A tese defende a ideia de que uma compreensão adequada da suspensão cética de juízo (epokhé) pressupõe o estudo dos textos de Sexto Empírico que, direta ou indiretamente, abordam o problema da concepção pirrônica da linguagem ou discurso (lógos), e também daqueles que fornecem elementos para a compreensão da posição sextiana acerca da linguagem cotidiana das pessoas comuns. Os primeiros capítulos lidam com a conhecida distinção entre as assim chamadas interpretações rústica e urbana da filosofia pirrônica. A seguir, o texto discute o problema do lógos quando considerado a partir de uma perspectiva pirrônica, onde uma nova argumentação em favor da interpretação rústica é desenvolvida, baseada na ideia de um percurso cético. No quarto capítulo, é examinada a noção de phainómenon e sua relação com o lógos cético, através da formulação de uma interpretação mais geral do ceticismo antigo e do seu discurso fenomênico. O quinto e último capítulo procede então a uma avaliação da força filosófica tanto da filosofia pirrônica como da neopirrônica / The dissertation defends the idea that an adequate understanding of the sceptical suspension of judgement (epoché) presupposes the study of the Sextus Empiricus texts which, either directly or indirectly, address the problem of the pyrrhonian conception of language or discourse (lógos), and also the study of those texts that provide elements for the understanding of the Sextian position about the everyday language of common people. The first chapters deal with the well-known distinction between the so-called rustic and urbane interpretations of the pyrrhonian philosophy. In the sequence, the dissertation discusses the problem of the lógos, as viewed from a pyrrhonian perspective, also by developing a new argument in favor of the rustic interpretation, based upon the idea of a sceptic path. Subsequently, the notion of phainómenon and its relation to the sceptic lógos are analyzed through a general approach to ancient scepticism. The fith and last chapter proceeds to an avaluation of the philosophical strength of both the pyrrhonian and neopyrrhonian philosophies

[pt] Este trabalho é uma busca pelo significado original do ceticismo conforme pensado por Sexto Empírico. Começando por uma depuração do entendimento pejorativo do senso comum em torno das palavras cético e ceticismo, passamos a uma breve história do ceticismo desde os filósofos chamados proto-céticos , passando por Pirro e seus discípulos, pelo ceticismo Acadêmico, chegando até Sexto Empírico e seu ceticismo terapêutico. Assim, verificamos como, ao longo do tempo, diferentes ênfases foram sendo dadas às diferentes etapas da reflexão cética, algumas vindo a desaparecer, outras sendo reconhecidamente atribuídas ao arsenal argumentativo cético. Tendo argumentado que o ceticismo é uma maneira de se viver, passamos à reflexão sobre a viabilidade prática de se viver de modo genuinamente cético. Detectamos a origem do principal argumento contra a vida cética, o argumento da apraxía, que induz o cético a auto-refutar-se. A partir deste ponto nossa preocupação foi compreender os desdobramentos do argumento da apraxía até David Hume, e também os desdobramentos da defesa cética inicialmente elaborada por Arcesilao contra a filosofia da Stoa, até Sexto Empírico. Pensamos que Sexto em sua fundamentação de uma vida cética se adiantou às críticas de Hume, esta hipótese, uma vez verificada, nos permitiu repensar a acusação de que o cético se auto-refuta, bem como a suspensão do juízo. / [en] The present work is a search for the original meaning of the skepticism as thought by Sextus Empiricus. Beginning with a depuration of the common sense’s pejorative understanding around the words skeptic and skepticism, we pass to a brief history of the skepticism since the philosophers called proto-skeptics, passing through Pyrrho and his disciples, through the Academic skepticism, arriving to Sextus Empiricus and his therapeutic skepticism. Thus, we verify how different emphasis were being given to different stages of the skeptical reflection, some of then coming to disappear, others being recognized as parts of skeptical argumentative armory. Once arguing that the skepticism is a way of living, we passed to a reflection about the practical viability of living in a genuine skeptical way. We detected the origin of the main argument against the possibility of the skeptical life, the argument of the apraxía, which induces the skeptic to a self-refutation. From this point our main concern was comprehend the developments of the argument of the apraxía until David Hume, and also the developments of the skeptical defense, initially developed by Arcesilaus, against the Stoa’s philosophy until Sextus Empiricus. We think that Sextus, in his foundation of a skeptical live, had stepped forward Hume, this hypothesis once verified allowed us to rethink the accusation that the skeptic refutes himself, as well as rethink the scope of the suspension of judgment.

