THE ASSUMPTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD

The thesis that the pathē alone can be known, while the nature of external objects is unknowable, raises questions concerning the scope of Cyrenaic scepticism. The most important one is whether the Cyrenaics challenged not only our knowledge, but also the existence, of anything external to the perceiver's pathē. If they did, and if they envisaged the hypothesis that each and every individual pathos may be a logical construction of one's mind and may have nothing to do with external reality, they prefigured a problem central to the formulation of modern scepticism, the problem of the external world.

In what follows, I shall argue that, although they denied that we can have cognitive access to the properties of the external objects, they do not take the next step of challenging the existence of the objects themselves in a general and systematic way. At the outset, I should like to stress that I do not take a definitive position as to whether the Cyrenaics need the assumption that there is a reality external to the perceiver; the point is not so much that they need to presuppose it, but that they do not have a philosophical motive to raise doubts about its existence.

There is no evidence that the members of the school formulated definite views about the existence of external objects.