Sextus Empiricus: against the ethicists

Resumo

Sextus Empiricus is one of the major sources we have for the reconstruction and the study of the Hellenistic philosophy. His works contain wide-ranging excerpts of other philosophical schools, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism, but Sextus is also rightly acknowledged as a philosopher in his own right. He was certainly a leading figure in later ancient philosophy, and produced a number of arguments in order to refute (or at least to question) the views defended by so-called "dogmatists", i.e, all those philosophers who systematically maintained positive theses on various topics. Sextus' main opponents were the Stoics. He presented his arguments against them in a number of pas sages throughout his works, including Against the Ethicists. In what follows, I refer to Against the Ethicists by the abbreviated ti dle Adversus Mathemathicos XI, hereafter M XI. (For details of the titles standardly given to Sextus' works cf. p. x and 45 of book under review).In recent decades the study of Sextus' works has undergone a revival. English speaking scholars already had a complete translation of his works with facing Greek text (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the Physicists, Against the Ethicists and Ag the Logicians), in three volumes, edited by R.G. Bury in the Loeb Classical Library (Sextus Empiricus, Cambridge, Mass., 1934-1936), but in recent years a number of new English translations of Sextus have been made, notably those by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism, Cambridge University Press 1994) and by Benson Mates (The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus's "Outlines of Pyrrhonism", Oxford University Press 1996).