Epicurus Against The White Flags of Surrender: Sextus Empiricus and the Pyrrhonists

Of all the philosophical enemies Epicurus faced, none were more insidious than the skeptics. The Stoics and Platonists at least claimed to know things — and could therefore be argued with, corrected, and refuted on the basis of what the evidence actually shows. The skeptics were more obstinate opponents. They claimed, in various ways, that knowing things was impossible — and from that position it is very hard to dislodge anyone, because every argument you make against them can be met with the same response: perhaps, but how can you be sure?

Epicurus was sure. The Canon — his account of how knowledge is actually possible, grounded in sensation, in the anticipations nature builds through experience, and in the feelings of pleasure and pain — was not an epistemological opinion that could be set against the skeptics’ epistemological opinion and treated as one view among many. It was, Epicurus insisted, the account of how every human being actually does acquire knowledge of the world, including the skeptics themselves, whether they acknowledged it or not. The skeptics were not discovering a genuine problem with human knowledge. They were performing a philosophical confusion and calling it wisdom.

There is a reason this matters urgently for anyone studying Epicurus today — and it goes beyond academic history. One of the most persistent and damaging errors in modern presentations of Epicurean philosophy is the elevation of ataraxia — freedom from disturbance — as the central goal of the philosophy. “Epicurus teaches ataraxia,” the textbooks say, and the reader nods and moves on. The problem is that the Pyrrhonists — the most radical skeptics in the ancient world, and among the most determined opponents of everything Epicurus stood for — also claimed to teach ataraxia. They used the exact same word to describe the goal of their philosophy. And their ataraxia, as we will see, was not a description of the pleasurable life fully lived. It was a description of the philosophical equivalent of switching off.

This confusion would be impossible if Epicurus’s actual teaching were kept clearly in view. Epicurus does not say the goal of life is ataraxia. He says the goal of life is pleasure — that pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life, that nature itself has provided pleasure and pain as the guides by which every living creature navigates toward genuine goods and away from genuine harms, and that the philosophical life aimed at pleasure, guided by reason and wisdom, is the best life available to a human being. Ataraxia — freedom from groundless disturbance — is one component of that pleasurable life, not its definition and not its goal. Sometimes life does require the disturbance of urgent action. The moment you substitute ataraxia for pleasure as the central term, you have opened the door to the Pyrrhonist, who can walk straight through it and claim to be teaching Epicurean philosophy. Keeping pleasure as the goal keeps that door shut. The two philosophies cannot be confused when you take Epicurus at his word.

So there were two distinct and importantly different skeptical traditions that Epicurus and his followers confronted — and understanding what separates them is essential to understanding what is wrong with each.

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The First Stream: Skepticism from the Inside — The Academic Tradition

To understand Academic Skepticism you have to understand how it arose, because its origin is one of the more remarkable transformations in the history of philosophy. Plato founded the Academy in Athens around 387 BC as a school for the pursuit of philosophical and mathematical knowledge. For generations it operated as what ancient philosophers called a “dogmatic” school — meaning not dogmatic in the pejorative modern sense, but in the technical ancient sense: it taught definite doctrines and maintained them. Plato’s theory of Forms, the immortality of the soul, the supremacy of reason over sensation — these were the Academy’s commitments, and it defended them.

Then something happened. In the third century BC, the Academy underwent a philosophical revolution under a leader named Arcesilaus. Arcesilaus turned the Academy against its own Platonic heritage — or, more precisely, turned it against the Platonic heritage as the Stoics were attempting to appropriate it. The Stoics, under Zeno and Chrysippus, had developed a theory of knowledge centered on what they called the “kataleptic impression” — a mental impression so clear and distinct that it guaranteed its own accuracy and could serve as the foundation for certain knowledge. Arcesilaus attacked this claim with devastating effect, arguing that no impression could be so clear and distinct as to guarantee its own accuracy, and that therefore suspension of judgment was the only honest response to any question.

His successor Carneades pushed the argument further and in more directions. Carneades was one of the most brilliantly destructive debaters in ancient philosophy. He made it his practice to argue both sides of any question with equal force, demonstrating that for every philosophical position, an equally compelling case could be made for the opposite, and that certainty was therefore nowhere to be found. He is reported to have once delivered a speech in Rome in praise of justice — and then the next day delivered an equally convincing speech against it — for the explicit purpose of demonstrating that certainty on ethical questions is impossible.

