International Journal for the Study of 3 (2013) 295–307 brill.com/skep

Book Reviews

New Essays on Ancient Pyrrhonism. Edited by Diego E. Machuca. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. xi + 207. ISBN: 978-90-04-20776-9.

The self-proclaimed aim of this volume is to bring together “eight essays on ancient Pyrrhonism which discuss issues not previously examined or reconsider old ones from a different perspective, thus proposing new interpretations and advancing the scholarly study of the Pyrrhonian philosophy” (p. 2). That is a broad ambit. Perhaps too broad. In a footnote in his introduction to the essays (p. 3, n. 7), Diego Machuca distinguishes the present volume from Myles Burnyeat’s and ’s 1997 edited collection1 on the grounds that the latter, but not the former, restricts its focus to a specific controversy. It is not clear whether this is to the present volume’s advantage. As things stand we have: one essay which adopts a historico-philological approach; one which is predominantly concerned with literary matters; and six which are uncontroversially exercises in the history of philosophy—three concern epistemological themes, two examine the connection between scepticism and action, and one deals with meta-ethics. Diversity of argu- ment, opinion, and approach are of course virtues for any anthology, but in this instance the reader was left with the impression that the volume would have achieved greater focus and coherence if the essays had been woven around a more clearly defined question or set of questions. Of course that is not to say that there are not interesting and thought-provoking offerings within the volume, as the fol- lowing précis should indicate. Mauro Bonazzi’s piece, “A Pyrrhonian ? Again On Sextus On Aenesidemus On Plato,” opens the collection. The question Bonazzi sets himself is a historical one: when Sextus Empiricus argues for the incompatibility of the philosophy of Plato and scepticism, is Sextus in agreement or in disagreement with his sceptical predecessor Aenesidemus? The answer turns on a particularly corrupt sentence of Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism (hereafter PH) to which rival emendations have been applied. If the preposition kata in PH I 222 is followed by a genitive, then Sextus is arguing in opposition to Aenesidemus; if it takes an accusative, then Sextus is arguing in accordance with him. Bonazzi persuasively utilises textual, philological, and exegetical evidence to argue for the second of these readings. If Bonazzi’s approach is fundamentally philological, Stéphane Marchand’s is literary. In “Sextus Empiricus’ Style of Writing,” Marchand offers a number of

1 Burnyeat, M.F., and Frede, M. (eds.), The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/22105700-03011099 Book Reviews / 296 International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 295–307 explanations as to how sceptics like Timon and Sextus are able to convey their philosophical positions in writing if they suspend judgement about whether anything can be taught or known. In a brief first section on Timon, Marchand claims that literary devices like humour and parody play an important role in this regard. The bulk of Marchand’s paper then explores how Sextus developed what Marchand terms a “sceptical rhetoric” to deal with the same problem. Three fea- tures of this rhetoric which are singled out are Sextus’s use of locutions that express subjective reports, the provisional character of his prose, and its doxographical dimension. Of the more philosophical essays, three focus on epistemological matters. In “The Cyrenaics Vs. The Pyrrhonists On Knowledge of Appearances,” Tim O’Keefe argues that there is a significant difference between the way in which the Cyrenaics and the Pyrrhonists conceive of how they apprehend whatever is apparent to them. In a brief but tightly argued piece, O’Keefe contends that in asserting a proposition like “I feel cold,” the Cyrenaic is willing to say that he knows such a proposi­ tion, whereas the Pyrrhonist is not. The Cyrenaic therefore requires, in a way in which the Pyrrhonist does not, a theory about the content of his own perceptual states which grounds his thinking that claims like “I feel cold” are true. One particu- larly interesting claim that emerges from O’Keefe’s study is that for the Cyrenaic a claim like “I feel cold” is undeniable because it is epistemically self-evident, whereas for a Pyrrhonist such a claim is undeniable as a matter of psychological fact. James Warren’s “What God Didn’t Know,” one of the philosophically richest papers in the collection, ranges from Sextus Empiricus to Frank Jackson.2 Warren examines the sceptic’s attitude towards his own mental states, focussing on a pas- sage from Against the Mathematicians (hereafter AM) IX 162–6, where Sextus lays out an argument against the existence of god. Warren isolates one of the premises of this argument, namely, that the only way in which it is possible to acquire knowl- edge of what a pain is like by nature is by experiencing the pain in question. Warren then analyses the way in which Sextus defends this premise against possible counter-objections. His ultimate conclusion is that Sextus does not draw a clear distinction between the kind of access one has to one’s own inner mental states and the kind of access one has to the external world. Along the way to reaching this conclusion, Warren raises a number of interesting questions concerning the nature of ancient and contemporary conceptions of subjectivity. Otávio Bueno’s brief but punchy “Is the Pyrrhonist an Internalist?”, the last of the purely epistemological essays, argues against the view, ascribed to ,3 that the sceptic is committed to a form of epistemological internalism. Barnes, according to Bueno, maintains that the sceptic argues his externalist dog- matic opponent into the awkward position of not being able to believe he is justi- fied in believing some proposition, P, even if he is in fact justified in believing P. Against this view Bueno first argues that there is no reason for an externalist to

2 Jackson, F., “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291–5. 3 Barnes, J., The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).