilization. I maintain hope that somewhere, in a dusty mausoleum or cave, thousands and thousands of those texts survive. But anyway. Pyrrhonism is essentially disdain for desire. Pyrrho believed that everything, excluding virtue, was merely an extension of human habits and beliefs.
Pyrrhonist ethics thus resemble Stoicism somewhat, but takes things a bit further. 'Equability' is the target, to live free of disturbances. This translates to drifting aimlessly, never choosing and never desiring. Nothing is better than anything else. Some of the secondary texts, comments on Pyrrhonism by later writers, seem to indicate Pyrrho valued virtue and despised vice, however. At the very least, this extends to his 'scribe', Timon, much in the same vein that Socrates never wrote any of his work down.
So, I can't really agree with Pyrrhonist ethics. Virtue is certainly desirable, and vice is undesirable. I think the Stoics have that all figured out - there is the desirable and the undesirable. Some things in between are preferred - or maybe they are not, that is one of the major Stoic debates. Pyrrho's physical philosophy is much easier to disagree with, though a useful thought exercise. He maintains that nothing in the world is factual. Not, and this is important, that nothing can be known with certainty. No, Pyrrho claims there is no actual physical truth to things, that what we know about the world is human consensus instead. This is irreconcilable with modern science; it would be too much of a stretch to buy into this. Still, in a Descartes-inspired way, denying the truth in things is useful for philosophizing.
No comments:
Post a Comment