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Concept
Epoché
Summary
In Hellenistic philosophy, Epoché (ἐποχή epokhē, "cessation") is suspension of judgment but also as "withholding of assent".
Pyrrhonism
Epoché plays an important role in Pyrrhonism, the skeptical philosophy named after Pyrrho, who is regarded as the founder of ancient skepticism. The Pyrrhonists developed the concept of "epoché" to describe the state where all judgments about non-evident matters are suspended to induce a state of ataraxia (freedom from worry and anxiety). The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus gives this definition: "Epoché is a state of the intellect on account of which we neither deny nor affirm anything." This concept is similarly employed in Academic Skepticism but without the objective of ataraxia.
Pyrrhonism provides practitioners with techniques for achieving epoché through the use of the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus, the Five Modes of Agrippa, and the Pyrrhonist maxims. Pyrrhonism is mostly known today through the writings of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus whose surviving works appear to be an encyclopedia of Pyrrhonist arguments for inducing epoché across a breadth of philosophical and other intellectual issues of antiquity. Sextus Empiricus was able to elaborate on the 10 tropes of Aenesidemus and argue syllogistic proofs in every area of speculative knowledge.
In Stoicism, the concept is used to describe the withholding of assent to Phantasia (impressions). For example, Epictetus uses the term in this manner: "If what philosophers say is true, that in all men action starts from one source, feeling, as in assent it is the feeling that a thing is so, and in denial the feeling that it is not so, yes, by Zeus, and in epoché, the feeling that it is uncertain: so also impulse towards a thing is originated by the feeling that it is fitting, and will to get a thing by the feeling that it is expedient for one, and it is impossible to judge."
Bracketing (phenomenology)
The term was popularized in Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl in 1906.
Official source
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