19
SCEPTICISM IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
SCEPTICISM IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
ARCHIVES IN1ERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
IN1ERNA TIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
145
RICHARD H. POPKIN
SCEPTICISM IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY A Pan-American Dialogue
Founding Directors: P. Dibont (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA)
Directors: Brian Copenhaver (University of California, Los Angeles, USA), Sarah Hutton (The University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom), Richard Popkin (Washington Univer
sity, St Louis & University of California, Los Angeles, USA) Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J.D. North (Groningen); M.J. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington);
Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop (Melbourne); P.O. Kristeller (Columbia University); E. Labrousse (paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Malarczyk (Lublin); E. de Olaso (C.I.F. Buenos Aires); J. Orcibal (Paris); W. ROd (Munchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles); H. Rowen (Rutgers University, N.J.); J.P.
Schobinger (Zurich); J. Tans (Groningen)
SCEPTICISM IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
A PAN-AMERICAN DIALOGUE
Edited by
RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University, St. Louis, U.S.A.
University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
SPRlNGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.Y.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sceptlcls. In the history of philosophy: a Pan-Alerlcan dialogue I edited by Richard H. Popkin.
p. CI. -- (Archives Internatlonales d'hlstolre des Idees = International archives of the history of Ideas; v 145)
Includes bibliographical references anU Index. ISBN 978-90-481-4629-1 ISBN 978-94-017-2942-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2942-0 1. Skeptlclsl--Hlstory. I. Popkin. Richard Henry. 1923-
II. Series: ArchIves Internatlonales d'hlstolre des Idees ; 145. 8837.S2745 1996 149'.73'09--dc20 95-36282
ISBN 978-90-481-4629-1
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 1996 S~rin~er Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
List of Contributors
Acknow ledgments
Introduction Richard H. Popkin
All Things Considered Milton Miller
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. How Sceptical Were the Academic Sceptics? Dorothea Frede
vii
ix
xi
xxi
2. The Dissoi Logoi and Early Greek Scepticism 27 Thomas M. Robinson
3. Some Traces of the Presence of Scepticism in Medieval Thought 37 Mauricio Beuchot
4. Hobbes on Peace and Truth: An Objection to Richard Popkin's "Hobbes and Scepticism I" and "Hobbes and Scepticism II" 45
Leiser Madanes
5. Samuel Clarke's Four Categories of Deism, Isaac Newton, and the Bible 53
James E. Force
6. Arnauld versus Leibniz and Malebranche on the Limits of Theological Knowledge 75
Robert Sleigh
7. Berkeley: Scepticism, Matter and Infinite Divisibility Jose A. Robles
v
87
vi Table of Contents
8. Hume's Scepticism and his Ethical Depreciation of Religion 99 Miguel A. Badia Cabrera
9. Hume's Scepticism: Natural Instincts and Philosophical Reflection 115 Barry Stroud
lO. Kierkegaard's Distinction between Modem and Ancient Scepti-cism 135
Jose R. Maia Neto
11. Peirce and Scepticism 159 Alejandro Herrera Ibanez
12. Finding One's Way About: High Windows, Narrow Chimneys, and Open Doors. Wittgenstein's "Scepticism" and Philosophical Method 167
Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho
l3. Philosophical Scepticism in Wittgenstein's On Certainty Graciela De Pierris
14. The Sceptical Epistemology of Triste Tropiques Richard A. Watson
15. Scepticism about Value Julia Annas
16. Philo of Larissa and Platonism David Glidden
17. Scepticism, Humor and the Archipelago of Knowledge Miguel E. Orellana Benado
18. Scepticism and the Limits of Charity Ezequiel de Olaso
19. The Argument from Possibility Avrum Stroll
Index
181
197
205
219
235
253
267
281
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
1. Dorothea Frede, Philosophical Institute, University of Hamburg (formerly at Swarthmore College)
2. Thomas M. Robinson, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
3. Mauricio Beuchot, Instituto de Investigaciones Filos6ficas, UNAM, Mexico
4. Leiser Madanes, Centro de Investigaciones Filos6ficas, Buenos Aires, Argentina
5. James E. Force, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky
6. Robert Sleigh, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
7. Jose A. Robles, Instituto de Investigaciones Filos6ficas, UNAM, Mexico
8. Miguel A. Badia Cabrera, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
9. Barry Stroud, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
10. Jose R. Maia Neto, Universidade Belo Horizonte, Brazil
11. Alejandro Herrera Ibanez, Instituto de Investigaciones Filos6ficas, UNAM, Mexico
12. Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho, Pontifico Universidade do Rio de Janiero
13. Graciela De Pierris, Indiana University
VB
viii List of Contributors
14. Richard A. Watson, Department of Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis
15. Julia Annas, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona
16. David Glidden, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside
17. Miguel E. Orellana Benado, Departamento de Filosofia, Universidad de Santiago de Chile
18. Ezequiel de Olaso, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
19. Avrum Stroll, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to acknowledge and thank the following for their support which made the conference possible: the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Center for Ideas and Society of the University of California, Riverside, and the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History. Without their generosity this conference would not have taken place.
