Five Modes of Scepticism: Sextus Empiricus and The Agrippan Modes Stefan Sienkiewicz Newest Edition 2025
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Five Modes
of Scepticism
Sextus Empiricus
and the Agrippan Modes
Stefan Sienkiewicz
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Stefan Sienkiewicz 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965178
ISBN 978–0–19–879836–1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. The Mode of Disagreement 12
Some Features of Disagreement 12
Kinds of Disagreement 15
Is the Sceptic Part of the Disagreement? 19
Disagreement and Undecided Disagreement 22
Principles of Disagreement 25
Two Accounts of the Sorts of Beliefs a Sceptic Can Hold 29
A Dogmatic Mode of Disagreement 31
The Method of Equipollence 34
A Sceptical Mode of Disagreement 41
Chronicling Disagreement and Creating Disagreement 47
Concluding Remarks 51
2. The Mode of Hypothesis 53
When the Mode of Hypothesis Occurs 53
What Hypothesizing Is Not 55
What Hypothesizing Is 59
The Function of Hypothesizing 64
Three Modes of Hypothesis 68
A Sceptical Mode of Hypothesis 72
The Mode of Hypothesis as a Limiting Case of the
Method of Equipollence 74
Concluding Remarks 76
3. The Mode of Infinite Regression 77
Infinity Introduced 77
The Unacceptability of Infinitely Regressive Arguments 80
The Unsurveyability of Infinitely Regressive Arguments 87
Infinite Regression and the Suspension of Judgement 93
A Dogmatic Mode of Infinite Regression 97
A Sceptical Mode of Infinite Regression 99
Concluding Remarks 102
4. The Mode of Reciprocity 104
Reciprocity Parallel to Infinite Regression 104
Formal Reciprocity 105
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
viii CONTENTS
References 193
Index Locorum 199
General Index 202
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
Acknowledgements
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction
¹ Other varieties of scepticism—for example the Academic and the Cartesian—do not
feature.
² According to Sextus, Pyrrho wrote a poem for Alexander the Great (M 1.282).
Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers claims, at one point, that Pyrrho wrote
nothing at all (I 16) and, at another, that he left nothing in writing (IX 102). Whatever the
truth of the matter, it is reasonable to infer that none of Pyrrho’s writings was philosophical.
³ Agrippa is mentioned once in Diogenes Laertius IX 88. There are no other mentions of
him in the ancient texts and none of his works survive. The situation regarding Pyrrho is
marginally better. His name crops up in Diogenes Laertius, Sextus, and Plutarch; and in
Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel (Praep. evang. XIV xviii 1–4) a summary is offered of
some aspects of his thought by his student Timon. I discuss this passage in greater detail in
Chapter 1 n. 17. For further information on Pyrrho see Sedley (1983), pp. 14–16 and Bett
(2000).
⁴ ‘PH’ is the standard abbreviation.
⁵ I shall also, occasionally, make reference to Sextus’ other works, namely Against the
Mathematicians 1–6 and Against the Mathematicians 7–11 (the standard abbreviation is M).
However, my main focus will be on the Outlines. For the Greek texts I have used the
standard Teubner editions: PH (ed.) Mutschmann and Mau (1958); M 7–11 (ed.)
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
Mutschmann (1914); M 1–6 (ed.) Mau (1961). Translations of PH are based on Annas and
Barnes (2000). Translations of other ancient texts are my own.
⁶ Sextus attributes the modes to ‘the more recent sceptics’ (οἱ νεώτεροι) at PH 1.164.
These sceptics are presumably more recent than the ‘older sceptics’ (οἱ ἀρχαιότεροι) of
whom Sextus speaks at PH 1.36 and to whom he ascribes the ten modes. Elsewhere, at
M 7.345, Sextus attributes the ten modes to Aenesidemus, so we might date the more recent
sceptics of PH 1.165 to somewhere between Aenesidemus and Sextus, that is between 100 BC
and AD 200. For further detail on Aenesidemus’ dates see Glucker (1978), pp. 116–18 and on
Sextus’ see House (1980).
⁷ For reflections on the Aenesideman modes see Annas and Barnes (1985), Striker
(1996a), and Morison (2011) and on the eight modes against causal explanation see Barnes
(1983).