Nous nous proposons, dans le cadre de cette étude, de démontrer que les Essais de Montaigne contiennent bel et bien, en dépit d’une forme éclatée et d’un propos non systématique, ce qu’il convient d’appeler une morale. Non seulement cette morale ne s’oppose-t-elle pas au scepticisme des Essais, mais elle lui est même d’une certaine façon coextensive : la morale de Montaigne est une morale de l’essai, lequel constitue l’expression la plus achevée de son scepticisme. Ce dernier, pour être bien compris, doit préalablement être mis en parallèle avec la « voie » (ἀγωγή) que propose Sextus Empiricus dans ses Hypotyposes pyrrhoniennes, dont l’influence sur Montaigne pourrait être bien plus importante que ne le laissent croire plusieurs travaux récents. / We will argue, in the following study, that Montaigne’s Essays, despite their fragmented writing and unsystematic form, indeed contain what deserves to be called an ethics. This ethics, far from contradicting his scepticism, identifies with it in a certain way: Montaigne’s ethics is an ethics of the essay, which is the definitive expression of his scepticisim. The latter, to be correctly understood, needs to be compared with Sextus Empiricus’ « way » (ἀγωγή), whose influence on Montaigne may be more important than it has been argued in recent years.

Nous nous proposons, dans le cadre de cette étude, de démontrer que les Essais de Montaigne contiennent bel et bien, en dépit d’une forme éclatée et d’un propos non systématique, ce qu’il convient d’appeler une morale. Non seulement cette morale ne s’oppose-t-elle pas au scepticisme des Essais, mais elle lui est même d’une certaine façon coextensive : la morale de Montaigne est une morale de l’essai, lequel constitue l’expression la plus achevée de son scepticisme. Ce dernier, pour être bien compris, doit préalablement être mis en parallèle avec la « voie » (ἀγωγή) que propose Sextus Empiricus dans ses Hypotyposes pyrrhoniennes, dont l’influence sur Montaigne pourrait être bien plus importante que ne le laissent croire plusieurs travaux récents. / We will argue, in the following study, that Montaigne’s Essays, despite their fragmented writing and unsystematic form, indeed contain what deserves to be called an ethics. This ethics, far from contradicting his scepticism, identifies with it in a certain way: Montaigne’s ethics is an ethics of the essay, which is the definitive expression of his scepticisim. The latter, to be correctly understood, needs to be compared with Sextus Empiricus’ « way » (ἀγωγή), whose influence on Montaigne may be more important than it has been argued in recent years.

In this dissertation, I examine the influence of Pyrrhonist skepticism over Shakespeare’s sonnets. Unlike academic skepticism, which begins from a position of doubt, Pyrrhonist skepticism encourages an embrace of multiple perspectives that, according to Sextus Empiricus, leads first to a suspension of judgment and ultimately to a state of tranquility. The Pyrrhonian inflection of Shakespeare’s sonnets accounts for the pleasure and uncertainty they cultivate in readers. By offering readers multiple perspectives on a given issue, such as love or infidelity, Shakespeare’s sonnets demonstrate the instability of information, suggesting that such instability can be a source for pleasure. One essential tool for the uncertainty in the sonnets, I argue, is the figurative language they draw from a variety of fields and discourses. When these metaphors contradict one another, creating fragmented images in the minds of readers, they generate a unique aesthetic experience, which creates meaning that transcends the significance of any of the individual metaphors. In the first two chapters, I identify important contexts for Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the pliability of figurative language: Reformation-era religious tracts and pamphleteers’ debates about the value and function of the theater. In Chapter 3, I examine Shakespeare’s response to the Petrarchan tradition, arguing that he diverges from the sonneteers, who often use figurative language in an attempt to access and communicate stable truths. Shakespeare creates epistemological instability in sonnets both to the young man and to the dark lady, and, as I argue in Chapter 4, this similarity offers readers an opportunity to think beyond traditional divisions between the two sonnet subsequences.