The Academic Skeptics called themselves “Academics” because they occupied the Academy, Plato’s own school. They directed their arguments primarily against the Stoics, whose theory of knowledge was their main target. But they did not limit their attacks to the Stoics. Epicurean claims to reliable knowledge through sensation were equally in their sights, and the Academic argument against sensation as a reliable guide — the familiar litany of perceptual illusions, the tower that looks round from far away and square up close, the oar that appears bent in water, the honey that tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the feverish — was applied to Epicurean epistemology with the same force as to Stoic.

The Academic response to this supposed situation was not total silence. Carneades introduced the concept of the pithanon — the “probable” or “persuasive” — as a practical substitute for knowledge. We cannot know with certainty, but we can identify some impressions as more persuasive than others, and act on those. This is the skepticism familiar from Cicero, who was himself deeply influenced by the Academic tradition and presents its arguments at length in his philosophical dialogues. It is arguably a more livable position: suspend judgment about certainty, but act on probability.

Epicurus’s response to this entire tradition was that it mistook a philosophical argument for a genuine epistemological discovery. The Academic argument works only if you accept a standard of knowledge so demanding that nothing could meet it — the standard of infallible certainty — and then declare that since nothing meets that standard, nothing is known. But that standard was never the right one. The right standard is what the Canon provides: does this account cohere with what sensation reports? Does it predict accurately what further observation reveals? Has the experience built up through many encounters generated a genuine anticipation — a reliable pre-formed recognition of what things of this kind are like? These tests produce reliable knowledge — not infallible certainty, but reliable enough to direct a life and build a philosophy.

As for the Academic’s appeal to perceptual illusions: Epicurus’s answer is that the illusions are not in the sensations but in the judgments we form on top of them. The oar in the water looks bent — that is what sensation accurately reports about the visual relationship between this eye, this oar, and this water. The error comes when we judge that the oar is bent in fact, going beyond what sensation reports. The correction is more observation and better judgment, not abandonment of sensation as a guide. The Academic who cites the bent oar as evidence against sensation has misidentified where the error occurs.

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The Second Stream: Skepticism from the East — Pyrrho and His Heirs

The second skeptical tradition is older than Academic Skepticism in its origins, more radical in its conclusions, and stranger in its genealogy. Its founder was Pyrrho of Elis, a contemporary of Epicurus — both were born around 360 BC — who came to philosophy through an unusual route.

Pyrrho had been a painter before he became a philosopher. He was drawn into philosophical company through the Democritean tradition, and he subsequently traveled with Alexander the Great’s army on its conquest of the East, spending time in Persia and reaching India. There, according to Diogenes Laertius and other ancient sources, he encountered two groups of teachers whose influence on his subsequent philosophy appears to have been substantial: the gymnosophists — the “naked wise men,” Indian ascetic philosophers who rejected material possessions including clothing as irrelevant to genuine wisdom — and the Persian Magi.

What exactly Pyrrho absorbed from these encounters is disputed by scholars, and there were genuine practical difficulties: multiple layers of translation were required, and the quality of philosophical communication through three interpreters is inherently limited. Nevertheless, the parallels between Pyrrho’s subsequent philosophy and certain Indian philosophical traditions — particularly Buddhism and Jainism — are striking enough to have attracted serious scholarly attention. The Buddhist doctrine that attachment to views and beliefs generates suffering, and that liberation comes from releasing all such attachment, maps onto Pyrrho’s central claim with remarkable precision. The Indian concept of anatta — no-self, the dissolution of the individual into a state beyond personal desire and judgment — echoes in the Pyrrhonist ideal of the sage who has achieved total suspension of judgment and the tranquility that supposedly follows from it.

Pyrrho himself wrote nothing. What we know of his views comes primarily through his student Timon of Phlius, and even Timon’s works survive only in fragments quoted by later authors. The tradition Pyrrho established did not immediately flourish — it was the Academic Skeptics, occupying Plato’s own institution, who dominated philosophical discussion in the Hellenistic period.

Pyrrhonism was formally revived and systematized centuries later by Aenesidemus, a first-century BC philosopher who had himself been associated with the Academy and became dissatisfied with what he considered the Academic Skeptics’ excessive willingness to accept probability as a practical guide. Aenesidemus argued that the Academics had been insufficiently radical — that probability was just another form of dogmatism in disguise. He organized the Pyrrhonist arguments into ten systematic “modes” or “tropes,” categories of consideration that could generate suspension of judgment on any question whatsoever.

