Sextus Empiricus - Introduction From An Epicurean Perspective

Download the PDF: Sextus Empiricus – Surviving Works With An Epicurean Introduction (First Edition, October 26, 2026), Sextus’s surviving works together with this introduction, is available free from archive.org.

This article is the introduction to the Sextus Empiricus collection on EpicurusToday.com, where all five of Sextus’s surviving works are available in R. G. Bury’s public-domain translation. Every citation of Sextus below links to the passage itself.

Why Sextus Empiricus Matters to Epicureans

Sextus Empiricus was a Greek physician and Sceptic philosopher of the late second century AD. He belonged to the “Empiric” school of medicine, hence his name, and to the radical Scepticism that traced itself back to Pyrrho of Elis. His surviving books are the fullest statement of ancient Scepticism we have. Their method is to set “to every argument an equal argument” until the reader suspends judgement on everything.^[1]

Many readers meet Sextus’s arguments one at a time and take them for an honest search for truth: a case for one side, a case for the other, and then a weighing of the two. That is not what they are. Sextus tells us plainly that the arguments are built to come out even, and that coming out even is the point. The “main basic principle” of his system is “opposing to every proposition an equal proposition,” and he adds why: “for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize” (Outlines I.12). In other words, the purpose of the whole back-and-forth is to make the reader stop holding any view at all.

Sextus is just as plain about where he wants that to lead. Suspense, he says, is “a state of mental rest owing to which we neither deny nor affirm anything,” and quietude enters the soul “along with suspension of judgement” (I.10). The Sceptic began by hoping to learn “what is true in things and what false” (I.12). When he could not decide, he gave up, and found that calm followed “as if by chance” (I.26–29). Sextus does say that the Sceptics “keep on searching” (I.3), but it is a search arranged so that it can never end, because every argument is to be met by an equal one.

Sextus even describes his arguments as medicine for belief. The Sceptic, “being a lover of his kind, desires to cure by speech … the self-conceit and rashness of the Dogmatists” (III.280). The patients he has in mind include Epicurus by name. At the start of the Outlines Sextus names the Dogmatists he is writing against: “Those who believe they have discovered it are the ‘Dogmatists,’ specially so called—Aristotle, for example, and Epicurus and the Stoics” (I.3). In Against the Ethicists he singles Epicurus out again: “the lover of pleasure is further inflamed by the doctrine of Epicurus,” and the Dogmatists’ “science of life” is “a bulwark in defence of the evils of mankind rather than an aid against them” (Against the Ethicists 179–180). The disease he means to cure is the conviction that anything is true. In Against the Ethicists he says it outright: to teach men “that there does not exist anything which is either good or evil by nature” is “the peculiar task of Scepticism” (Against the Ethicists 140).

This is the heart of the conflict with Epicurus. For Sextus, giving up on finding the truth is the goal, and his arguments are tools for getting the reader there. For Epicurus, finding the truth about nature is the only road to a happy life.

Epicureans should read Sextus for two reasons.

First, Sextus is the opponent, and one of the most dangerous to a proper understanding of Epicurus. His Scepticism is the position Epicurus spent his life refuting: the claim that the senses cannot be trusted, that nothing can be known, and that peace comes from giving up the search for truth. Epicurus answered: “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false” (PD 23). Lucretius answered that the man who claims to know nothing “has himself stood with his own head in his footprints” (Lucretius 4.469–521). To see what Epicurus was answering, you have to see the Sceptic case at full strength, and Sextus gives it.

Second, Sextus is a witness. To refute every school, Sextus had to describe every school. He is a hostile witness but often a careful one, and he preserves some of the most important surviving reports of Epicurus’s own teaching. The best example is the account of Epicurus’s Canon, his doctrine of the standards of truth, in Against the Logicians. He even defends Epicurus once, against the charge of stealing his doctrines from the poets.

Same Word, Different Things: Sextus’s Ataraxia Is Not Epicurus’s

To understand Epicurus you have to watch his words. He used the ordinary Greek words of his day, but he often meant something very different by them from what other schools meant. His opponents regularly used the same words to mean something very different.