There have been recent explosions of interest in two fields: Madhyamaka-Pyrrhonism parallels and Pyrrhonism itself, which seems to have been misunderstood and therefore neglected by the West for the same reasons and in the same ways that Madhyamaka traditionally has often been by the West and the East. Among these recent studies are several demonstrating that grounding in Madhyamaka, for example, reveals and illuminates the import and insights of Pyrrhonean arguments. Furthermore it has been suggested that of all European schools of philosophy Pyrrhonism is the one closest to Buddhism, and especially to Madhyamaka. Indeed Pyrrho is recorded to have studied with philosophers in Taxila, one of the first places where Madhyamaka later flourished, and the place where the founder of Madhyamaka, Nāgārjuna, may have received hitherto concealed texts which became the foundation for his school. In this dissertation I explore just how similar these two philosophical projects were. I systematically treat all the arguments in the Pyrrhonist redactor Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against Dogmatists and compare them to the most similar arguments available in the Madhyamaka treatises and related texts. On this basis, I ask whether the Pyrrhonists and the Buddhists would satisfy each other’s self-identifying criteria, or what characteristics would disqualify either or both in the other’s eyes. I also ask what questions arise from the linguistic and historical evidence for interactions between the Pyrrhonist school and the Madhyamaka school, and how sure we can be of the answers. Did Pyrrho learn Buddhism in Taxila? Was Nāgārjuna a Pyrrhonist? Finally I bring the insights of the living commentarial tradition of Madhyamaka to bear on current scholarly controversies in the field of Sextan Pyrrhonism, and apply the subtleties of interpretation of the latter which have developed in recent scholarship to Madhyamaka and its various difficulties of interpretation, to scrutinize each school under the illumination of the other. With this hopefully illuminated view, I address for example whether Sextus was consistent, whether living Pyrrhonism implies apraxia, whether Pyrrhonism is philosophy at all, and whether Madhyamaka is actually nihilism.

This paper investigates Herman Melville’s quest for spiritual stability and certainty in his novel Moby-Dick. The analysis establishes a philosophical tradition of doubt towards the Bible, outlining the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, David Hume, Thomas Paine and John Henry Newman. This historical survey of spiritual uncertainty establishes the issue of uncertainty that Melville writes about in the nineteenth century. Having assessed the issue of doubt, I then analyze Melville’s use of metaphorical charts, which his characters use to resolve this issue. Finally, I present Melville’s philosophical findings as he expresses them through the metaphor of whaling. Here, I also scrutinize Melville’s depiction of nature, as well as his presentation of the dichotomy between contemplative and active questing, as represented by the characters Ishmael and Ahab.

[pt] Sexto Empírico não fala de dúvida, e não faz uso deste conceito em sua clássica descrição do cético pirrônico. No entanto, desde a sua redescoberta na década de 1430 no contexto do humanismo florentino e até os dias atuais, o ceticismo é interpretado através da dúvida. Na presente tese, primeiramente mostramos que não há uma conexão direta entre o ceticismo pirrônico e o conceito de dúvida. Em seguida, analisamos alguns dos modos pelos quais a dúvida é introduzida no ceticismo, particularmente no período que vai do início do século XV ao final do século XVI, conhecido como ceticismo renascentista. Sexto Empírico não fala de dúvida, e não faz uso deste conceito em sua clássica descrição do cético pirrônico. No entanto, desde a sua redescoberta na década de 1430 no contexto do humanismo florentino e até os dias atuais, o ceticismo é interpretado através da dúvida. Na presente tese, primeiramente mostramos que não há uma conexão direta entre o ceticismo pirrônico e o conceito de dúvida. Em seguida, analisamos alguns dos modos pelos quais a dúvida é introduzida no ceticismo, particularmente no período que vai do início do século XV ao final do século XVI, conhecido como ceticismo renascentista. / [en] Sextus Empiricus does not speak of doubt, nor does he use this concept in his exposition of Pyrrhonian skepticism. However, since its rediscovery in the 1430s to the present day, skepticism has been interpreted through the concept of doubt. In the present thesis, we showed first that there is no explicit connection between Pyrrhonian skepticism and doubt. Then, we analyzed some ways through which the concept of doubt was introduced into skepticism, especially in the period from the beginning of the 15th to the end of the 16th century, known as Renaissance skepticism.

This thesis is a comparative study of the approaches to mental tranquility advanced by the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus and Huineng, the historically recognized Sixth Patriarch of the Southern Zen School. Relying on the Outlines of Pyrrhonism and the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, the principle texts of the Pyrrhonian and Zen schools respectively, I argue that the Pyrrhonian skeptic’s method of attaining ataraxia (“unperturbedness”) via the use of opposing arguments is essentially identical to that of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng’s employment of “opposition pairs.” Finally, in addition to contextualizing the schools historically, I compare their respective positions on ethical and metaphysical statements.

[pt] Tese em que se desenvolve um modo de interpretar o ceticismo Antigo, especialmente o pirrônico, e que isenta a dýnamis cética da acusação de apraxía. Essa via média interpretativa emerge como um modo de superar as aporias entre as interpretações rústica e urbana e tem sua eficácia testada quando aplicada como ferramenta exegética para Contra os Retóricos. / [en] Thesis in which we develop a way to interpret the Ancient skepticism, especially the pyrrhonic one, and we exempt the skeptical dýnamis of the apraxia’s accusation. This interpretive middle way emerges as a mode to overcome the aporias between the rustic and urbane interpretations, and it has its efficiency tested when applied as an exegetical tool for Against the Rethors.