A second generation of systematizers, associated with a figure called Agrippa, reduced these ten modes to five and then to two, stripping the arguments to their most essential logical forms. And then, at the end of the line, came Sextus Empiricus — writing in the late second or early third century AD, more than five hundred years after Pyrrho himself — who produced in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism and his Against the Professors the most systematic, comprehensive, and intellectually careful presentation of radical skepticism that antiquity produced.

Sextus is important not because he added new arguments but because he preserved, in organized and accessible form, the full arsenal of Pyrrhonist reasoning that might otherwise have been lost. He also distinguished Pyrrhonism sharply from Academic Skepticism, and the distinction matters.

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How the Two Traditions Differ — and Why Both Are Wrong

The Academic Skeptics said: we cannot achieve certainty, but we can identify more and less persuasive impressions and act on the more persuasive ones. They denied the possibility of knowledge but allowed a practical substitute.

The Pyrrhonists said: that concession to probability is already a philosophical surrender to dogmatism. True suspension of judgment means suspending judgment about everything, including probability itself, including the skeptical arguments themselves. The Pyrrhonist does not claim to know that nothing can be known. The Pyrrhonist claims only to be withholding judgment — on all things, in all directions, without remainder.

This distinction matters for what each tradition implies about how to live. The Academic, having accepted probability as a practical guide, can function in the world much as anyone else does — making decisions, forming preferences, pursuing goals, even arguing for philosophical positions (though with the caveat that certainty is unavailable). Cicero, the most influential ancient representative of this tradition, was a prolific author, a practicing lawyer, a senator, and a figure of enormous practical consequence. His Academic Skepticism did not prevent him from doing things and caring about outcomes.

The Pyrrhonist ideal was different and much stranger. The goal of Pyrrhonism was ataraxia — tranquility, freedom from disturbance — achieved not through correct philosophical understanding of the world, as Epicurus achieved it, but through the progressive elimination of all judgment about the world. The Pyrrhonist sage who has truly achieved suspension of judgment on all matters is, in theory, no longer disturbed by anything, because disturbance presupposes caring about outcomes, and caring about outcomes presupposes judging that some outcomes are better than others, and that judgment is precisely what the Pyrrhonist has suspended.

The ancient critics of Pyrrhonism raised what seems like an obvious objection: how does the Pyrrhonist act at all? If you have genuinely suspended judgment about whether food is better than starvation, whether shelter is better than exposure, whether walking around obstacles is better than walking into them — how do you get through the day? The ancient legend that Pyrrho himself was so committed to his principles that he had to be rescued by companions from walking off cliffs (a story Diogenes Laertius reports) may be apocryphal, but it captures the logical problem precisely. The Pyrrhonists’ answer was that they acted on appearances — not on judgments about appearances, but on the appearances themselves, following what seemed to present itself without committing to any view about what it really was. This was a clever response, but it was not a satisfying one, and Epicurus would have seen through it immediately: following appearances without making any judgment about them is not a description of how anyone actually acts. It is a verbal formula designed to make an impossible lifestyle sound coherent.

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The Eastern Roots: What Was Really Imported

The connection between Pyrrhonism and Eastern philosophical traditions is worth examining carefully, because it illuminates what the Pyrrhonist program is actually aimed at — and what is philosophically hazardous about it.

The Indian traditions that apparently influenced Pyrrho — whether Buddhist, Jain, or the Ajnanist tradition that explicitly advocated ignorance and the suspension of all views — share a common feature that is foreign to Greek philosophy in general and to Epicurean philosophy in particular: they treat the individual self as either illusory or as a source of suffering that must be dissolved or transcended. The Buddhist anatta doctrine holds that there is no permanent self. The Jain doctrine of anekantavada holds that all philosophical positions are partially true and partially false from different perspectives, making certainty on any view impossible. The gymnosophist ideal of the naked sage who has stripped away all material attachment extends to stripping away cognitive attachment as well — the belief in any particular view of the world.

What these traditions have in common is the identification of desire, judgment, and the sense of self as the source of suffering — and the prescription of their elimination as the cure. This is diametrically opposed to the Epicurean position. For Epicurus, desire is not the problem; empty and unlimited desire is the problem. Sensation is not the enemy; mistaken judgment layered on top of sensation is the enemy. The self is not an illusion to be dissolved; it is the seat of the pleasure and pain that constitute the only real measure of how well a life is going. The correction for false beliefs is better beliefs, not the dissolution of the capacity for belief. The cure for excessive desire is the pursuit of genuine goods, not the elimination of desire as such.

