Sextus Empiricus

Sextus Empiricus, physician and philosopher, lived at Alexandria and Athens about 200-250 A.D. As physician he was a representative of the Empires (hence his second name; see MEDICINE); as philosopher he was the chief exponent of the later Scepticism (q.v.) of the Old World, which was professedly a continuation of Pyrrhonism. In his two works still extant—the Hypotyposes and Adversus Mathematicos—he has left a prodigious battery of arguments and exceptions against dogmatism in grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, music, astrology, logic, physics, ethics. There are monographs by Jourdain (Paris, 1858) and Pappenheim (Berlin, 1875).