Talk:Pyrrho

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Contents 1 Pronounciation? 2 Dates? 3 Be bold! 4 Bryson 5 Paragraph removed 6 The last sentence

[edit] Pronounciation?

I suggest someone adds a brief phonetic pronunciation of Pyrrho. I would do it myself, but I don't know the proper pronunciation. 63.100.44.98 22:29, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dates?

Those dates are rather accurate: most sources quote an approximate decade for birth and death: can you give a cite for these dates?

Sorry, got those dates from one of the many skeptics pages I've read tonight; you're right, after doing a minimum of research I realise that those dates aren't known with that accuracy. Article edited to reflect this.

[edit] Be bold!

NO, no, NO! This article should not be labeled as a possible copyright violation. That URL links to an article that was copied from Wikipedia and says so at the bottom of the article! Please wake up! --Blanchette 04:59, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Be bold! I now routinely revert copyvio notices on articles where the "source" is a blatant Wikipedia mirror or one of the well-known public-domain sources like the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Just leave a note on Wikipedia:Copyright problems mentioning why it's not a copyvio. DopefishJustin (･∀･) 15:54, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bryson

I cannot find references to a Bryson in Wikipedia that has relevance with the topic. Perhaps one should eliminate this link until there's one for the correct Bryson. I'm a user from pt.wikipedia and I'm translating this to portuguese. Cheers!

[edit] Paragraph removed

I removed the following paragraph since it describes sceptical strategies that are not to be found in any of the sources on Pyrrho:

The same thing appears differently to different people, and therefore it is impossible to know which opinion is right. The diversity of opinion among the wise, as well as among the vulgar, proves this. To every assertion the contradictory assertion can be opposed with equally good grounds, and whatever my opinion, the contrary opinion is believed by somebody else who is quite as clever and competent to judge as I am. Opinion we may have, but certainty and knowledge are impossible. Hence our attitude to things (the third question), ought to be complete suspension of judgment. We can be certain of nothing, not even of the most trivial assertions

This is a hotch potch of the ten modes of scepticism, compiled by Aenesidemus and have nothing to do with Pyrrho although they belong to Pyrrhonism. --D. Webb 06:28, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The last sentence

Please, nobody ever remove or alter the last sentence of this article. It may be the best thing I've ever read in an encyclopedia. Thanks! --72.1.83.120 21:23, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

It's probably the best thing I've ever written. -Jimbo Wales

I hope it isn't the best thing you've ever written - because it's either outright wrong or too much on the punchy side to operate with a transparent sense of the word 'dogmatist.'

In PH 1.15 Sextus (by far the best source on Pyrrho) writes the following:

… [T]he main point is this: in uttering these phrases [the Pyrrhonian] says what is apparent to him and reports his own impression [pathos] without holding opinions, affirming nothing about external objects.

What the Pyrrhonist sees as setting him apart from dogmatic philosophers is that when he makes statements he intends these to be understood as reporting how things appear to him, not as his making claims about how the world is independently of his appearances. Pyrrho (as far as we can tell) doesn't go so far as to say nothing is knowable (as the Academic sceptics would) - rather he says he doesn't know whether anything is knowable or not(PH1.1). This is what makes him purely non-dogmatic - he assents to no doctrine whatsoever as true - merely reporting whether or not certain things seem to him to be true or not.

I really think that last sentence should go.

In fact: consider the following - from the very first chapter of Sextus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

"Those who are called Dogmatists in the proper sense of the word think that they have discovered the truth - for example, the schools of Aristotle and Epicurus and the Stoics, and some others. The schools of Clitomachus and Carneades, and other Academics, have asserted that things cannot be apprehended. And the Sceptics [i.e. Pyrrho] are still investigating."

in light of this, the last sentence of the article seems scandalously misrepresentative. Pyrrho (as we know him) clearly doesn't state that the truth can't be known, and on the first page of the major treatise on Pyrrhonism Sextus makes it clear that his doctrine is distinct from this - he simply isn't a negative dogmatist.

Mackenho (talk) 02:27, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Mackenho (talk) 02:16, 7 May 2008 (UTC)mackenho

Can we say "Ownership of an article?"... Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 15:35, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I also changed the first sentence of the 'philosophy' section - in line with what was said above about the inaccuracy of the label 'negative dogmatism'. The old sentence read as follows:

The main principle of Pyrrho's thought is expressed by the word acatalepsia, which connotes the *impossibility* of knowing things in their own nature. Mackenho (talk) 01:50, 8 May 2008 (UTC)