History & overview · every faith gets one
Suspend judgement, and the quiet arrives on its own.
The ancient sceptical school that treated belief itself as the disease. For any claim it assembled an equally strong opposing claim, arrived at suspension of judgement, and found — to its own surprise — that tranquillity followed. Its practitioners kept the local rites and paid the local taxes without holding any opinion about them, on the grounds that ordinary life needs appearances and not doctrines.
Why it is filed this way
Filed as a philosophy, but Sextus presents it as a way of life with a therapeutic aim rather than a position — he calls it an ability, an agoge, a path one is led along. Whether that makes it a creed is exactly what it would decline to rule on. Modern philosophers argue over whether a person can genuinely live without beliefs; the ancient answer was that appearances are enough to act on.
No Pyrrhonist body survived antiquity. The rediscovery of Sextus in the sixteenth century reshaped European philosophy through Montaigne, Bayle and Hume, and small modern Pyrrhonist circles exist online, but there is no institution and nothing to join.
The founding
Pyrrho travelled east with Alexander's army and is said to have met Indian ascetics; he wrote nothing and left an example rather than a method. Three centuries later Aenesidemus revived the name against the Academy, and around the second century CE a physician called Sextus Empiricus wrote the manuals that are the reason we know any of it.
Its founding is bound to Pyrrho of Elis; systematised by Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus — c. 300 BCE.
What it holds
Reality. Unknown, and the question is one the sceptic declines to answer.
The divine. Not atheism and not belief. The Pyrrhonist suspends judgement about the gods exactly as about everything else, and then follows the customs and laws of the place — attending the sacrifices, saying the words — without holding that any of it is true. Sextus argues at length against theological proofs and still counts himself a participant in civic religion..
Death and after. Suspended. To assert annihilation is as dogmatic as to assert survival..