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Full Idea
Our lack of sureness in the senses is shown if we take two colours, back and white, and pour one into the other drop by drop, we are unable to distinguish the gradual alterations although they subsist as actual facts.
Gist of Idea
We reveal unreliability in the senses when we cannot discriminate a slow change of colour
Source
report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Logicians (two books) I.090
Book Ref
Sextus Empiricus: 'Against the Logicians', ed/tr. Bury,R.G. [Harvard Loeb 1997], p.47
A Reaction
[Sextus calls Anaxagoras 'the greatest of the physicists'] I'm not sure what this proves. People with bad eyesight can distinguish very little, but that doesn't prove scepticism. And there are things too small for anyone to see.
| 22761 | We reveal unreliability in the senses when we cannot discriminate a slow change of colour [Anaxagoras, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| 2243 | Mitigated scepticism sensibly confines our enquiries to the narrow capacity of human understanding [Hume] |
| 5548 | Hume became a total sceptic, because he believed that reason was a deception [Hume, by Kant] |
| 15623 | Humean scepticism, unlike ancient Greek scepticism, accepts the truth of experience as basic [Hegel] |
| 3575 | Scepticism can involve discrepancy, relativity, infinity, assumption and circularity [Williams,M] |
| 7322 | Constitutive scepticism is about facts, and epistemological scepticism about our ability to know them [Miller,A] |
| 6588 | Scepticism is cartesian (sceptical scenarios), or Humean (future), or Pyrrhonian (suspend belief) [Fogelin] |
| 18700 | Cartesian scepticism doubts what is true; Kantian scepticism doubts that it is sayable [Button] |