• “Gods.” Epicurus says “gods there are,” but “they are not such as the many believe them to be,” and “the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many” (DL 10.123). His gods neither rule the world nor punish anyone. Anyone who hears “gods” and thinks of Zeus or of Plato’s maker of the world has missed his meaning entirely.
• “Virtue.” For Plato and the Stoics virtue is the highest good, chosen for its own sake. For Epicurus “virtue is preferred for the sake of pleasure, and not for its own sake, just as the doctor’s art is employed for the sake of health” (DL 10.138). Same word, opposite place in the system.
• “Happiness.” Every school claimed to teach the happy life, and each put happiness in something different.
  • The Stoics put it in virtue. Diogenes Laertius reports their view that virtue “is of itself sufficient for happiness, as Zeno says” (DL 7.127, Yonge translation).
  • Plato tied it to the worship of the gods. In the Laws he calls it “the noblest and truest of all sayings” that “for the good man to offer sacrifice to the Gods, and hold converse with them by means of prayers and offerings and every kind of service, is the noblest and best of all things, and also the most conducive to a happy life” (Laws IV, 716d, Jowett translation).
  • The Christians put it in God. Augustine prays: “the happy life is this—to rejoice unto You, in You, and for You; this it is, and there is no other” (Confessions X.22, Pilkington translation).
  • Epicurus put it in pleasure: “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life” (DL 10.129). Centuries later, in the second century AD, the Epicurean Diogenes of Oinoanda carved the same answer in stone. The question, he says, is “what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?,” and “I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues … are in no way an end, but the means to the end” (Diogenes of Oinoanda, fr. 32, Smith translation).

Ataraxia belongs on this list, and it may be the most important word on it. Sextus says the goal of the Sceptic is ataraxia, which Bury translates “quietude.” Epicurus also speaks of ataraxia, which Bailey translates “peace of mind” or “freedom from disturbance.” Many modern readers see the one Greek word and conclude that the two men wanted the same thing. They then read Epicurus through Sextus, and make Epicurus a quietist who seeks calm by withdrawing from the world and holding no firm views.

That reading turns the truth upside down. When each man’s own definitions are put side by side, the two ataraxias turn out to be fundamentally different things, built on opposite foundations.

1. For Epicurus Ataraxia Is a Pleasure. For Sextus It Is Not.

Epicurus classes freedom from disturbance as a pleasure: “Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures” (DL 10.136). It is part of the pleasure that is “the beginning and end of the blessed life.”

Sextus defines quietude simply as “an untroubled and tranquil condition of soul” (Outlines I.10), and he sets it against pleasure. In his chapter on the Cyrenaics he says that the Sceptic’s End is “‘quietude,’ which is the opposite of their End,” because “the man who positively affirms pleasure to be the End undergoes perturbations” (Outlines I.215). If the two words meant the same thing, Epicurus’s goal would be the opposite of itself.

2. Epicurus Reaches It by Knowing the Truth. Sextus Reaches It by Giving Up on Truth.

For Epicurus, peace of mind is built on firm belief. Its whole purpose in studying the heavens is “peace of mind and a sure confidence” (DL 10.85). Peace of mind “is being delivered from all this, and having a constant memory of the general and most essential principles” (DL 10.82). He who is “in opposition to clear-seen facts … can never have his part in true peace of mind” (DL 10.96). “Without natural science, it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed” (PD 12). And there is “no profit in securing protection in relation to men, if things above, and things beneath the earth, and indeed all in the boundless universe, remain matters of suspicion” (PD 13).

For Sextus, quietude depends on holding no beliefs at all. The Sceptic set out to learn which impressions were true, “found himself involved in contradictions of equal weight, and being unable to decide between them suspended judgement; and as he was thus in suspense there followed, as it happened, the state of quietude” (Outlines I.26). Quietude “followed upon their suspense, even as a shadow follows its substance” (I.29).

Put “sure confidence” into Sextus’s quietude and, on his own terms, it is gone. Take “sure confidence” out of Epicurus’s peace of mind and, on his terms, it is gone. Each is built on what destroys the other.

3. Epicurus Aims at It. Sextus Stumbles Into It.

For Epicurus, health of body and freedom from disturbance of soul are “the aim of the life of blessedness. For it is to obtain this end that we always act” (DL 10.128). It is reached by “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit” (DL 10.132). Epicurus banishes false opinions by reasoning his way to true ones.

For Sextus, quietude was never reached by reasoning to a conclusion. It came “as it happened.” He compares the Sceptic to the painter Apelles, who could not paint a horse’s foam, threw his sponge at the picture in frustration, and found that the sponge had made the effect for him (Outlines I.28–29). Sextus banishes every opinion, true and false alike.