When Pyrrho returned from India and applied what he had apparently absorbed there to Greek philosophy, he was not discovering a Greek philosophical insight that had been waiting to be named. He was importing a framework that was alien to the Greek philosophical project at its most fundamental level — the project of understanding the world in order to live better in it. The Pyrrhonist goal of suspended judgment leading to tranquility is recognizable as a Greek translation of something like Buddhist nirvana: a state of absolute equanimity achieved by releasing all attachment to how things are. The problem is that such a state, if genuinely achieved, would be indistinguishable from death. A person who has truly ceased to judge that any outcome is better than any other has ceased to have preferences, and a person who has ceased to have preferences has ceased to be the kind of living creature whose wellbeing can go better or worse. The goal of Pyrrhonism, pursued consistently, terminates not in tranquility but in the philosophical equivalent of suicide.

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What “Ataraxia” Actually Means — and Why the Pyrrhonists Stole the Word

Here is one of the most revealing points of contact between Pyrrhonism and Epicurean philosophy: both traditions use the word ataraxia — freedom from disturbance — as a description of something desirable. The Pyrrhonists claimed to achieve ataraxia through suspension of judgment. Epicurus described the desirability of living a life of pleasure with a mind free from groundless fear and a body free from unnecessary pain.

But these are completely different things given the same name. Epicurean ataraxia is a positive achievement — pleasure accompanied by freedom from disturbance that belongs to a person who has understood the world correctly, freed themselves from the fear of death and of the gods, identified what genuinely satisfies them, and built a life organized around those genuine goods. It is the tranquility of someone who is fully engaged with a life they understand and love. It is, crucially, not the primary goal of Epicurean philosophy — it is a description of what the full cup feels like from the inside. Pleasure remains the primary goal, and the absence of groundless disturbance is one component of the pleasurable life, not a substitute for it.

Pyrrhonist ataraxia is something else entirely: the emptiness of a person who has suspended all judgment, who no longer cares about outcomes, who has ceased to be disturbed by anything because they have ceased to care about anything. It is the tranquility of someone who has switched off the instruments that would tell them how their life is going. It is, from the Epicurean standpoint, not philosophy but the philosophical performance of a kind of death.

The Pyrrhonist who holds up ataraxia as the destination and claims to have found a route to it through suspended judgment has, Epicurus would say, confused the map for the territory. The map shows a state of undisturbedness at the destination. The Pyrrhonist has found a different way to produce undisturbedness — by eliminating the sense that disturbance matters — and is claiming to have arrived. But the territory the map described was a life fully lived, not a life fully abandoned.

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A Name Designed to Mislead: Why “Sextus Empiricus” Is Not an Empiricist

Before proceeding to the logical consequences of Pyrrhonism, one further confusion deserves direct treatment — because it catches modern readers off guard and because it is exactly the kind of terminological trap that obscures rather than illuminates.

The name “Sextus Empiricus” sounds, to modern ears, like it describes a philosopher who believed that truth can be obtained through the senses — an empiricist in the modern sense, someone in the tradition of Locke or Hume or the broader scientific tradition that grounds knowledge in sensory observation. A reader encountering the name for the first time could easily assume they are dealing with a philosopher sympathetic to the Epicurean Canon, which also grounds knowledge in sensation. That assumption would be exactly wrong.

Sextus Empiricus was a radical skeptic who denied that reliable knowledge could be obtained through the senses or by any other means. He systematized the Pyrrhonist project of demonstrating that for every argument grounded in sensation, an equally compelling counter-argument could be constructed, and that the appropriate response to all sensory evidence was therefore suspension of judgment rather than any conclusion. The word “Empiricus” in his name has nothing to do with his epistemological commitments.

The label comes from his medical practice. Sextus was a physician, and he belonged to what ancient medicine called the “Empiric” school — one of the three main schools of ancient medicine alongside the Dogmatists and the Methodists. The Empiric school of medicine held that physicians should rely on observed clinical experience — what treatments had been seen to work in practice — rather than on theoretical speculation about the hidden causes of disease. This was a methodological position about medicine, not a philosophical position about the foundations of knowledge. Empiric physicians were skeptical of theoretical medicine, not skeptical of observation as such — their whole practice depended on accumulated clinical observation.

