The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy

One line of thinking traces the ancestry of ancient scepticism back to Democritus, whose atomist theory calls into question the reliability of our senses (reality is atoms and void). It seems to be well attested that the man who came to be regarded as the founder of scepticism, Pyrrho, frequently quoted Democritus with approval. At the beginning of Part III of this work (“Epistemology”) Jacques Brunschwig marshals available evidence to argue that Pyrrho was not, however, interested in theoretical questions about knowledge but was instead a moralist intent on imparting a new “art of happiness”. Pyrrho admired Democritus as “the...