Pyrrhonian School of Ancient Greek Philosophy Texts

Pyrrhonian scepticism takes its name from Pyrrho of Elis (c. 370–c. 272 BCE), who travelled to India with Alexander the Great and there encountered Indian ascetics. The experience is credited with shaping his insistence that judgement be withheld where matters are not evident.

The school holds that certain knowledge of non-evident things is not to be had. Presented with opposed arguments of equal force, the sceptic suspends judgement, a practice the tradition names ἐποχή, and the goal of that suspension is ἀταραξία, tranquillity of life free from the disturbance that comes of holding unprovable opinions. The Pyrrhonist follows appearances without committing to any account of what underlies them: he steps away from a cliff not because he affirms that it is dangerous but because it appears dangerous, and he lives by custom, perception, and need. Pyrrho's own formula was that things are "no more" one way than another. This stance differs from that of the sceptical Academy, which the Pyrrhonists charged with dogmatism for asserting flatly that knowledge is impossible, a claim the Pyrrhonist refuses to affirm or deny.

After Pyrrho's death his disciple Timon of Phlius (c. 320–230 BCE) recorded and spread his teaching in prose and verse, after which the school faded until Aenesidemus revived it in the 1st century BCE, drawing a deliberate line between Pyrrhonism and the contemporary Academy. The tradition found its fullest statement in the Roman period in Sextus Empiricus (c. 2nd–3rd century CE), a physician who assembled its arguments into a system; his <cite>Outlines of Pyrrhonism</cite> is the principal source for the school's doctrines.