Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism

Mary Mills Patrick's 1899 study opens a window onto one of antiquity's most radical philosophical traditions: Pyrrhonian skepticism, as preserved in the writings of Sextus Empiricus. At a time when the Cambridge School and Victorian classicists were just beginning to recover Hellenistic philosophy for modern readers, Patrick undertook the ambitious task of making Sextus's challenging work accessible to English-speaking students. The book situates Sextus within his intellectual milieu, tracing skepticism's development from Pyrrho through the Academic philosophers, while establishing the crucial connection between skepticism and empiricism that gives Sextus his distinctive character. Most valuably, Patrick includes her own translations of Sextus's «Pyrrhonic Sketches», offering readers direct access to the philosopher's devastating arguments against dogmatism in every domain: logic, physics, ethics. What emerges is not mere negativity but a practical philosophy of suspension of judgment (epoché) as a path to tranquility (ataraxia). For readers curious about the philosophical traditions that shaped Montaigne, the Enlightenment, and contemporary pragmatism, this remains a valuable, if dated, point of entry into one of antiquity's most coherent and challenging schools of thought.