Talk on Sextan Pyrrhonism

The next meeting of the Northern Association for Ancient Philosophy will take place on 31st March-1st April 2012 at the University of Glasgow (Bridie Library, Glasgow University Union, 32 University Avenue). On Sunday, at 3.30-4.30, Mark Wildish (Durham) will present his “Sextus on Nature, Second Nature, and Subsistent Nature.” Here's the abstract:

The primary objection to the phenomenological reading of Sextan Pyrrhonism is that it appears to forgo any claim to a condition of rational constraint on experience imposed by a natural order independent of that experience. Conversely, if nature is to exercise a rational constraint on experience, then nature must be already rationally accessible to experience through impressions with intelligible content and therefore itself subject to a condition of rational constraint connatural to experience. From a Pyrrhonian perspective, then, the first question is whether anything at all can be made intelligible by phenomenal impressions on the one hand or subsistent nature on the other independent of the manner of their apprehension through everyday observance and common concepts. The answers to both questions, I suggest, are that both phenomenal experience and subsistent nature are subject to rational constraint through learned habitual competences which constitute acquired second nature, which qua nature is not itself subject to a further condition of independent justification.