Sources of Knowledge of Sextus Empiricus in Hume's Time

Abstract

In the excellent article by Leo Groarke and Graham Solomon, Some Sources for Hume's Account of Cause (JHI, 52 [1991], 645-63), the authors discuss ways in which David Hume could have known about Sextus's arguments. In addition to two main possibilities they descuss, the English publication of the complete text of Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism in Thomas Stanley's very popularHistory ofPhilosophyin 1655-60 and reprinted in 1687; and the 1718 edition by J. A. Fabricius of the Greek text and Latin translation ofthe works of Sextus; there were several other ways in which one could have known of Sextus's arguments in the early eighteenth century.I First, there was a complete French translation of one of Sextus's works in 1 725, Les Hipotiposes ou Institutions Pirroniennes de Sextus Empiricus en trois livres, Traduites du grec,2 reissued in 1735.3 It was done by a Swiss mathematician, Claude Huart. In the preface, Huart said that it was not necessary to give areasonforpublishing the Hypotyposes inFrench, since there are some who will enjoy reading the text in French rather than in Greek or Latin. The translator said that he did not feel obliged to refute Pyrrhonism, since he was only rendering the text. However, he mentioned that so many great men both ancient and modem have been skeptics, and in the last century there have been so many habiles skeptics such as Pierre Charron, Michel de Montaigne, La Mothe Le Vayer, the savant Gassendi secretly, Bayle, and tout nouvellement feu M. Huet, fonner bishop ofAvranches.4 In the translation there are some striking similarities in phraseology to that of Hume, and some notes suggesting points