The Bibliographic Bases of Hume's Understanding of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonism
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Nα̑ϕɛ ϰαὶ μέμνασख़ ἀπιστɛι̑ν1
Epicharmus
over the past forty years, the work of many scholars has served to advance and secure a hermeneutical approach to the development of modern philosophy first articulated by Richard H. Popkin.2 The central proposition upon which this approach turns is that the discovery and application of ancient [End Page 261] skeptical (especially Pyrrhonian) texts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe provided early modern thinkers with powerful sources of inspiration and provocation, as well as with plentiful conceptual larders from which to draw.3 Among the most important and most interesting investigations that have been conducted along these lines has been that of attempting to determine the precise nature and extent of the impact of the rediscovery of ancient skepticism upon the thought of David Hume (1711–76). Indeed, the question of the skeptical influences upon Hume has informed much of Popkin’s subsequent work.4 Most recently, Popkin has undertaken to update the catalogue of sources from which Hume may have drawn in a “Note” commenting on an article that appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas by Leo Groarke and Graham Solomon.5 The information compiled and presented by Professor Popkin and other authors on this subject formidably sustains the accuracy and power of his (and Schmitt’s) original intuition. The account so far produced, however, may be improved. In particular, (1) a number of texts may be added to the list of sources available to Hume, and (2) it is possible to determine more precisely when and how the skeptical texts to which Hume had access were available to him. In order to situate these modifications in the literature, let us briefly review the current understanding scholars have achieved of the career of the work of Sextus Empiricus, the principal source of Pyrrhonian thought for ancient and early modern thinkers.
1. the career of the work of sextus empiricus
It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the Sextus Empiricus’s texts (probably ob. early 3rd century) were known during the Greco-Roman era.6 Our view of [End Page 262] the Middle Ages is, however, somewhat clearer. From the best that can at present be determined, it seems that Sextus’s output was less than well known in the Judaic, Islamic, and Western Christian worlds during the medieval period. During the early Middle Ages Pyrrhonism seems to have maintained itself as a somewhat more prominent intellectual force among thinkers centered around the Eastern Church and Byzantium, though even there attention to it was meager and generally hostile.7 So far three codices of a late medieval Latin translation of Sextus’s work have been discovered: one in Paris, a translation of the Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes apparently copied in the fourteenth century, erroneously attributed to Aristotle, and recovered in the mid-nineteenth century; the second, a better version of that same translation, found in Spain nearly a century later; and the third, possibly the earliest, a manuscript housed in the National Library in Venice (Popkin, History of Scepticism, 19).
The French manuscript is: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 14700, s. XIII, mbr., misc., 396 fols.: (ff. 83r–132v) (P)Irroniarum Informacionum libri.8 The Spanish manuscript is: Madrid Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. 10112 (Hh92, Toledo 98, 25), s. XIV, mbr., misc., 131 fols., not numbered: (ff. 1r–30r), Pirroniarum informacionum libri.9 Walter Cavini has demonstrated that Ms. Paris Lat. 14700 is derived from the same source as the Venetian text: Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Cod. Lat. X.267 (3460), s. XIV, cart., 57 fols.: (ff. 1r–46v) Pirronie Informaciones, with (ff. 47r–57v) fragments of [End Page 263] Adversus Mathematicos III–V, translated perhaps by Petra Montagnana.10 A draft of a will appended to the Marcianus suggests it was produced sometime before 1323. These and other newly discovered documents are discussed in Luciano Floridi’s recent article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, “The Diffusion of Sextus Empiricus’s Works in the Renaissance.”11
Greek manuscripts of Sextus’s work seem to have arrived in...
