Ricerc@Sapienza

May we plan to conduct our everyday life without referring to any kind of emotion or passion? Or, more radically, may we suppose that there is a philosophical theory claiming to either eliminate all affections or to at least control them thanks to a strong and prescriptively binding use of a form of rationality? Against the background of such dogmatic presuppositions, what about Pyrrhonists? Do they really ignore the multifarious, difficult, and complex web of all those passions and emotions that crowd and sometimes influence or change the course of our everyday life?

Within a sort of conceptually homogeneous logical-epistemological arsenal that reflects a perspective marked by the dichotomy true/false, I would like to focus on one of the ‘logical’ sections of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, book II, namely: division, whole/parts, genus/species, accidents (PH II 213-228). These are unique in Sextus’ work and hence find no parallels in the more meticulous analysis provided in M VII and VIII.