Sextus Empiricus: Against the Ethicists
Subtitle: (Adversus Mathematicos XI) (Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers)
Contributors: Richard Bett (Translator)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: December 31, 1996
Language: eng
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780198236207
Description: In this unjustly neglected and misunderstood work Sextus sets out a distinctive Sceptic position in ethics. He discusses the concepts good and bad, and puts forward the sceptical argument that nothing is either good or bad by nature or intrinsically or invariably, but only relatively to persons and/or to circumstances. He then argues that the sceptic is better off than the non-sceptic. In the latter part of the book, Sextus attacks the Stoic view that there is such a thing as a 'skill for life'.

This volume contains a translation of Against the Ethicists into clear modern English, together with an introduction and a detailed commentary. Those who have discussed this work in the past have tended to underestimate it, often regarding its main position as essentially the same as that of Sextus' better-known Outlines of Pyrrhonism.

Richard Bett shows that Against the Ethicists represents a quite distinct and coherent philosophical outlook, associated with a phase of Scepticism earlier than Sextus himself, an outlook of which little other evidence survives.