Video chat: Richard Bett on ancient Skepticism

Episode 9 of "Meet the Greco-Romans"

Welcome to another entry in an occasional series of video chats with authors and translators who have written about the philosophy, culture, and history of the Greco-Roman tradition.

In this episode I talk to Richard Bett, professor of Ancient Greek philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Richard particular focus is on ethics and epistemology. He is the author of Pyrrho, his Antecedents and his Legacy (Oxford, 2000), and of translations of Sextus Empiricus' Against the Ethicists (Oxford, 1997, with introduction and commentary), Against the Logicians (Cambridge, 2005, with introduction and notes), Against the Physicists (Cambridge, 2012, with introduction and notes), and Against Those in the Disciplines (Oxford, 2018, with introduction and notes).

Richard is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (2010). A collection of his essays, under the title How to be A Pyrrhonist, was published in 2019 (Cambridge). In 2021 he published How to Keep an Open Mind: An Ancient Guide to Thinking Like a Skeptic, a guided selection of Sextus Empiricus' writings for a general audience, in Princeton University Press's Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series.

He is currently working on a translation of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which will also include commentary. While Richard’s publications have been especially on ancient Greek skepticism (sometimes including comparisons with modern approaches to skepticism), he has also published papers on the Stoics, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists.

Enjoy our conversation!