Pyrrho, the first Greek sceptic, marched to India with Alexander the Great
Pyrrho of Elis wrote nothing at all, yet a whole school of doubt carries his name. He travelled with Alexander's army as far as India, and later taught that peace of mind comes from giving up firm beliefs, holding that any thing no more is than is not.
He lived roughly from 365 or 360 to 275 or 270 BC in Elis, on the Ionian Sea, and probably belonged to the Klytidiai, a clan of seers who interpreted oracles at the temple of Zeus at Olympia, where he served as high priest. Unlike the founders of other Hellenistic schools, he owed little to Socrates. Before his travels he had studied in the Democritean tradition, which already contained sceptical ideas.
Together with the philosopher Anaxarchus he joined Alexander's campaign into India between 327 and 325 BC, meeting the naked ascetics the Greeks called gymnosophists and the Persian Magi. Diogenes Laërtius claims this is where he picked up his doctrine of suspending judgment. Scholars disagree sharply. Richard Bett doubts any real Indian influence, noting that talking to the gymnosophists reportedly took three interpreters, none versed in philosophy, and Buddhist scholar Johannes Bronkhorst sees no link with early Buddhism. Others suggest Jain or Ajnana thinkers may have left a mark.
Almost everything known about his thought comes from his pupil Timon of Phlius, whom he first met at a temple on the road to Delphi, and Timon's writings survive only in fragments. The central summary, preserved by Eusebius quoting Aristocles quoting Timon, says things are equally indifferent, unstable and indeterminate, so neither senses nor opinions are true or false, and we should stay without opinion or wavering. Readers still argue over whether that makes reality itself indeterminate, which later Pyrrhonists would count as a dogma of its own.
His goal was ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, sometimes compared to nirvana. Centuries later Aenesidemus revived the movement, and Sextus Empiricus, writing more than 400 years after Pyrrho's death, set out its method: collect arguments of equal strength on both sides of a question until suspending judgment becomes a habit, and tranquillity follows. Pyrrhonism became one of two great sceptical schools of the Hellenistic age, alongside Academic scepticism.
Source: Pyrrho