We would also like to thank Bernd Magnus, Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, Steven Gould Alexrod, Associate Director for the Center for Ideas and Society, Marie-France Orillion, Scott Christensen and Carolyn Garfinkel, of the University of California, Riverside, and Constance Blackwell, of the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History, London.
We wish to thank Robert John Arias for preparing the final copy, and the index.
RICHARD H. POPKIN
ix
INTRODUCTION
The essays presented here are the fruits of a conference held at the University of California, Riverside, from 15 to 17 February 1991, with participants from the Americas: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The idea for such a meeting grew out of my relationship with Ezequiel de Olaso of the Universidad de San Andres in Buenos Aires. As he explained in his article, "The Two Scepticisms of the Savoyard Vicar,"! we first met at the end of 1966 when Olaso was working on his doctoral dissertatiop with Jose Ferrater Mora at Bryn Mawr. After conferring with me about his work and his interests, Olaso wrote his thesis on Leibniz and Greek Scepticism. Thereafter, we kept up with each other's work on the history of scepticism, but did not meet again until late 1982 when Olaso came to visit me while I was a visiting professor at Emory University. We met at several conferences in Europe in the next few years. At the Pan-American philosophy conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, we met again, and I was introduced by him to other Latin American scholars who were working on aspects of scepticism. Through the efforts of Olaso and others, my History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza was translated into Spanish and published in Mexico. And a collection of my articles was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil.
In 1988, 01aso invited me to take part in a conference he organized in celebration of Thomas Hobbes's 400th birthday in Buenos Aires. I had just celebrated the same event at Oxford, so why not celebrate such a unique event twice, in each of the two hemispheres?
At the Buenos Aires meeting, I was happily surprised to find that there were scholars from various countries, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, who were doing interesting, original and exciting work about scepticism and its history. Subsequent trips to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, and to the PanAmerican philosophy conference in Buenos Aires intensified my contacts with the Latin American scholars. And working with Jose Maia Neto, from Rio de Janeiro, who came to do his doctorate with me at Washington University, St. Louis (only to discover I had already retired and fled the Middle Western winter to live in sunny southern California), made me appreciate more the kinds
xi
Richard H. Popkin (ed.), Scepticism in the History of Philosophy, xi-xix. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
xii Introduction
of new perspectives and work on scepticism and its history that were being done "south of the border."
After returning from the Pan-American meeting in Buenos Aires, I conceived of the possibility of a conference with equal numbers of "gringo" scholars, and Latin Americans dealing with their common interests in scepticism, ancient and modem. I had become only too aware that the work being done by the Latin American scholars was not sufficiently known in the United States and Canada, and that we, living in the same hemisphere, had not had "'nough opportunities to meet each other, and to interact and learn from one another. I broached the possibility of such a gathering with Brian Copenhaver, when we were together at the Warburg Institute memorial conference for our late, mutual friend, Charles B. Schmitt. Copenhaver had just taken up his new administrative post as Dean of Humanities at Riverside. I knew of his interest and concern for scholarship in the history of ideas, and I thought that his institution would be most receptive to making contact with Latin American scholars. I also broached the possibility of the conference with Constance Blackwell, who had started a Foundation for Research in Intellectual History, and who was strongly interested in encouraging work in the history of scepticism. She had already met Olaso and Jose Maia Neto, and she was impressed by what I told her about the exciting scholarship going on in Latin American, mostly unknown to North Americans and Europeans. Both Copenhaver and Ms. Blackwell were enthusiastic supporters, and this led to the organization and sponsorship of the meeting by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California, Riverside, and the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History.
