Hi MrP. As my message ended up on page three, I take the freedom to post it again.
1) "The impossibility of giving his assent to any of the positions which are party to these various disputes, on account of their apparent equipollence, leads the Pyrrhonist to the adoption of suspension of judgment with regard to the matters in question. Hence, the mere fact that there is diversity of points of view, opinions, or theories is not in itself sufficient to induce suspension of judgment: it is also necessary that none of them appear to have more weight than the others.”
Yes, I also felt that the "on account of..." is kind of weird. Perhaps: "...disputes, due to the fact that their arguments appear to be equipollent,..."?
2) You've already seen this paragraph, where I use the term “party”, and when referring to it I use the possessive adjective “its” and then the personal pronoun “they”. The point is that I’m not sure whether I should rather use “their”/ “they” or “its” / “it” or just leave the way it is.
“He will point out that such opinions seem to be dependent upon each party’s familial, cultural, and social background, as well as upon its religious, metaphysical, and scientific beliefs and theories, so that one may say how abortion appears to be in relation to each of these factors, but not how it is in itself. But his inquiry will not stop there: he will attempt to determine whether any of the contending parties can justify its claims. That is to say, in attempting to prove the truth of an assertion, one of the parties will have to prove the truth of the premise from which they infer the assertion, and so on ad infinitum. Or, to avoid being thrown back ad infinitum, they will try to establish the truth of one of the links of the chain of reasons by having recourse to the first link whose truth they set out to establish, thus falling into circularity. Or they will argue that one of the links of the chain needs no proof to establish its truth because, for instance, it is self-evident or self-justifying.”
3) "I underline this point because, in discussing his paper through written communication, Bett pointed out to me that Annas had claimed that contemporary ethical skepticism rests on a non-skeptical position regarding science, and that what he had intended to prove was that this need not be so."
4) "It follows from this that when I translate the term anepikritos as “undecidable”, I do not use this word in a strong sense. I think that if up to now the arguments put forward by the parties to a dispute have appeared to a person to have equal force it is consistent to say that at least so far it has not been possible for that person to give his assent to any of the contending positions".
Thanks,
Sextus
|