Spinelli, Emidio

Senior Fellow: April–May 2017

Research Project: Ancient Scepticism, Its Philosophical Self-Justification, and Its Polemical Tools: contra dogmaticos, sed pro sceptica philosophia

This project aims to offer a first analysis towards a general introduction to Sextus’ Pyrrhonian philosophy. Accordingly, it will pursue the following goals:

1. A global picture of the self-justification of his ‘movement’ (see especially the first book of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, chs. 1–30);
2. A new philosophical attention to the relationship between some dogmatic assumptions about the notions of truth and the practical consequences they can or should have;
3. A running commentary that reveals some crucial aspects of the Pyrrhonian attack against any kind of subsistence of the demonstration/ἀπόδειξις;
4. An analysis of those passages where Sextus attacks some notions of dogmatic logical doctrines, for example: division, whole/parts, genera/species;
5. Finally, the research will focus on a more global topic, namely the destruction of any rea­sonable concept of the body as well as the soul, both considered as basic components of human beings in their capacity of acting as alleged criteria of truth.

Emidio Spinelli is a full professor of the history of ancient philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Sapienza University of Rome.