I had learned during my various visits south of the border that there were quite a few experts in different aspects of scepticism who had studied in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, and who understood and could converse in English. At talks I had given in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, people asked questions and challenged my views in English or Spanish, and we were able to have continuous dialogue. At a seminar on scepticism that was part of the Pan-American Philosophy conference in Buenos Aires, there were three speakers - Danielo Marcondes, Ezequiel de Olaso and me. We carried on in Portuguese, Spanish and English. The audience actively participated in different languages. Whenever somebody did not understand, there was always a bi- or tri-lingual person who would translate.
From these experiences I knew that the Latin American scholars could easily engage in philosophical exchanges with us. I then looked for U.S. and Canadian scholars who either knew Spanish, or could understand it to some extent. The result was, I believe, a gathering of a compatible group, who happily exchanged ideas formally and informally during our three most pleasant days in Riverside.
Now, to tum to the substance of our meeting, I should like to place our discussions in the context of the increasing interest in scepticism from about 1950 to 1991. My own interest in the subject, as more than a personal attitude
Introduction xiii
which seems to have grown up with me as a youth coming to self-awareness in the troublesome years of the 1930s in New York City, dates from my college days at Columbia. Forty years ago I took John Herman Randall's famous intensive survey course of the history of philosophy. Confronted with the riches of Greek philosophy, I found that I could not make too much out of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. When we finally turned to Hellenistic philosophy, things began to make more sense to me. I remember reading Sextus Empiricus, in the Loeb Library Edition, on the subway going to and from Columbia from my home in the Bronx. Suddenly I found a philosophical text that really spoke to me. A couple of years later, I took Paul Oskar Kristeller's seminar in post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy. This time I got a more intensive look at the writings of Sextus, and enjoyed them even more. In 1945, in a seminar at Yale on Hume conducted by Charles Hendel, I wrote a term paper on Hume and Sextus. I showed the paper to Kristeller who said to me in his most scholarly way that I should look into whether Hume read Sextus, and whether there was any sceptical tradition in European philosophy leading up to Hume. These comments gave me my scholarly vocation which I have been following out ever since then.
As I started looking into scepticism and its history, I was able to find only one current article, a piece about Sextus by Roderick Chisholm. It was one of the first things he had written. A young scholar, then a student at Iowa, Edward Madden and I wrote an article comparing Sextus and Hume on causality, seeking to show that all of Hume's main points were already in Sextus. We submitted the paper and got a scathing rejection from J. H. Randall, partly on the grounds that we had not shown any historical connection between the two thinkers. We abandoned the article. Madden, a couple of years ago, described it as a dreadful article. As I remember it, it was not so bad, and its main point was probably true. (A paper has recently appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas tracing the sources of Hume's account of cause, and showing the ways in which Hume could have been aware of Sextus's writings.)2
At the time, scepticism was not part of the canon of either the history of philosophy or of philosophy. It was regarded as an unnecessary and unwanted attitude toward finding answers to serious problems. Histories of philosophy very briefly discussed the ancient sceptical views as a dead end in the Hellenistic period, which however produced interesting and influential philosophies of the Stoics and Epicureans, and of the Neo-Platonists. Modem sceptics hardly got a mention, except for Hume, who had been rescued from being a sceptic, and was portrayed as a good naturalist by Norman Kemp Smith, and as a precursor of the logical positivists by Julius Weinberg.
I started my vocation of exhuming the history of scepticism by writing a series of articles on various aspects of Renaissance and post-Renaissance scepticism, including "Hume's Pyrrhonism and his Critique of Pyrrhonism," "The Sceptical Precursors of David Hume," "Hume and the Pyrrhonian Controversy," "Berkeley and Pyrrhonism," and "Kierkegaard and Scepticism," In a few years, while teaching at the University of Iowa, I had assembled a
xiv Introduction
vast amount of data about sceptical thinkers from Montaigne to Hume. Scholars of literature had shown serious interest in the matter, but not historians of philosophy. I began to put this together into a somewhat coherent picture in a lecture I gave to the Humanities Society of the University of Iowa in 1951-52 on "The Sceptical Crisis and the Rise of Modem Philosophy" in which I tried to include every thinker I had run across in my researches. I sent the lecture to my teacher, Paul Weiss, then editor of The Review of Metaphysics which had published some of my early essays. Weiss said he would print the talk if I footnoted every author and every title mentioned in the lecture. The article appeared in three parts in 1953-54. By then, I had started working in European archives, and soon saw the fuller version of my theory that a sceptical crisis had developed in the 16th century from the impact of the revival of ancient scepticism, especially as it was presented in the texts of Sextus Empiricus, on the basic religious controversy concerning the rule of faith in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; that this spawned the fundamental problems that Descartes and others tried to resolve, and whose solutions were undermined by Bayle and Hume.