The irony, from an Epicurean standpoint, is pointed. The Empiric school of medicine came closer to genuine Epicurean epistemological principles than Sextus’s philosophical Pyrrhonism did. When Sextus was practicing medicine, he was presumably acting on the kind of accumulated experiential knowledge — observations of symptoms, treatments, and outcomes — that Epicurean canonics treats as the proper foundation for reliable belief. When Sextus was writing philosophy, he was systematically arguing that no such foundation was possible. The physician and the philosopher were at war with each other under the same name.

The practical lesson for students of Epicurus: encountering the name “Sextus Empiricus” in philosophical discussion, do not let the “Empiricus” mislead you. This is not an ally of the Epicurean Canon. This is its most systematic and comprehensive ancient opponent. The “empirical” in his name describes his day job. His philosophical legacy is the polar opposite of empiricism in any meaningful sense.

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The Logical Consequences of Radical Skepticism: Inaction, Nihilism, and the Wasted Life

Let us follow the Pyrrhonist program to its actual conclusion, which its sophisticated ancient defenders were careful never to make explicit.

If you have genuinely suspended judgment about whether pleasure is better than pain — and the Pyrrhonist must suspend this judgment, because to affirm it would be to commit to a dogmatic position — then you have suspended the natural guidance system that every human being is born with. Nature provides pleasure and pain as the instruments by which living creatures navigate toward what is genuinely good for them and away from what harms them. These instruments are not optional. They are not recommendations. They are the basic biological and psychological equipment of a living creature with a good life to pursue or miss.

The Pyrrhonist who suspends judgment on whether pleasure is better than pain has not achieved a philosophically superior neutrality. They have disabled their compass and called the resulting disorientation enlightenment.

What follows from disabled navigation? Not the pleasure of undisturbedness in any meaningful sense. What follows is one of three things. The first is covert action according to unacknowledged preferences — the Pyrrhonist sage who claims to have no views quietly eats when hungry and avoids fire, following their actual biological preferences while maintaining the philosophical pretense of suspended judgment. This is what Sextus Empiricus described as acting on appearances without committing to judgments about them — a formula that conceals continued ordinary action behind philosophical camouflage. The second possibility is genuine paralysis — inability to act because all grounds for preferring one action to another have been suspended. The Pyrrhonist legends of Pyrrho needing to be rescued from cliff edges belong to this territory. The third is despair — the recognition that if no outcome is better than any other, then the project of living a good life is incoherent, and nothing about one’s situation can warrant the energy of engagement.

None of these deserves the name of ataraxia. The first is self-deception. The second is dysfunction. The third is nihilism.

Vatican Saying 14 captures the Epicurean response to all of this with the directness the situation demands: “We are born once and there can be no second birth; for all eternity we shall no longer be. But you, who are not master of tomorrow, are putting off your happiness. Life is worn away in procrastination and each of us dies without allowing himself leisure.”

The Academic Skeptic who settles for probability and defers action pending certainty that will never come has worn away some part of the one life available. The Pyrrhonist who has dissolved the very framework within which action could be intelligently directed has worn away all of it. Both traditions, in different ways and to different degrees, make the same fundamental error: they treat the absence of certainty as a philosophical problem requiring a philosophical solution, rather than recognizing it as the normal condition of a living creature who must act now, with the instruments nature has provided, in the world that exists.

Epicurus had no patience for this performance. The Canon provides the instruments. Sensation reports accurately what it reports. The anticipations nature builds through experience allow reliable recognition of genuine goods and genuine harms. The feelings of pleasure and pain tell you, without the mediation of any philosophical theory, how your life is going and what direction it needs to move in. None of this requires certainty in the impossible sense the skeptics demand. It requires only the honesty to accept what nature provides and the courage to act on it.

The skeptics — Academic and Pyrrhonist alike — were performing an escape from that honesty. They had found, in different philosophical vocabularies, ways to avoid the recognition that you are alive, that your life has a direction, that some choices are genuinely better than others, and that the time to make them is now. Epicurus refused to join that escape. And he was right to refuse.

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The primary sources for Epicurean philosophy discussed here are the Letter to Menoeceus, the Letter to Herodotus, the Principal Doctrines, and the Vatican Sayings. The primary Pyrrhonist texts are Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Professors. Academic Skepticism is represented primarily through Cicero’s Academica and De Finibus. Discussion of these topics is ongoing at EpicureanFriends.com.