My personal step outside both Academic Skepticism and Pyrrhonism

First, it is NOT that of Doug Bates, who thinks Pyrrho himself was a Buddhist in drag.

And, to the degree Pyrrhonism believed in an epoche, like modern phenomenology, no, I don't believe in that. 

And, I don't think the younger, Pyrrhonist Hume did either, and certainly not the older one.

Rather, I think his version of Pyrrhonism was based on rejecting probabilistic reasoning as untenable. Per his bon mot in later life, when questioned about how he could go to sleep every night, not knowing if the sun would rise in the morrow or not, he said, he simply went to bed.

Elsewhere, contra legends about Pyrrho's behavior, Hume gives every occasion that giving assent to regular, customary natural occurrences is fine. And, he did not "suspend judgment" on human custom, let alone reject it as if he were a good Cynic.

(Stoicism gets the matter of the epoche wrong, by not accepting that everything is sense impressions — albeit sense impressions encoded by a regularly evolved set of perceptual organs into a regularly evolved brain.)

Back to more modern times.

Hume would have rejected the Pyrrhonist emphasis on apatheia. 

My stance is in some ways related to Benson Mates. Suspension of judgment does not lead to ataxaria. That said, is it even possible to suspend judgment? Per other Pyrrhonists rejecting the tales of Pyrrho not following convention about repeating natural world matters, the master himself didn't suspend judgment on whether or not an oxcart was actually coming at him. 

Rather, going back to Hume, I think this could be seen as a subset of the passions. 

I'm not really sure what to call it, as of course, Academic Skepticism had the Sgt. Schultz approach to knowledge, period, and Pyrrhonism said, well, we can't even know that much.

Descartes has been associated with probabilistic skepticism, but I hate to use the term Cartesian skepticism, because, he wasn't really all that. First and foremost, his was a methodological skepticism that laid the foundation for modern science in some ways; he was not a philosophical skeptic.

Wiki has a short piece about probabilism. Based on it and tidbits at Stanford, I could call myself a Carneadic skeptic, I guess. That said, Carneades rejected the idea of actual probabilities.

Because I reject the precision of Bayesian probabilism (as well as rejecting Bayes' backstory of coming up with his equation to try to refute Hume — take that, Richard Carrier!), I would have to tie this with Stanford's article on imprecise probabilities. 

 

Top critical thinking writing of July-September 2026

As I normally do, but quarterly rather than monthly as at my main site, here's a roundup of my most popular writing of the last quarter.

As is normal, not all pieces may have been written in in the past three months, and I'll give you a original date on the evergreen material.

No. 10? Yes, let's continue to Say goodbye to History for Atheists, as I first did in 2017, as long as Tim O'Neill continues to lie about the reality of post-Renaissance Catholic in general and papal in particular antisemitism. 

No. 9? Indeed: What if there were another Bethlehem? Contra the Jesus mythicists, many of whom still claim that Nazareth didn't exist in the first century CE, Bruce Chilton offers good evidence for a second village of Bethlehem, just a few miles away from Nazareth in Galilee, existing then.

No. 8? From 2007, my first, briefer, poetry and not prose callout of Buddhism claims that it’s not a religion.

No. 7 is from 2012 and talks about the true meaning of Hanukkah. Those thoughts spun into several more pieces over the years.

No. 6? From 2017, the 500th anniversary of the beginning of legends about Martin Luther saying or doing all sorts of shit he didn’t actually say or do. (I’ve not kept up post-1521, but may, if I remember, in 1529 dip into the Marburg Colloquy.)

No. 5? From the start of the third-quarter period, FAFO with Leo XIV didn’t work.

No. 4? From 2007, “Patriots, gurus, scoundrels and martyrs” was a Shitter-sized post. Maybe Google thinks its popular because it’s getting botted.

No. 3 was the previous quarter’s version of this roundup.

No. 2 was from 20 years ago, a philosophical reflection, with hat tip to Matthew Arnold, on a recent Pacific Coast-focused National Parks summer vacation.

And No. 1?

ALSO from 2007, like a couple of others, an oldie but goodie:

“More proof the Buddha was no Buddha.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wrong / strawmanning on Gnosticism, Robyn Faith Walsh

Once again, Ben the Amateur Exegete strikes, as from a posting of his, Robyn Faith Ehrman Walsh is flat wrong if she thinks there was no such thing called Gnosticism.  Wiki does note that there is no one religion called Gnosticism, but says it does work as an umbrella term. RFE spoils her case further by citing Karen King as the main source for her argument. See more here from me on the issue of Gnosticism and of King's problematic-ness. See also my well-read "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism."

Beyond that, the King book is 20 years old. Plenty of scholars who are not Westar/Jesus Seminar flunkies nor Ehrman flunkies have thought on these issues. Wiki's footnotes reference David Brakke's book, among others, that are newer than King. 

So, if rather, RF Ehrman is saying there's no such thing as what was called "Gnosticism" say, pre-2000, she's strawmanning and leaning too much on the slender reed of King.

Getting back to Wiki. It notes Gnosticism was not entirely a Christian or para-Christian phenomenon. Books have been written about the idea of Jewish Gnosticism, after all. And, a bit about Mandean and pagan Gnosticism.

I quote the first paragraph of the Wiki entry:

It is not a singular, homogeneous tradition or religion, but an umbrella term used by modern scholars to describe different groups and beliefs that shared certain characteristics.

So, yea, RF Ehrman is strawmanning. And I told Ben that, only being more polite than using the word "strawmanning." We'll see if there's any response.

He's getting closer to being deblogrolled, which doesn't matter so much anyway if Blogger doesn't fix its recent problem of not updating RSS feeds. 

Ben the Amateur Exegete has another nothingburger roundup

Here's the link.

Contra Robyn Faith Ehrman Walsh, no, it's not "striking" that the gospels don't describe Jesus' appearance. We don't know for sure Apollonius of Tyana looked like. Many later Cynic philosophers are unknown to us. Within his own tradition, we don't know what John the Baptizer looked like. Etc., etc. Someone more famous in his own time than Jesus and John? We don't know what Josephus looked like, either. No external source tries to describe any of the three and Josephus doesn't try to describe himself. Worse? Walsh did this same schtick last year, per another post by Ben. Worse yet, in that same post, is a piece claiming Jesus was "Ugly," because Isaiah 53 and something Irenaeus said 150 years after Jesus lived. I've had enough of various thoughts of John Nelson to reject that one, too. (And gack, his PhD thesis bled an alleged 100,000 words over that, he says. [No follow on that link enacted.])

The bible doesn't exist, but only as an intellectual formulation? A nothingburger to those who know the formation of the canon of the Christian Old and New Testaments. 

The intertextual bible (giving it a separate link) actually sounds interesting enough that Ben, other than posting Charles Kuffner like snippets, should actually write a post about it. 

 ==

Gack! Going through his posts, he believes in a historical Moses.