My articles and my book, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, published in 1960, elicited some interest. It was followed by the important studies of Charles Schmitt (who wrote one of the first reviews of my book), on Renaissance scepticism, and on the impact of the revival of Cicero's scepticism. From that work and that of others such as Giorgio Tonelli and Ezequiel Olaso, I think one can say that from the 1960s onward there has been a general recognition that scepticism played an important role in the rise and development of modem philosophy. There has also been a growing interest among historians of science about the role played by sceptical ideas, and sceptical philosophers, in the development of the modem theory of science and of the scientific method. And people working in the history of logical ideas, especially those that became prominent in the 20th century, have become concerned with Stoic logic, especially as it is presented in the texts of Sextus Empiricus.
So, by the 1970 scepticism had regained a serious and noble position in the history of philosophy. I found that I, and to some extent, Charles Schmitt, were being taken as primary sources. (This conference has been described as a living festschrift to me, and a memorial to my dear friend, Charles Schmitt.) We had exhumed the earlier sceptics. Others were not going to burrow in the dusty graveyards of previous philosophies, and so would take our word for it, and at least give token notice that scepticism was part of the intellectual world in which modem philosophy developed. There is of course a danger involved in taking us as primary sources. Readers should have some scepticism of their own about fallible scholars, and should remember that there are original sources that mayor may not corroborate what we have said, and which may contain clues that we have overlooked or misinterpreted.
In the 1960s I noticed a qualitative change in the reaction to my researches.
Introduction xv
It was not just regarded as cute or amusing antiquarian research, but was also being taken as having relevance to current issues in philosophy. Avrum Stroll, from the time that I first met him in 1954, saw that what I was talking about was related to concerns he had developed from studying Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein. The students of Sir Karl Popper, especially William W. Bartley III, Imre Lakatos, John Watkins and Paul Feyerabend, saw the history of scepticism, at least since the Renaissance, as intimately related to the problems Popper claimed to have solved. People started writing about scepticism as a living issue in philosophy, and a handful of brave souls presented themselves as advocates of scepticism in the current philosophical world.
Another serious change, some of whose fruits appear in our conference, is the concern with understanding ancient scepticism. Classically trained philosophers had written for decades on the same points in Plato and Aristotle. Then in the 1960s scholarly articles began appearing about points in Sextus and other ancient sceptical or anti-sceptical authors. There has been some interest and concern with kinds of scepticism in the Middle Ages, especially in the Arabic and Jewish writers. (A couple of years ago, a lively scholar from Chicago showed me a text, and asked me where I thought it came from. My guess was Sextus, but what he showed me was a text from Maimonides!)
Bernard Williams, Myles Burnyeat and their students made the philosophical understanding of the classical sceptical texts a major scholarly focus. But it was a focus that they intimately related to current concerns in contemporary philosophy, as was evident in Williams's study of Descartes and scepticism, and in Burnyeat's articles on whether the sceptic can live his scepticism, and on the differences between ancient and modern scepticism, which Julia Annas, Olaso and myself are now discussing at various gatherings.
The last two decades have also seen the emergence of new forms of scepticism such as that that seems to be involved in the deconstructionist movement, and the structuralist movement. The sceptical ideas involved may not have affected many professional philosophers yet, but are having a great effect on literary scholars. However, the posthumous publications of Wittgenstein, especially his materials "On Certainty", have spawned an enormous literature in the philosophical journals about Wittgenstein's scepticism, or his answer to scepticism, or Kripke's attack on Wittgenstein's scepticism, etc.
Because scepticism appears to be the subject of at least one article in each English language philosophy journal that comes out, Constance Blackwell and I decided to try to have a bibliography of the literature on scepticism prepared for 1989 and 1990. Jose Maia Neto worked on this and produced a remarkable picture of what is now appearing in the journals. We hope to supplement this with a survey of books and chapters of books. The largest number of entries deal with contemporary analytic philosophy, but there are a growing number dealing with ancient scepticism and with scepticism in the later history of philosophy up to the 20th century.