4. Epicurus’s Peace Reaches the Body. Sextus’s Stops at Opinion.

Sextus’s quietude covers only “matters of opinion.” For hunger, cold and pain he settles for “moderate affection,” and admits that “we do not, however, suppose that the Sceptic is wholly untroubled” (Outlines I.25–30). He even admits that Sceptic argument cannot talk a hungry man out of his distress, nor talk the man who is relieved out of his joy (Against the Ethicists 148–149).

Epicurus does not stop at opinion. He pairs freedom from trouble in the mind with freedom from pain in the body (DL 10.131), and he teaches that bodily pain itself is either short or bearable (PD 4). That teaching is a firm belief about the body, the kind of belief Sextus says must be given up.

5. Epicurus’s Peace Is Knowing Particular Truths. Sextus’s Is Knowing None.

Epicurus’s peace of mind is the knowledge of particular truths: the gods are not to be feared, death is nothing to us, the heavens have natural causes, pain and desire have limits which can be known (PD 10–13). Sextus suspends judgement on exactly these questions. The third book of the Outlines and the whole of Against the Physicists argue that nothing can be known about the gods, causes, bodies, motion or time. Epicurean ataraxia consists in holding the very beliefs that Sextus says must be dropped to reach his.

A Second Trap: The Name “Empiricus”

Sextus’s name sets a second trap. Today “empiricism” means the view that knowledge comes from the senses and from experience. Epicurus taught that the senses are the standard of truth, so modern readers often call him an empiricist. Then they meet a philosopher named “Sextus Empiricus” and assume the two belong on the same side. They do not.

“Empiricus” is not a description of Sextus’s philosophy. It is the name of his medical school. The Empiric school took its name from the Greek word empeiria, “experience.” Its doctors claimed to work from experience alone: they treated patients by remembering what had followed what in past cases, and they refused to reason about the hidden causes of disease. Sextus himself says that even this school went too far for a Sceptic, because it “positively affirms the inapprehensibility of what is non-evident” (Outlines I.236).

The difference shows most clearly in what each man does with what the senses report. Sextus accepts only the “suggestive” sign, the kind learned by habit, as when “a man sees smoke” and fire comes to mind. He rejects the “indicative” sign, which reveals something that can never be seen, and he calls it one of “the private inventions of the Dogmatists” (Outlines II.99–102). But reasoning from the seen to the unseen is the heart of Epicurus’s method. Epicurus proves that void exists, “a thing non-evident,” from “an obvious fact, namely motion” (Against the Logicians I.213). In the same way he reasons to atoms, to the nature of the soul, and to the nature of the gods. Every one of those conclusions is exactly what Sextus says cannot be known.

So Epicurus trusts the senses and builds on them, reasoning all the way to the atoms and the void. Sextus uses the senses only as a habit of daily life and refuses to build anything on them. Sharing a name with “empiricism” makes Sextus no more an ally of Epicurus than sharing the word ataraxia does.

Why This Makes Sextus Such an Opponent

Plato and the Stoics were Epicurus’s opponents, but they at least agreed that truth exists and can be known. Epicurus argued with them about what is true: about atoms and void, the gods, the soul and pleasure. Sextus attacks the ground all of those arguments stand on. He denies that anything can be known at all, and he aims that denial straight at Epicurus’s Canon, the senses, feelings and preconceptions by which Epicurus says we know the truth.

He is also dangerous to a proper understanding of Epicurus, because he looks like a friend. He uses Epicurus’s word for the goal of life, and so readers who would never mistake Plato for an Epicurean take Sextus’s quietism for Epicurus’s teaching. The result is an Epicurus who has given up on truth, given up on pleasure, and given up on the confident knowledge of nature that he said was the only road to a happy life. That Epicurus never existed. One might call him “Sextus wearing an Epicurean mask,” but for the fact that Sextus never claimed to be an Epicurean. The mistaken identity is entirely the fault of those today who fail to pay heed to the differences between them.

Getting ataraxia right is therefore one of the most important steps in understanding Epicurus. Wherever a modern writer says that Epicurus’s goal was “tranquility,” the reader should ask whose tranquility is meant: the confident pleasure of a man who knows the truth about nature, or the quietude of a Sceptic who has stopped asking.

