Talk:Sextus Empiricus

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[edit] Does Sextus belong to the methodological tradition?

On what grounds is Sextus said to have belonged to the methodological school in medicine? To the contrary, his name would seem to indicate that he belonged to the empiric school. And indeed this is the conclusion of Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes in the introduction to their translation of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Cambridge UP, 2000), xii-xiii, as well as of Richard Bett in the introduction to his translation of and commentary on Against the Ethicists (Oxford UP, 1997), ix. Bett does refer to the passage in the Outlines (I.236-41), where Sextus would seem to imply that he belonged to the methodological tradition, and rejects the implication. (Annas and Barnes don't seem to even take the passage to imply that Sextus wasn't an empiric.) These scholars are some of the foremost authorities on Sextus today. So in light of what the foremost scholars agree on, shouldn't the article say that he belonged to the empiric tradition in medicine? --165.123.138.170 09:38, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

No, since other eminent scholars disagree (Frede, House, Mates), and, most importantly, Sextus himself (at the place you cite, I.236f.) says: "it would not befit a skeptic to take up that system [the empiric medical system]. He might better adopt the so-called Method, it seems to me, for it alone of the medical systems seems not to make precipitate assertions ... in accord with the skeptic practice." Annas, Barnes, and Bett have their arguments, but unless we want to expand the article to include the fine points, the safest route is to suspend judgment. After all, on what grounds is Sextus said to have belonged to the empiric school in medicine, aside from the name tradition attaches to him? 4.232.123.140 22:45, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nagarjuna

The article compares Sextus to 'the 1st century AD Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna'.

The Nagarjuna article puts him later. 131.111.8.104 11:52, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I removed the sentence which compares Sextus and Nagarjuna since it is extremely misleading from what I could see in the article on Nagarjuna. --D. Webb 15:18, 1 December 2006 (UTC)