In the light of all of this, the Riverside conference is of some importance. It has brought together experts in many of the areas of the study of scepti-
xvi Introduction
cism from ancient scepticism, to attempts to delineate the differences between ancient and modern scepticism, to studies of the relevance of scepticism to understanding the philosophies of Hobbes, Newton, Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kierkegaard, Peirce and Wittgenstein. We also dealt with value scepticism, and with the very possibility of stating a sceptical point of view. In addition to bringing together experts in all these areas, and creating lively interchanges of these subjects, the conference also brought together two scholarly worlds which do not interact often enough - the Latin American and the United States-Canadian ones. For better or worse, the tendency in both groups is to see Europe as their ancestral intellectual home, and still the source of new ideas and inspiration. Because of various factors of intellectual training, language knowledge, and historical tradition, far too little interchange and interaction has been occurring between these worlds. We hope that the success of the Riverside conference will lead to many more such gatherings. (In fact, a seminar on scepticism was held in Buenos Aires in June 1992, hosted by Ezequiel de Olaso, with some of the participants from the Riverside conference, plus others from Europe, the United States and Latin America.) The problem of mUltilanguage communication should no longer be taken as a barrier to cooperative scholarship. Although too many United States scholars have a deaf or dead ear about other languages than English, I think that with some effort and lots of goodwill, the problem of communication does in fact get solved, if people are sufficiently concerned to learn what others are saying and thinking. In the global village in which we are all now living, we need tq,-join our efforts together and to profit for our various understandings of common intellectual concerns. Hopefully this successful conference will be followed by other conferences of like nature, other joint efforts, and the development of lasting intellectual friendships. The Riverside conference was preceded by two other international ones on the history of scepticism in 1990, one sponsored by the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History that was held at the beginning of August 1990 at Wassenaar in The Netherlands, and another at Olympia, Greece sponsored by the Greek Institute for the Study of Scepticism. Others are now being projected for 1993 and after.
The papers and discussions at the Riverside conference indicated a wide variety of topics for consideration. Papers on ancient scepticism were presented by Dorothea Frede of Swarthmore College and Thomas Robinson of the University of Toronto. A paper of medieval scepticism was given by Mauricio Beuchot of the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico. Several papers were given on scepticism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy by Leiser Madanes of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, James Force of the University of Kentucky, Robert Sleigh of the University of Massachusetts, Jose Antonio Robles-Garcia of the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, Miquel Badia-Cabrera of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Barry Stroud of the University of California, Berkeley and Constance Blackwell of the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History, London. There were papers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century scepticism and philosophy by Carla
Introduction xvii
Cordua of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Jose Maia Neto of Washington University, St. Louis, Alejandro Herrera Ibanez of the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, Graciela De Pierris of the University of Illinois, Chicago and Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho of the Pontifica Universidade Cat6lica do Rio de Janeiro and Richard Watson of Washington University, St. Louis. And then there were papers on the character of scepticism by Julia Annas of the University of Arizona, David Glidden of the University of California, Riverside and Ezequiel de Olaso of the Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, plus a purported refutation of scepticism by Avrum Stroll of the University of California, San Diego.
In addition to the areas that we explored, there are a wide variety of research projects connected with scepticism that need more study, and more recognition. Much more needs to be looked into concerning medieval Arabic and Jewish forms of scepticism, their sources, their character and their influence, and into the possibility that ancient Greek sceptical problems got into the discussion concerning nominalism amongst Christian theologians and philosophers. There is growing interest and concern with forms of scepticism that developed among Indian and Chinese thinkers in quite different philosophical traditions. Efforts have already begun to consider comparative studies in scepticism in such different cultures, and their relation to what has happened in our traditions.
And, as I happily now see the study of scepticism and its history as an accepted and growing field of intellectual interest, I also am a little wary, since as Kierkegaard pointed out in Training in Christianity, academic professors have a way of turning exciting material into arid footnotes, encyclopedia articles (of which I have written far too many) and into formularized courses entitled "Scepticism 1," "Scepticism 101," etc., with exams that have true/false answers. As this happens, as it is already beginning to occur, one has to guard against the academization of the subject consuming the living force of sceptical questioning, and sceptical argumentation, goading dogmatic philosophers into more and more elaborate attempts to answer scepticism. We should remember, as Pascal said, as long as there are dogmatists, we have to be sceptics. But if everyone became a sceptic, then we would have to become dogmatists.