Sextus and Epicurus: Enemies, Not Allies

The quietist reading of Epicurus does not survive a look at the word ataraxia. It does not survive a look at the rest of Sextus either. Sextus quotes Epicurus’s own books and letters, and he never once treats Epicurus as an ally. Here is what he says about Epicurus, and what he never says.

Sextus Names Epicurus a Dogmatist

Sextus opens the Outlines by dividing all philosophers into three kinds: those who think they have found the truth, those who think it cannot be found, and the Sceptics, who keep on searching. The first kind he names at once: “Those who believe they have discovered it are the ‘Dogmatists,’ specially so called—Aristotle, for example, and Epicurus and the Stoics” (Outlines I.3). Everything Sextus wrote is a war on the Dogmatists. The longest part of it, the books against the Logicians, Physicists and Ethicists, is known as Against the Dogmatists.

He returns to the point again and again:

• His stock examples of Epicurean dogma are “Being is divided,” “God does not foreknow events in the Universe,” and “Pleasure is the Good” (Outlines II.5).
• When he rejects the authority of the wise man, the first one he names is “the Sage of Epicurus” (Outlines II.38).
• When he argues that the schools disagree, so that none can be trusted, Epicurus is his example: “why Epicurus rather than Aristotle?” (Against the Logicians I.328).
• He refuses to share even Epicurus’s quarrel with the professors. Both attacked the arts, he says, but the Pyrrhonists were not moved “by the view that these subjects are of no help to gaining wisdom (for that is a ‘dogmatic’ assertion)” (Against the Professors I.5). In the same passage he sneers at Epicurus’s “lack of culture” and says that “in many matters Epicurus stands convicted of ignorance” (I.1).

The Letter to Menoeceus Is a Dogmatic Document

Sextus’s central charge against every Dogmatist is that he “opines that anything is by nature good or bad” (Outlines I.27). That is exactly what the Letter to Menoeceus does, from beginning to end:

• It tells Menoeceus to practise what Epicurus taught him, “considering them to be the first principles of the good life,” and to “believe that god is a being immortal and blessed” (DL 10.123).
• “We call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us … using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good” (DL 10.129).
• The best man is the one who “has reasoned out the end ordained by nature” (DL 10.133).

Every one of these is a firm statement about what is good by nature. To Sextus that belief is the root of all disturbance: “the man who opines that anything is by nature good or bad is for ever being disquieted” (Outlines I.27). The Sceptic finds quietude only by refusing to call anything good or bad by nature (Outlines III.235–237; Against the Ethicists 118). He even says that friendship, courage, justice and wisdom are “goods” only “by belief,” to be given up with the rest (Against the Ethicists 142).

Epicurus’s school taught the reverse. Diogenes Laertius records that the Epicurean wise man “will give definite teaching and not profess doubt” (DL 10.121).

“Absence of Pain” Does Not Make Epicurus a Sceptic

The quietist reading rests on the phrase “freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind” (DL 10.131). Sextus’s own words answer it in four ways.

First, Sextus’s objection is to making pleasure the end at all, whatever kind of pleasure is meant. In his chapter on the Cyrenaics he says that the Sceptic’s quietude is “the opposite of their End; for whether pleasure be present or not present the man who positively affirms pleasure to be the End undergoes perturbations” (Outlines I.215). The fault lies in affirming pleasure as the end. Epicurus affirms it in so many words: “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life” (DL 10.129), and “we maintain that pleasure is the end” (DL 10.131).

Second, Sextus counts “painlessness” as one more dogmatic answer. Asked what the good is, he says, the Dogmatists “plunge into a hopeless war, some saying it is virtue, others pleasure, others painlessness” (Outlines III.175; the same list at Against the Ethicists 36 and 76). Calling the goal “absence of pain” does not move a man out of the Dogmatist camp. It only puts him on one side of the war that Sextus wants to end. And the “painlessness” side of that war was not Epicurus’s side. The philosopher who made painlessness the end was the Peripatetic Hieronymus of Rhodes, and the ancients kept him and Epicurus apart. In Cicero’s On Ends, the Epicurean Torquatus is asked what Hieronymus holds to be the supreme good. “I understand,” he answers, “that he holds freedom from pain to be the final good”; and of pleasure Hieronymus “asserts … that it is not essentially an object of desire.” Cicero concludes that Hieronymus therefore holds “that joy is one thing, absence of pain another,” and Torquatus answers that “he is grossly mistaken” (On Ends II.8–9, Reid translation). Cicero himself presses the point: if Epicurus meant the same as Hieronymus, “why does he prefer to talk of pleasure rather than of freedom from pain, as Hieronymus does” (II.16)? Epicurus talked of pleasure because pleasure was his end. When Cicero sorts the theories of the supreme good, he puts them in separate places: “one that of Aristippus or of Epicurus, the second that of Hieronymus” (II.35). In Sextus’s list, then, Epicurus belongs under “pleasure”; “painlessness” was the answer of Hieronymus.

