Ancient Greek and Roman · c. 300 BCE
Pyrrhonism
Overview
Set opposing arguments side by side, suspend judgment when they balance and find calm in no longer forcing a verdict.
Pyrrhonism takes its name from Pyrrho of Elis, who lived around 300 BCE and wrote nothing. His followers remembered him as a man who stayed calm by refusing to claim that he knew how things really are. The school was revived centuries later, and its fullest surviving account is the Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus, a Greek doctor of the second century CE.
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The method is to set appearances and arguments against each other. When opposed claims seem equally strong, the skeptic suspends judgment, and tranquility follows. A later skeptic, Agrippa, left five modes that bring a claim to suspension: disagreement, endless regress, relativity, bare assumption and circular support. The skeptic still lives and acts, guided by appearances, feelings, custom and the skills of a trade.
Critics, ancient and modern, ask whether anyone can live without beliefs, and whether the skeptic’s own method is a belief in disguise. The school’s influence ran through Montaigne and Hume to modern debates about justification. The habit worth keeping is to notice when the case on each side is even, and to hold off rather than force a verdict.
Where it answers
How do we know?
When the arguments balance, suspend judgment, and calm follows.
Key terms
- Epoché
- Suspending judgment, when the arguments on each side seem equal.
- Ataraxia
- The tranquility that, the skeptics found, follows suspending judgment.
- Equal force of arguments
- Isostheneia: opposing arguments balance each other.
- Five modes of Agrippa
- Five ways to show a claim is unsupported: disagreement, endless regress, relativity, assumption and circularity.
- Living by appearances
- Acting on how things seem, without claiming to know how they are.
Further reading
- Outlines of Pyrrhonism · Sextus Empiricus
- Against the Mathematicians · Sextus Empiricus
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Quest2Reason. “Pyrrhonism.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/pyrrhonism. Accessed 13 November 2026.