Category: Ataraxia
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Lent and Media Dreck
Lent is a good time for a plenary news fast, or, if you can't quite manage that, a time to moderate your intake of media dreck. It suffices to be aware of the overall drift of events as the Left pursues its pernicious purposes; there is no necessity of recording every particular outrage. And this…
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A Peace Worth Wanting? Problems with Pyrrhonian Ataraxia: Passivity and Porcinity
The Pyrrhonians see clearly that part of our misery in this life is due to our inability to attain certain knowledge. Wanting certainty, but unable to secure it, we are thrown back upon conflicting beliefs that inflame passions. The heat of the passions seems to vary inversely with the rational unprovability of the beliefs that…
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Presumption and Suspension of Judgment
I continue my Pyrrhonian ponderings. What is exercising me at the moment is the question of how suspending judgment as to the truth or falsity of a proposition p is related to presuming that p. I will propose that there are two forms of suspension of judgment. There is suspension in the service of…
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The Pious Pyrrhonian: Is Beliefless Piety Possible?
Is it possible to be a religiously pious Pyrrhonian? The Pyrrhonian skeptic, aspiring to tranquillity of mind, tries to live without beliefs. These of course include religious beliefs which are a prime cause of bitter and sometimes bloody contention. So one might think that a skeptic of the stripe of Sextus would have nothing to…
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Inquiry, Doxastic Equipose, and Ataraxia
Seldom Seen Slim writes, I'm very happy to see you writing (so well) about the summum bonum. I don't have the text of Sextus at hand to cite you chapter & verse, but I think I recall this correctly. It would be pretty ironic for a skeptic to denigrate inquiry since skeptikos means precisely…
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Ataraxia and the Impossibility of Living Without Beliefs
John Lennon bade us "imagine no religion." But why single out religious beliefs as causes of conflict and bloodshed when nonreligious beliefs are equally to blame? Maybe the problem is belief as such. Can we imagine no beliefs? Perhaps we need to examine the possibility of living belieflessly. In exploration and exfoliation of this possibility we…
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Meditation: What and Why
Here are some preliminary thoughts on the nature and purposes of meditation. Perhaps a later post will deal with methods of meditation. Meditation Defined We need to start with a working definition. The question of what meditation is is logically prior to the questions of why to do it and how to do it. The…
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Ataraxia and Non-Contradiction
What is the highest good? To be a bit more precise, what is the highest good attainable by us though our own (individual or collective) efforts? One perennially attractive, if unambitious, answer is that of the Pyrrhonian skeptics: our highest good lies in ataraxia. The term connotes tranquillity, peace of mind, freedom from disturbance, unperturbedness.…
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Ataraxia and the Tobacco Wacko
Near the end of the 1980's I read a paper at a multi-day philosophy conference in Ancient Olympia, Greece. After one of the sessions, we repaired to a beautiful seaside spot for lunch. We sat in the open air at long tables under a canopy. Directly across from me sat a Greek woman who had…