Showing papers on "Pyrrhonism published in 2009"

Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into Poetry

Abstract: Early Skepticism and its founder, Pyrrho of Elis, were introduced to the world by the poet and philosopher Timon of Phlius. This is the first book-length study of Timon's work in English, and includes a new reconstruction of his most influential poem Silloi. All of the extant fragments are translated and discussed as literature rather than as source material for the history of philosophy. The book concludes with a definition of 'skeptical aesthetics' that demonstrates the importance of Timon and early Skepticism to the most influential Hellenistic poets: Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes.

The Hellenic Origins of Unamuno's Skepticism and Niebla's Skeptical Parody of Cartesianism

Abstract: Even though skepticism figures prominently in many of Miguel de Unamuno's novels and essays, it has drawn scant attention from critics, who tend to refer to it cursorily or against the backdrop of Unamuno's religious beliefs.1 One critic who has devoted some attention to the topic, Adolfo Carpio, makes insightful references to skepticism in his rigorous treatment of Unamuno's subjectivist philosophy. Like Carpio, I argue that skepticism plays a fundamental role in Unamuno's thought and agree with Carpio's assessment that "el pensamiento de Unamuno desemboca en la skepsis," and that "esta skepsis no se entendera adecuadamente si con ella se confunde cualquier forma de escepticismo al uso" (145). What Carpio contends, more precisely, is that Unamuno's uncertainty encompasses all aspects of his existence and bears no resemblance to the intellectual doubt associated with rationalist philosophers like Rene Descartes. The present study goes a step further, however, and argues that Unamuno's thought in many ways grows out of Hellenic skepticism and that this tradition can especially illuminate aspects of Unamuno's novelistic production. In what follows, I examine the direct and indirect references to skepticism in several of Unamuno's essays in order to establish a conceptual framework from which to interpret Nieblas parody of the cogito, which, I argue, emerges from Unamuno's contempt for Descartes's radical distortion of skepticism's goals. If on one level Niebla challenges the cogito, then on another it upholds the skeptical principles that Unamuno values and that validate his vitalist world view, which subscribes to the notion of life as a process of becoming and the individual as the sum of her emotional and rational faculties at any given moment in time.Most of what is known of Greek skepticism today derives from three extant historical accounts written during the Roman era and recovered during the Renaissance: Diogenes Laertius's The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Cicero's Academica, and Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Schmitt 226-28). Read widely in scholastic circles, these three works left a lasting impact on the European intellectual climate and had an especially profound effect on Michel de Montaigne, who, for inspiration, carved phrases and short passages from Sextus into the rafters of his study as he wrote his most celebrated skeptical essay, "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Popkin 47).* What remains of Unamuno's personal library (as catalogued by Mario Valdes and Maria Elena de Valdes in An Unamuno Source Book) contains none of the primary sources, but does hold a copy of Montaigne's Essays with Unamuno's markings and notes. A footnote found in En torno al casticismo (77) refers readers to Montaigne's "Apology" and thus confirms that Unamuno had, at the very least, secondary contact with the skeptical tradition prior to writing the majority of his major essays and novels. As a professor of Greek philology who, as Nelson Orringer maintains, "daily communed with the Hellenic world while writing major works of philosophy, literary criticism, and literature" (331), there should be little doubt that Unamuno had significant contact with the skeptical tradition, as in fact the many references to it found in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida and other essays corroborate. Since many of the books to which Unamuno refers throughout his writings cannot be found in his personal library, part of which was lost when Unamuno went into exile in 1924 (Valdes and Valdes xi), we are left only with Unamuno's papers and published writings to measure the impact of Hellenic skepticism on his thought.Skepticism developed along two axes in the Hellenic world, one theoretical and the other practical, which Jose Ferrater Mora describes in his authoritative Diccionario de filosofia:Desde el punto de vista teorico, el escepticismo es una doctrina del conocimiento segun la cual no hay ningun saber firme, ni puede encontrarse nunca ninguna opinion absolutamente segura. …

Renaissance Pyrrhonism: A Relative Phenomenon

Abstract: "More than any other kind of philosophy, Pyrrhonism exalts relativity, if only, in the first place, by opening up the dogmatist's horizons to new aspects of familiar phenomena. But there is another relativity factor, a more extrinsic one: the very different textual elements of its diffusion in Europe in fragmentary texts of which the reception was unusually erratic. My purpose here is to resume briefly, without giving detailed demonstrations, the results of my work on the revival of scepticism in the sixteenth century, consisting in an exploration of the relations between the different symptoms of the sceptical crisis during this period; this work was the object of a doctoral thesis, and of a number of conferences and articles. I will present here the method of my enquiry as well as the results, insofar as the method may contribute to further research on the rediscovery of ancient philosophies in modern times. My method developed progressively as a means to overcome a seemingly insoluble preliminary problem: can progress be made in the examination of a question which Richard H. Popkin's work seemed to have covered exhaustively? If we concern ourselves exclusively with Pop-kin's chapters on the Renaissance, we can see that he explored this question in the wake of Pierre Villey and Henri Busson, whose starting-point was Pierre Bayle's presentation of modern Pyrrhonism in his "Dictionnaire historique" . The main and decisive conclusion of Popkin's study of Renaissance scepticism consisted in rejecting traditional prejudice concerning the close link between Pyrrhonism and modern atheism, which prejudice was still the inspiration of Don Cameron Allen's research some years after the publication of Popkin's book. I will not examine in any detail Popkin's enquiry into the Renaissance — the centre of gravity of his work seems rather to be the reappraisal of scepticism in the classical age considered as a development of certain Renaissance trends — and even less all the progress that Popkin's work has allowed us to accomplish in the understanding of modern scepticism. In my eyes, the main interest of Popkin's masterly study is to paint a panoramic view of the reintroduction of ancient pyrrhonism into modern philosophy, and to show decisively that "skepsis" played a major role in the classical age. Popkin's approach has nevertheless imposed limits on the examination of the scepticism rediscovered and deployed during the Renaissance, as regards the dimensions of that movement, and above all as regards certain options in its interpretation. I would like to point out a few of Popkin's presuppositions or methodological options, which should lead us to undertake a re-examination of Renaissance Pyrrhonism"

Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Exercises in Skeptical Cartography

Abstract: Despite their divergences, I argue that Sextus, Montaigne, and Hume are committed to several substantive points of commonality and that these commonalities justify us in speaking of them as belonging to a unitary Pyrrhonist tradition. In this tradition, Pyrrhonizing doubt serves to chart the boundary of that-which-resists-doubt, thereby simultaneously charting the shape of that complex of nature and custom which constitutes the bedrock of human life — the life that remains after doubt has done its worst.