Third, Epicurus calls freedom from trouble and freedom from pain pleasures. “Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures” (DL 10.136). Sextus’s quietude is not a pleasure, and he does not choose it as a good. It comes to the Sceptic “as if by chance” after he gives up (Outlines I.29).

Fourth, Epicurus did not limit pleasure to the static kind. In the same passage Diogenes Laertius reports that, unlike the Cyrenaics, “Epicurus admits both kinds both in the soul and in the body” (DL 10.136).

Sextus Says Epicurus Makes Men Worse

Sextus does not think Epicurus brings calm. He says the opposite. In Against the Ethicists he argues that every dogmatic “art of life” makes men more disturbed, and he names Epicurus: “the lover of pleasure is further inflamed by the doctrine of Epicurus (for on his showing pleasure is proved to be the perfection of happiness).” The Dogmatists’ “science of life,” he concludes, “is a bulwark in defence of the evils of mankind rather than an aid against them” (Against the Ethicists 179–180).

He attacks Epicurean pleasure head on, too:

• He argues that the Epicurean cradle argument fails, because “to every pleasure there is linked a pain” (Outlines III.194–196; Against the Ethicists 96–98).
• He argues that “if Epicurus makes the End consist in pleasure” while the soul is made of atoms, no heap of atoms can judge anything good (Outlines III.187).
• He counts “Epicurus … asserts that pleasure is a good” among the clashing opinions that, he says, prove nothing is good by nature (Against the Ethicists 73–77).

And his whole case about happiness is aimed at Epicurus’s starting-point. “The dogmatic philosophers assert … that the man who acquires the good and avoids the evil is happy” (Against the Ethicists 110). That is Epicurus’s doctrine of choice and avoidance. Sextus answers that such a man “will never be happy” (113).

What Sextus Never Says

If Epicurus’s goal were really Sceptic quietude, Sextus would have said so. He never does.

• Epicurus is not among the near neighbours. In Book I of the Outlines, Sextus gives six chapters to philosophies that others had confused with Scepticism: those of Heraclitus, Democritus, the Cyrenaics, Protagoras, the Academics and the Empiric doctors (Outlines I.210–241). Epicurus is not on the list. It did not occur to Sextus that anyone could mistake him for a Sceptic.
• No claim of kinship. Sextus never calls Epicurus a forerunner, never says that Epicurus’s ataraxia is the same as his own, and never cites Epicurus in support of suspending judgement.
• Borrowing without credit. When Sextus does use an Epicurean argument, he leaves Epicurus’s name off it. His comfort for the Sceptic in pain, that the worst pain “terrifies us, after all, but for a moment,” while everyday pain is easily relieved, is Epicurus’s teaching that pain is either short or bearable (PD 4), unacknowledged (Against the Ethicists 150–155).
• A defence with a motive. The one place Sextus defends Epicurus is against the Grammarians’ charge that he stole his doctrines from the poets. Sextus needs the defence to show that the Grammarians are of no use. In making it he reports Epicurus’s doctrine accurately: “it is far preferable to be alive because the good belongs to the sentient” (Against the Professors I.283–285). That is a statement of what is good, the very thing Sextus says no one should affirm.

The Hostility Ran Both Ways

The Epicureans gave as good as they got. Sextus complains that “especially those of the Epicurean School” were “wont to withstand us rather rudely” (Against the Logicians II.337). Epicurus himself, Sextus reports, abused his old teacher Nausiphanes, “the disciple of Pyrrho,” calling him “the Stockfish” because he was “without sense” (Against the Professors I.1–4). And Epicurus aimed his Canon squarely at the Sceptic position: “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false” (PD 23).

