Pyrrhon, Pyrrhus and the Possibility of the Past: A Response to David Henige

Abstract

To a significant degree David Henige’s commentary on selected sections of one of my essays on historiography suffers from a lack of clarity, misses the point of my argument or misrepresents it, or is otherwise puzzling. It further displays an unfortunate modern prejudice against faith vis-à-vis ‘knowledge’, and to that extent it is muddled from an epistemological point of view as well as deficient in its understanding of the nature of religion and of the religious worldview. To the extent that it does with clarity and conviction engage with my argument, it is unconvincing in its objections to it, not least because its philosophical foundation in Scepticism is unstable. Indeed, Henige’s characterization of himself as a ‘Pyrrhonian’, after the Greek philosopher Pyrrhon of Elis (the father of Scepticism), is misleading. Like other historians who claim to employ methodological scepticism, Henige more resembles ancient Pyrrhus than ancient Pyrrhon; for the sceptic’s argumentative ‘victories’ are too costly to be worth the winning (Pyrrhic victories indeed), and the arguments that produce them ‘prove’ too much to be taken seriously. As Berkeley once put it, they at one and the same time ‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’.