Agrippa the Skeptic Quotes on Knowledge
Agrippa (probably first century CE) is the skeptical philosopher whose name the doxographic tradition attaches to the canonical "five modes" of Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment preserved in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism. The five modes — disagreement, infinite regress, relativity, hypothesis, and circularity — supply the systematic dialectical instruments by which any dogmatic claim to knowledge can be reduced to suspension of judgment, and the corresponding trilemma of regress, hypothesis, and circularity has remained one of the most influential single results of ancient skepticism in subsequent Western epistemology, structuring debates from the early-modern period through the contemporary literature on epistemic justification.
Quotes
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Attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic:
“Every philosophical claim invites either an infinite regress, a circular argument, or an unproven hypothesis.”
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Attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic:
“Where the philosophers disagree, the wise man does not yet take sides.”
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Attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic:
“Things appear differently to different observers, and we have no neutral standpoint from which to choose.”
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Attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic:
“What we offer as evidence today must itself find its evidence tomorrow, and so on without end.”
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Attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic:
“Suspension of judgment is not the death of philosophy; it is its proper humility.”