This matters for how Epicurus is presented today. Epicurus’s goal is pleasure, and in a wider sense than the Cyrenaics allowed, since it takes in both pleasure in motion and pleasure at rest. Epicurean confidence comes from knowing the truth about nature, the gods and death, not from despairing of truth. When modern writers make “tranquility” the Epicurean goal, they borrow the vocabulary of a school that Epicurus opposed and that opposed Epicurus in turn. Sextus himself never confused the two.

Who Are the “Professors”?

The Greek title of Sextus’s largest work is Pros Mathematikous, in Latin Adversus Mathematicos: “Against the Mathematicians.” The word does not mean mathematicians in our narrow sense. The mathemata were “the things learned,” the subjects of a liberal education. A mathematikos was a man who professed and taught them: grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology and music. That is why Bury translates the title as Against the Professors. Because the later books against the Logicians, Physicists and Ethicists were copied together with it, the whole collection carries the name.

This matters to Epicureans because Epicurus fought the same professors, for his own reasons. Sextus opens the work by pairing himself with Epicurus. Both attacked the professors of the arts, he says, though “the standpoints they adopt are different,” and “Epicurus took the ground that the subjects taught are of no help in perfecting wisdom.” In Cicero’s On Ends (I.71–72), the Epicurean Torquatus explains the reason. Epicurus refused to spend his life, as Plato did, on “music, geometry, mathematics and astronomy, which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one whit towards living a more agreeable, that is a better life” (Cicero, On Ends, Reid translation).

The two oppositions are not the same. Sextus rejects the arts because he rejects all knowledge. Epicurus rejected them because he held that the senses, not abstract reasoning, are the standard of truth, and that learning is worth only what it adds to a pleasant life. Plato had made geometry the gateway to his world of eternal Forms, and the Stoics prized the same kind of reasoning. Epicurus’s attack on the “mathematicians” was an attack on that whole way of seeking truth apart from the senses. It was never an attack on learning itself. Sextus himself reports that Epicurus wrote that the wise man must learn to read and write (Against the Professors I.49), and Cicero records that Epicurus’s friend Polyaenus, “said to have been a great mathematician,” was “persuaded by Epicurus to believe all geometry to be false” (Academic Questions II.106).

The Surviving Works

Sextus’s books survive in three groups. Modern scholars usually cite them by Latin titles and numbers, so both are given below.

Against the Logicians, Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists together form one treatise, sometimes called Against the Dogmatists. Because the manuscripts attach it to Against the Professors (Adversus Mathematicos), all eleven books are cited as M I–XI.

On EpicurusToday.com each work has its own page with the full translation, an “Epicurean Focus” section listing the passages that report or attack Epicurus, and a section-by-section outline.

The Most Important Epicurean Passages

The links below go straight to the passage in Bury’s translation on EpicurusToday.com.

The Canon: How We Know the Truth

• Every sensation is true; error lies in opinion. Epicurus’s doctrine of presentation and opinion, the square tower, and the tests of confirmation and non-contradiction: Against the Logicians I.203–216. This is the single most important passage in Sextus for Epicureans.
• All sensibles are true and existent: Against the Logicians II.9 and II.185.
• Orestes and the Furies: the sensation of the images was true, and the opinion that the Furies were solid was false. Against the Logicians II.63–65.
• Epicurus “established all” appearances, unlike Democritus, who “abolished” them: Against the Logicians I.369.
• The Epicureans begin with Canonics: Against the Logicians I.22.
• Preconception (prolepsis) makes inquiry possible: Against the Logicians II.337 and Against the Professors I.57.
• How all concepts arise from the senses, by resemblance, composition and analogy: Against the Physicists I.393–395 and Against the Ethicists 250–251. Compare DL 10.32.
• The evidence of the senses against dialectic: even Sextus admits that “the evidence of facts seems to bear out the view that motion exists,” and tells of the Cynic who answered the arguments against motion by standing up and walking about: Against the Physicists II.66–68.
• Demetrius of Laconia’s defense of proof: Against the Logicians II.348.

