Protreptic Writing

Image from the life of Pyrro, who never wrote anything, but whose legacy is preserved in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism

Lambert_Wiesing’s book, The Philosophy of Perception (forthcoming from Bloomsbury this August–my translation) contains–among many fine things–a resolution to the question, “How do phenomenologists speak–or write–without appearing to persuade?”  Protreptic writing does not argue a case, does not presume to present a “truth” independent of actual experience.  Rather it describes the author’s own steps in reaching a given conclusion.  The cue to the reader is then to follow those same steps, and arrive at the same conclusion, having had the supporting experience.  It is by no means a new approach.  The primary examples come from Outlines of Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, a Greed physician, fl. 1st century ad.