It has too long been contended that no one can consistently and honestly state the sceptical view. In ancient times, the Stoics kept saying this, and Sextus made various attempts to deal with this objection, sometimes saying that he was just chronicling his opinions, indicating how he felt, not stating what he knew to be arguments or positions. Sometimes he presented himself in his medical guise (since he was a doctor), saying that he was a physician seeking to deal with the disease of the dogmatist - rashness, which was causing much suffering by making the dogmatist disturbed and anxious that someone might disprove his views. The sceptic, as a helpful doctor, tried to make the patient feel better by leading him or her to suspend judgment about any and all dogmas. When the dogmatic patient could be brought to this state of affairs,
xviii Introduction
then the patient would find peace of mind, tranquillity, ataraxia. So, Sextus explained at the end of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, the sceptic sometimes uses what seem to be weak or poor arguments. The sceptic as a lover of his fellow human beings uses whatever cures may be sufficient for the case at hand. If poor or weak arguments suffice to cure the patient, then so be it.
The question of the state ability of scepticism has gone on through the ages, and is still being raised in the articles appearing each month in the philosophical journals. It has seemed to me that this does not have to be a serious or important point. For years I have been toying with the idea of writing an article describing scepticism as being like an anonymous letter. The question of who is the author may be of some interest, but it is not the main concern. The recipient has the letter. The letter raises a host of problems for the recipient in defending his or her dogmatic philosophical position. Whether the anonymous author can be found or identified, dead or alive, sane or insane, does not help in dealing with or dismissing the problems. So whether scepticism can be consistently stated is not the main point. The thrust of the sceptical attack is in the effect it has on the dogmatist, who cannot evade the thrust by denouncing the sceptical opponent whom he or she may not be able to find, identify or classify. It is the dogmatists who have to do the defending, if they can, regardless of whether the sceptic really exists as a flesh and blood member of the human race, or as a raving inmate of a mental institute, or a science fiction character. And the dogmatists, attempting to defend their positions, have constituted a main creative force in philosophy from ancient times down to the present. The sceptic, real or imaginary, has led the non-sceptics to struggle over and over again to find a coherent and consistent way of putting their intellectual house in acceptable order (acceptable to honest dogmatists), only to find that another sceptic, real or imaginary, is creating another mass of doubts that require further examination and rethinking. The sceptic, the anonymous letter writer, does not have to be part of that process, but only has to await the results, and be ready to prepare another anonymous letter.
And so, having said my piece on subject of the stateability of scepticism, let me just end by quoting once more the not anonymous lines that the blind poet Thomas Blacklock wrote about his friend, David Hume
The wise in every age conclude, What Pyrrho taught and Hume renewed, That dogmatists are fools. 3
RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University, St. Louis and University of California, Los Angeles
Introduction xix
NOTES
1. Published in R. A. Watson and J. E. Force, The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1988), p. 43.
2. Leo Groake and Graham Solomon, "Some Sources for Hume's Account of Cause," Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 645-663. I subsequently wrote an addenda to this, "Sources of Knowledge of Sextus Empiricus in Hume's Time," Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 137-141.
3. This is the original version of poem by Thomas Blacklock as it appears in Hume's letter of 20 April 1757 to John Clephane, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1: 231.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED*
1.
Suspended in this doubtful age
of serially successful failure between
indetenninacy and
irreconcilable orders or opposition
that deny our certainties
but liberate all else
2.
the mind concedes
the unconditional affinnation inherent in denial
and inscribes reality with what
can be conceived as well as other
transient distinctions necessary
for invention to perfonn
a while as truth
3.
which seems a reasonable indulgence
of our ontological appetite
for absolute conviction
about incalculable certainties
even of our own conceiving
and welcome relief
from the tyranny of having to presuppose
a world we never made
* This poem was written by Professor Milton Miller of the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside. He attended the sessions of the Scepticism conference, and wrote the poem as his reaction to the talks and the discussions. We are most grateful to him for giving us permission to include it in this volume.
xxi
Richard H. Popkin (ed.), Scepticism in the History of Philosophy, xxi.
