Skepticism enters the depth-psychology corpus along two principal axes: the ancient therapeutic tradition, where it figures as a practiced capability for suspending belief toward the end of ataraxia, and the modern epistemological tradition, where it appears as a condition of intellectual honesty obligatory upon any empirical inquiry into the psyche and its phenomena. Nussbaum’s extended treatment of Pyrrhonism in Hellenistic ethics is the corpus’s most sustained engagement: she reads Skepticism not as a doctrine but as a dunamis, a know-how for generating isostheneia — equal force between opposing impressions — such that dogmatic attachment loosens and tranquility supervenes. This therapeutic reading places Skepticism in direct comparison with Epicurean and Stoic therapies of desire, while also exposing its internal tensions: the Skeptic’s reliance on ataraxia as an implicit end arguably reinstates the very dogmatic commitment the practice seeks to dissolve. William James, approaching from empiricist psychology of religion, insists that skepticism cannot be ruled out by any thinker, yet distinguishes it sharply from ‘wanton doubt,’ positioning productive fallibilism as the honest middle ground between dogmatic certainty and epistemic nihilism. Cicero’s Academic materials in the corpus rehearse the ancient contest between Stoic cognition and Academic suspension of assent, illuminating the genealogy of probability as a guide to action in the absence of guaranteed knowledge. Across these authors, Skepticism functions less as terminus than as intellectual purgative — a solvent that clears the ground for whatever more livable orientation follows.
Skepticism is a technë, and art or science, an organized body of knowledge… one is learning a capability, a know-how; one learns how to do something, namely, to set up oppositions among impressions and beliefs.
Nussbaum, via Sextus Empiricus, defines Skepticism as a practical dunamis rather than a doctrine, grounding its therapeutic power in the cultivated ability to generate equal-force opposition among impressions.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
At the end of the Skeptical process (should it ever be finally ended — a thing the Skeptic doubts), Skepticism itself has vanished.
Skeptical argument is self-consuming in the manner of a purgative drug: by loosening attachment to all theses, including its own, it ultimately dissolves itself along with the dogmatic beliefs it opposes.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
Why does the Skeptic have a Skeptical attitude to ataraxia? According to him, because he must have this attitude, if he is to avoid disturbance and attain ataraxia.
Nussbaum exposes the internal paradox of Skeptical practice: the very commitment to ataraxia as an end constitutes an implicit dogmatic attachment that undermines the Skeptic’s official stance of universal suspension.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
Skepticism has in it none of the dogmatic sense of correctness and authority that shape Epicurean society. Since what we all aim at is to go in the flow of life, free of belief’s crushing weight, then none of us is higher or better than any other.
Pyrrhonist Skepticism, unlike Epicureanism, generates a non-hierarchical therapeutic community because the freedom it offers is equally available to all and presupposes no privileged knowledge.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure… to admit one’s liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another.
James distinguishes principled fallibilism — acknowledging the corrigibility of all conclusions — from destructive skepticism, framing the former as the epistemically honest stance for empirical inquiry into religious experience.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
Dogmatists, they insist, are self-loving, rash, puffed up… Skeptics, by contrast, are calm and gentle. Pyrrho used to be hasty and irascible in his youth… Skepticism taught him composure and good temper.
The Skeptical school presents the suspension of belief as a direct moral-psychological therapy, removing arrogance and irascibility and cultivating social gentleness and tolerance.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
The Skeptic, claims Sextus, will argue in exactly the way suited to the nature of the pupil’s disease… a good doctor will not give the patient an overdose but will carefully calibrate the dose of medicine to the magnitude of the disease.
Sextus Empiricus’s medical analogy grounds Skeptical pedagogy in individualized dosing of argumentative opposition, aligning Skepticism’s therapeutic procedure with the particularism of clinical medicine.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
Nikidion will find each of her arguments opposed by a counterargument… until there is no thesis she cares to defend, no belief… whose answer means more to her than the answer to the question whether the number of the stars is odd or even.
The Skeptical therapeutic procedure systematically leads the student through equipoise on every belief, reducing all theses to existential indifference as the precondition for undisturbed living.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
The Pyrrhonist determines absolutely nothing, not even this very claim that nothing is determined. (We put it this way, he says, for lack of a way to express the thought.)
Long and Sedley’s doxographical account captures the radical reflexivity of Pyrrhonism: the suspension of judgment extends even to the meta-claim of universal suspension, exposing the linguistic limits of the position.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
He who restrains himself from assent about all things nevertheless does move and does act… there remain presentations of a sort that arouse us to action… provided that we answer without actual assent.
Cicero articulates the Academic solution to the practical objection against Skepticism: probability-guided action is possible without assent, preserving agency within a framework of suspended judgment.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
How can you be unhampered when there is no difference between true presentations and false ones? From this, that retention of assent was necessarily born, in which Arcesilaus constituted himself more consistently.
Cicero traces the Academic doctrine of epoché — suspension of assent — to the epistemological impasse created when no criterion reliably distinguishes true from false impressions.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
He restrains himself from assent, which he can do even about things that his own teachers held to be certain; why should not the wise man be able to do so about everything else?
Cicero argues that the consistent application of Skeptical restraint from assent — modeled even on Stoic practice in matters of divination — entails the wise man’s universal suspension of judgment.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
Nikidion will acquire no new ethical beliefs. But she will also not struggle against the ones she has. She will simply stop caring about whether they are true, treat them as impressions whose truth value is indeterminate.
Nussbaum describes the Skeptical ethical outcome: not a replacement of beliefs but a transformation in the agent’s relation to them, from conviction to mere naturalized impression, dissolving the anxiety of moral commitment.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
Ataraxia is not like the other things we go for, with the help of belief; it is just there for us as things flow along — you take away everything but nature, you get the orientation to that and no other.
The Skeptical account presents ataraxia not as a deliberate goal pursued through belief-driven desire but as the natural remainder when all dogmatic overlay is removed, revealed by the example of Pyrrho’s indifferent pig.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
Arcesilaus says ‘assent to the incognitive is opinion’… which leaves it open that some opinions may involve assent to cognitive impressions.
Long and Sedley reconstruct Arcesilaus’s argument within Stoic epistemology, showing how the Academic identification of assent with opinion was leveraged to collapse the Stoic distinction between knowledge and ignorance.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
We may, if we please, carry this scepticism a step further, and deny, not only objects of sense, but the continuity of our sensations themselves. We may say with Protagoras and Hume that what is appears, and that what appears appears only to individuals.
The Theaetetus commentary traces the genealogy of radical scepticism from Protagoras through Hume, framing it as the most extreme consequence of empiricist epistemology and posing the Platonic counter-question about the persistence of mind.
, Theaetetus, -369aside
My goal here is not to engage in postmodernist skepticism about holistic concepts of groups and culture… Even beyond postmodern skepticism, however, the definition of the ‘group’ that is deemed worthy of legal recognition remains a contentious matter.
In a political-philosophical context, the author brackets postmodernist skepticism about collective identity while acknowledging that difficulties in defining cultural groups persist independently of that skeptical challenge.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside