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Adrian Kuzminski is a research scholar in philosophy at Hartwick College.

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Pyrrhonian Buddhism reconstructs the path to enlightenment shared both by early Buddhists and the ancient Greek sceptics inspired by Pyrrho of Elis, who may have had extended contacts with Buddhists when he accompanied Alexander the Great to India in the third century BCE.

This volume explores striking parallels between early Buddhism and Pyrrhonian scepticism, suggesting their virtual identity. Both movements saw beliefs―fictions mistaken for truths―as the principal source of human suffering. Both practiced suspension of judgment about beliefs to obtain release from suffering, and to achieve enlightenment, which the Buddhists called bodhi and the Pyrrhonists called ataraxia. And both came to understand the structure of human experience without belief, which the Buddhists called dependent origination and the Pyrrhonists described as phenomenalistic atomism.

This book is intended for the general reader, as well as historians, classicists, Buddhist scholars, philosophers, and practitioners of spiritual techniques.
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Langri_Tangpa_Centre | Nov 20, 2021 |
Pyrrhonism claims the middle ground between dogmatism and scepticism. While sceptics claim that all dogmatic beliefs are false, Pyrrhonists suspend judgment about nonevident things, including the claim that all beliefs are false. While this sounds like a minor distinction, the implications are profound. The Pyrrhonist goal of tranquility (ataraxia) is quite different from the disputations of scepticism. Pyrrhonism has parallels to the philosophy of Madhyamaka Buddhism as described in the writings of Nāgārjuna and Chandragupta. Both schools of thought find a middle path between the true and the false. Pyrrho is known to have traveled with Alexander to India, where he met with various sages. Kuzminski suggests that this is more than a coincidence.

This is a dense book that reclaims Pyrrhonism from academic scepticism with which it has been confused. There is a long discussion on what distinguishes the evident from the nonevident, including such arcane constructions as the "evidently nonevident" (things such as consciousness which do not appear directly to our senses but which are implied by anything and everything that does appear). A final chapter makes a case for Wittgenstein as a modern Pyrrhonist. My only complaint is that there are several typos cluttering the text making it difficult to explicate some sentences.

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le.vert.galant | Jan 26, 2015 |

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