Nature: Atoms, Void, Time and the Gods

• How Epicurus came to philosophy: as a boy he asked his schoolmaster where Hesiod’s Chaos came from, and when told this was the business of philosophers, said “I must go off to them, if it is they who know the truth of things”: Against the Physicists II.18–19.
• The proof of void from motion: Against the Logicians I.213 and II.329.
• Epicurus’s definition of time (“a concurrence of concurrences”): Outlines III.137. The fullest account is Demetrius of Laconia’s report that time is “a symptom of symptoms”: Against the Physicists II.219–227.
• Change is the rearrangement of atoms, and the void is the “intangible nature”: Against the Physicists II.42–44 and II.2.
• Two Epicurean definitions of body: Against the Professors I.22, and body as “a combination of size and shape and resistance and weight”: Against the Physicists II.240.
• How men first conceived the gods, from great images of human shape seen in sleep: Against the Physicists I.25, with Sextus’s objections at I.43–47.
• Souls are “dispersed like smoke” when released from the body: Against the Physicists I.72.
• The gods neither feel trouble nor cause it (PD 1): Outlines III.219, and “the Divinity pays no heed to us,” Outlines I.155.
• The argument from evil against Providence, source of the so-called “Epicurean Paradox”: Outlines III.9–12.
• Thunder is no sign of a god: Against the Professors VI.19.

Ethics: Pleasure and Death

• The cradle argument: animals “as soon as they are born, when still unperverted, seek after pleasure and avoid pains.” Outlines III.194. A fuller version, the newborn that cries at its first touch of cold air “not as yet a slave to opinions,” is at Against the Ethicists 96. Sextus’s reply, that pleasures bring pains, is answered by Epicurus’s own doctrine of choice and avoidance (Letter to Menoeceus 129–130).
• The Sceptic cannot argue away pain and pleasure: Sextus admits that these come “by necessity,” and then consoles the Sceptic with Epicurus’s own argument that pain is either brief or bearable (PD 4), without naming him: Against the Ethicists 141–155.
• Philosophy is “an activity which secures the happy life by arguments and discussions”: Epicurus’s definition, at Against the Ethicists 169.
• Death is nothing to us (PD 2): Outlines III.229.
• Sextus defends Epicurus. Epicurus did not take his limit of pleasure from Homer, and “death is nothing to us” was “proved by Epicurus, and it is not the saying but the proving that is admirable.” Above all: “it is far preferable to be alive because the good belongs to the sentient.” Against the Professors I.283–285.
• Epicurus required the wise man to learn letters, in his lost book On Gifts and Gratitude: Against the Professors I.49.

Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists

These two works, in Bury’s Volume III (1936), complete Sextus’s attack on the “Dogmatists.” Against the Physicists argues that nothing can be known about gods, cause, body, place, motion, time, number, or becoming and perishing. Against the Ethicists argues that nothing is good or evil by nature and that there is no “art of life.” Epicurus held firm views on every one of these subjects, so Sextus reports and attacks him again and again. See the Epicurean Focus on their page. Many of these passages are also collected in Usener’s Epicurea:

• Epicurus on how people first formed the idea of the gods, from great man-like images seen in sleep (M IX.25; Usener 353).
• Epicurus’s saying that souls released from their bodies are “dispersed like smoke” (M IX.72; Usener 337).
• Epicurus’s definition of time, reported through Demetrius of Laconia (M X.219; Usener 294), and his conception of body as size, shape, resistance and weight (M X.240; Usener 275).
• The Epicurean cradle argument (M XI.96; Usener 398).
• Epicurus’s definition of philosophy (M XI.169; Usener 219).

About the Translation Linked Here

The translation is by the Rev. R. G. Bury (1869–1951) for the Loeb Classical Library: Volume I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1933); Volume II, Against the Logicians (1935); Volume III, Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists (1936); Volume IV, Against the Professors (1949). The text of Volumes I and IV was prepared from the scans at the Internet Archive.

Some points to keep in mind:

• Only Bury’s English is given. Bury’s footnotes are omitted. Chapter headings are Bury’s.
• Section numbers are Bury’s, which are the standard numbers used by scholars. Each is a link target, so a passage can be cited with a link such as .../092-sextus-empiricus-against-the-logicians-bury/#1-203. Book and section are joined by a hyphen.
• The text comes from OCR (machine reading of the scanned pages). It has been corrected by hand wherever it is quoted on these pages, but scattered misreadings may remain in other passages. A few section numbers could not be read from the scan, but their link targets still work.

Note

^[1] Sextus defines Scepticism as “an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgements in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of ‘unperturbedness’ or quietude” (Outlines I.8). “The main basic principle of the Sceptic system is that of opposing to every proposition an equal proposition; for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize” (I.12). He explains the formula “To every argument an equal argument is opposed” in a chapter of its own (I.202–205).