Sextus Empiricus

In a quiet corner of the Roman Empire sometime in the late second or early third century of our era, a physician sits at a wooden table, scratching notes onto a wax tablet by lamplight. Around him the house is dark; outside, the city is sleeping. On the shelves behind him are scrolls by Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Chrysippus, Hippocrates. He has read them all, argued with them in his mind, and found in each something impressive and something unproven. Tonight he is trying to do something different. Not to build yet another doctrine about the soul or the gods or the best life, but to catalogue the ways in which any such doctrine can be unsettled. His name is Sextus Empiricus, and though he writes in an age of worn-out certainties and competing cults, what he sets down will become one of the most powerful handbooks of doubt ever composed. We know almost nothing about Sextus’ personal life in the way we know about Socrates or Seneca. He left no anecdotes about himself, no self-dramatizing death. What we have are his works: dense, sometimes repetitive, but astonishingly systematic. He was almost certainly a doctor by profession, probably of the Empiric school of medicine, which distrusted grand theories about hidden causes and relied instead on observation, experience, and analogy. That attitude—suspicion toward unseen explanatory entities, and respect for what can actually be observed—shapes his philosophy. Selenius Media