Pyrrho

Pyrrho was born around 360 BC in Elis, lived through the conquests of Alexander the Great, and died around 270. He is credited as the first Greek sceptic and the founder of the school later called Pyrrhonism. He probably belonged to the Klytidiai, a clan of seers at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

He began as a painter, turned to philosophy after reading Democritus, and learned Megarian logic from Bryson and Stilpo. The decisive event was joining Alexander's eastern campaign around 334 BC. With Anaxarchus he reached the Magi in Persia and the Gymnosophists in India. Diogenes Laertius reports he took from this experience his doctrine of incomprehensibility and the necessity of suspending judgement. Whether early Buddhist or Jain ideas influenced him remains contested.

Returning to Elis he lived in poverty; Athens granted him citizenship. He wrote nothing. His thought survives through Timon of Phlius's satirical verse and a summary by Aristocles in Eusebius. That passage states: things are equally indifferent, unstable, and indeterminate; neither senses nor opinions are true or false; therefore hold no opinion, but say of every thing that it no more is than is not.

The core of his philosophy is the pair epoche (suspension of judgement) and ataraxia (freedom from disturbance). When arguments on both sides have equal strength (isostheneia), the rational response is to suspend. Made habitual, this produces unshakeable calm — Sextus Empiricus later wrote that ataraxia follows epoche as a shadow follows the body. Pyrrho proposed it as liberation from the anxious need to be right.

Diogenes Laertius reports the legend that Pyrrho, blindfolded while explaining scepticism, doubted a warning of a cliff and fell to his death; the same author calls the story doubtful. His school was systematised by Aenesidemus, summarised by Sextus Empiricus around AD 200, and rediscovered in the Renaissance to influence Montaigne, Descartes, and Hume.