ACTing as a Pyrrhonist Josef Mattes, PhD, MSc. https://research.jmattes.at This version: 2021-04-14 Comments are highly welcome:
[email protected] The Pyrrhonian Way Despite being little known outside specialist philosophical circles, the work of Sextus Empiricus seems of remarkable interest not only to philosophy more widely, but also to psychology: On the one hand, his work may well be, in the history of "western" philosophy, the third most influential among ancient Greek philosophers (Mates 1996: 4, Popkin 1979) , with only that of Plato and Aristotle ahead of his; on the other hand, he made claims regarding a way to achieve tranquility by following the Pyrrhonian Way (named after the earlier Hellenistic Philosopher Pyrrho1) which should be of interest to psychologists and psychotherapists, since “if [...] it turns out that the Pyrrhonists found a way to secure peace of mind, we better know the details.” (Wieland 2012: 277) Except for the work of Sextus, hardly any information about the Pyrrhonian Way survived (see Caizzi (2020) for the surviving fragments related to Pyrrho), therefore his extant works (PH, AD, AM)2 were extensively studied by philosophers. On the other hand, I am not aware of any work approaching him from a psychological science point of view, despite his obvious (at least potential) relevance to positive psychology and psychotherapy, and despite philosophers not being shy to make psychological pronouncements concerning his work. Note: In this essay I use the terminology "Pyrrhonian Way" rather than the more common terms Pyrrhonism or Skepticism, since, clearly, Sextus did not want to propagate yet another -ism (Jürß 2001: 7, Mates 1996: 6) , and since “Sextus [...] frequently uses the word agōgē (“way of life,” “conduct”) to describe his own stance.” (Marchand 2019: 25) In particular, I will avoid the term "skepticism," since today it has connotations that are very different from the meaning of the Greek word skepsis.