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By Root 669 0

other, just leave it to a clever Pyrrhonist to come up some way of making them equal. For instance, if you agree with Jon that President Bush is the worst President because you think that Stephen’s arguments are weak, a Pyrrhonist might point out that President Bush isn’t nearly as bad as Herbert Hoover, that eight years of the Bush Administration will give us a greater appreciation for future administrations and, most importantly, President Bush has given both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert such great comedic material that any of his negative political effects on America are outweighed by his positive comedic effects on America.

If you then ask Pyrrhonists, “Is President Bush the greatest President or the worst President?” they would respond by saying that each side is equally convincing and unconvincing. This suspension of judgment (known in Greek as epoche) leads to mental tranquility, because once you give up on grasping at one belief or another your mind is free from the disturbance caused by holding passionately to beliefs. For this reason, I think the sound-bite slogan of Pyrrhonism is “belief is undesirable.”

Modern Skepticism: Knowledge Is Impossible

Modern skeptics such as Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and David Hume (1711-1776) owe a lot to Pyrrhonism, but developed some new ideas. This is why they are “Modern” skeptics as opposed to the “Ancient” Pyrrhonists. “Modern” in the study of philosophy usually refers to the European philosophical scene from around 1600 to about 1800.

When Montaigne wasn’t busy inventing the literary form of the essay, he claimed that we human beings don’t know much at all and aren’t any better off than animals that rely on their instincts to get through life. Since we’re a sorry lot when it comes to actually knowing anything, Montaigne advocates that we adhere to custom and religion. Our animal habits can lead us through life and religion is based on revelation from God, who as a perfect being is a lot smarter than we are. It sounds strange to us today that a skeptic was so keen on religion, but Montaigne took up Pyrrhonist arguments, not for the Greek ideal of happiness, but for cultivating traditional faith in Catholicism. He provocatively describes a skeptical view of “Man … annihilating his intellect to make room for faith …”99 Stephen Colbert would probably get along with Montaigne: both are distrustful of “experts,” both are Catholic, and both have French names.

Hume, on the other hand, was not religious. In fact, he offered pretty serious skeptical challenges to some of the more popular arguments for the existence of God and doubted whether we should trust people when they tell us about miracles. Hume’s also famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for denying that we have any substantial knowledge of whether one thing causes another thing. Even worse, for Hume it’s unclear whether things like Doritos and portraits of Stephen Colbert really exist outside our minds and even whether we have real, enduring selves underneath all our various thoughts and perceptions about Doritos or portraits of Stephen Colbert.

One of the most famous (or again, infamous, depending who you ask) arguments used by Modern skeptics is called the argument from ignorance. This argument goes something like this: Suppose you’re sitting on your couch eating Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, drinking Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (four drinks in one!), watching The Colbert Report, and thinking about the pint of Americone Dream in your freezer. Now, what if you were just dreaming that you were sitting on your couch eating Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, drinking Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, watching The Colbert Report, and thinking about the pint of Americone Dream in your freezer, and in fact you were sound asleep in your bed? Or what if you were a nothing but a brain in a vat in some mad scientist’s lab or a body floating in a pod as in the film The Matrix? 100 Say you just had electrodes plugged into your brain feeding you signals that made it seem like you were sitting on your couch?