The Founder of Western Skepticism Walked to India With Alexander and Came Back Doubting

Pyrrho of Elis is the philosopher who founded what later became known as ancient skepticism, and he is famous mostly for things he didn't do. He didn't write anything. He held no formal academic position. He may have served as a high priest in a clan of seers at the temple of Zeus in Olympia, but the records on this are thin. He died around 270 BCE at somewhere between 85 and 95 years old — startlingly old for the period — having spent most of his life teaching by example.

The one detail that makes Pyrrho interesting in the textbook sense is that he traveled. He attached himself to Alexander the Great's eastern campaign, probably as part of a larger philosophical entourage, and was present in northwestern India around 327–325 BCE. Diogenes Laërtius, citing earlier biographers, says Pyrrho met both the Persian Magi and the Indian "gymnosophists" — naked ascetics, very likely Hindu or Jain — and absorbed something of their methods. Whether this contact substantively shaped his philosophy is the kind of question that ancient philology has been arguing about for two centuries; the modern critic Richard Bett thinks the language barrier alone makes deep transmission unlikely.

What Pyrrho came home with, in any case, was a method of suspending judgment about whether things really were the way they appeared. The goal was ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance. His student Timon of Phlius preserved much of the doctrine in verse satires that we read in fragments. The fullest surviving account is in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, written more than four centuries after Pyrrho's death — by which time the school had grown a working epistemology that influenced Hume, Montaigne, and most of modern philosophy of mind.