Apraxia and the Development of Ancient Skepticisms

Abstract

AbstractAs the Modern philosophers were not the pioneers in arguing against the practicability of Skepticism, since this argument started appearing at the very beginning of the history of the Skepticisms, both the Pyrrhonism and the thought of the Middle Academics. I am going to show that the argument is present as a seed even before the existence of more organized forms of Skepticism.With this in mind, we must take a look at Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV to see how the criticism arises, but against thinkers who were lately adopted by Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laërtius as kind of “Proto-skeptics”. Now if the latter Skeptics thought themselves as, in some ways, heirs of these Proto-skeptics, on the other hand, they also inherited the Aristotelian criticism aimed against those Proto-skeptics.After having traced the general lines of this first outline of the criticism against the practicability of the Skepticism (for now on “apraxia”) driven by Aristotle against the so-called Proto-skeptics, we investigate the variations and occurrences of the criticism against Pyrrho in his Life (D.L. IX, 61–71), where he is described as oddly behaving.