⁸ See, by way of example, the anthologies by Feldman and Warfield (2010) and Chris-
tensen and Lackey (2013).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
These are different questions because the sceptic and the dogmatist are
very different sorts of epistemic agent. One basic difference is that the
sceptic, unlike the dogmatist, is restricted with regard to the sorts of
belief he can hold. As Sextus informs us in a celebrated passage of the
Outlines—PH 1.13—the sceptic does not hold any beliefs, the holding of
which involves assenting to some unclear object of investigation of the
sciences (τήν τινι πράγματι τῶν κατὰ τὰς ἐπιστήμας ζητουμένων ἀδήλων
συγκατάθεσιν). Two main interpretative traditions detailing the sorts of
beliefs a sceptic is prohibited from holding have sprung up from the well-
tilled soil of the PH 1.13 passage, the details of which do not need to
concern us here in this Introduction—they will concern us later. It will
suffice to say that, according to one of these traditions, the sceptic is
prohibited from holding beliefs which have theoretical content (which
I term the Content Interpretation) and, according to the other, the
sceptic is prohibited from holding beliefs which are arrived at by a
process of reasoning (which I term the Grounds Interpretation).¹¹ For
the moment, let us refer to these prohibited beliefs as ‘theoretical beliefs’.
The PH 1.13 passage, therefore, tells us at least one thing about the
respective ways in which a sceptic and a dogmatist come to suspend
judgement on the basis of the Agrippan modes: the dogmatist can reach
suspended judgement by relying on various theoretical beliefs, but a
sceptic cannot.
Of those commentators who have probed the working of the Agrippan
modes, the most significant treatment to date is that of Jonathan
Barnes.¹² Though there have been (albeit briefer) treatments of the
modes by R. J. Hankinson, Harald Thorsrud, and Paul Woodruff, it is
Barnes’s work which will provide the main focus for this study.¹³ It has
two main aims. The first is to show that the reconstruction offered by
commentators, like Barnes, of some of the modes—in particular the
modes of infinite regression and reciprocity—is a dogmatic one. By
this I mean that it is a reconstruction which captures perfectly well
how a dogmatic philosopher might come to suspend judgement on the
¹¹ Barnes (1982) and Burnyeat (1984) can be seen as representative of the Content
Interpretation, Frede (1987) and Morison (2011) of the Grounds Interpretation. I elaborate
on these two traditions of interpretation in greater detail in Chapter 1.
¹² See Barnes (1990a) and Barnes (1990b).
¹³ See Hankinson (1995), Thorsrud (2009), and Woodruff (2010).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/2/2019, SPi
basis of these modes, but which cannot capture how a sceptic might
come to do so.¹⁴ The reason for this is that on the proposed reconstruc-
tion, the sceptic would have to hold a variety of theoretical beliefs to
which he is not entitled.
The second aim is to effect a change of perspective by approaching the
question of how the modes in general are meant to bring about suspen-
sion of judgement not from the point of view of the dogmatist, but from
the point of view of the sceptic. In this respect, the book can be seen as
opening up an alternative to a line of thinking advanced by Michael
Frede. On Frede’s view, the various first-person locutions that pepper the
Outlines—locutions such as ‘we come to suspend judgement’—are to be
understood as claims made by a sceptic who adopts, temporarily and
purely for dialectical purposes, a set of dogmatic assumptions and
patterns of reasoning.¹⁵ The present work can be seen as an attempt at
seeing how far one can take these locutions at face value—that is, taking
them as claims which a sceptic makes on his own behalf and not for
purely dialectical reasons.
Lest this point be misunderstood, let me stress that, in what follows,
I take no view as to whether Sextus himself was a sceptic who lacked all
theoretical beliefs.¹⁶ In the following pages I often speak of Sextus
‘formulating an argument’ or ‘drawing a conclusion’ or ‘objecting to a
line of reasoning’, activities which, one might reasonably think, would
require the holding of at least some minimally theoretical beliefs. The
point is simply to see how one might characterize the sceptic’s behaviour
if, pace Frede, one interprets those first-person utterances in the context
of the Agrippan modes as utterances made by a sceptic who makes them
sincerely and not for purely dialectical reasons.
In reconstructing the Agrippan modes from a sceptical and not a
dogmatic perspective two questions in particular will be distinguished
from one another and addressed: the question as to how the sceptic puts
the modes to use in his tussles with his dogmatic opponents, and the
question as to how a sceptic might come to suspend judgement on the
¹⁴ Note that the dogmatist could either be the historical figure with whom the sceptic
tussled or the contemporary historian of philosophy who anatomizes, analyses, recon-
structs, and passes judgement on the effectiveness of the sceptic’s arguments.
¹⁵ See Frede (1987c), pp. 204–5.
¹⁶ Lorenzo Corti has emphasized to me in conversation the importance of distinguishing
Sextus from the sceptic referred to in his pages.
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