Do you? Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode, Healthy Skepticism, Sextus Empiricus.

People have a lot of respect for doctors.

Along with philosophy professors, they rank among the most admired members of our society.

We turn to them in our hour of need, seeking not just basic competence, but total commitments,

confidence and self-assurance.

You do not want to find hesitancy and uncertainty lurking in the facial

expression of your doctor, any more than you want to hear it in the voice of the pilot making

announcements as your plane goes through turbulence.

So it's ironic that the greatest of all the ancient skeptics was a doctor.

He is known to us as Sextus Empiricus, and the Empiricus part refers to his membership in the

Empiricist School of Medicine, a fact that I'll be returning to at the end of this podcast.

Apart from that, we know little about him.

Even his dates are, appropriately enough, uncertain, but he is thought to have lived in the second

century AD. That puts him a couple of centuries later than the last

representatives of skepticism we've considered. The followers of Carnayides,

like Phylo of Larissa, and of course Cicero, lived in the first century BC.

Their age was one of transition.

The center of philosophical activity was moving from war-torn Athens to Rome, the center of political power, moving from the hands of the

Senate to those of a single ruler, Julius Caesar as dictator, followed by Augustus as

Prinkeps, and a line of emperors after that, including of course,

...