 As for the avoidance of theoretical inquiry and debate, if Pyrrho was primarily a moralist and the Aristocles passage mostly contains Timon’s ideas, such inquiry and debate would simply have been outside Pyrrho’s sphere of interest. But if the Aristocles passage as a whole represents Pyrrho’s own thought, it is fair to assume that he will have regarded such inquiry and debate as troublesome because it is necessarily fruitless and interminable. If the real nature of things is indeterminable by us, as the epistemological interpretation would have it, then to attempt to determine the nature of things, and to provide cogent grounds for the superiority of one’s own theories, is to attempt the impossible; such matters are simply beyond our grasp. But if, as the metaphysical interpretation would have it, the world is in its real nature indefinite, then one is also attempting the impossible, though for a different reason; one is attempting to determine a fixed character for things that inherently lack any fixed character. Of course, the thesis that reality is indefinite is itself a definite statement. But it follows from this statement that any attempt to establish fixed and definite characteristics for specific items in the universe is doomed to failure. And it seems to be this kind of theoretical inquiry that Timon represents Pyrrho as eschewing; as one fragment puts it (addressing Pyrrho), “you were not concerned to inquire what winds hold sway over Greece, from where everything comes and into what it passes” (Diogenes Laertius 9.65). On this reading, then, Pyrrho’s avoidance of inquiry and debate resembles the disdain for physical speculation that is apparent in some writings of Plato (Phaedo for example); physical speculation is fruitless because the physical world is not susceptible to rational inquiry.