Ancient Pyrrhonism represents perhaps the earliest example of an identifiably quietist position in the West. The Pyrrhonist philosopher
Sextus Empiricus described Pyrrhonism as a form of philosophical therapy: Some have identified
Epicureans as another early proponent of quietism. The goals of Epicurean philosophy are the decidedly quietist objectives of
aponia (freedom from pain) and ataraxia, even dismissing Stoic logic as useless. The
neo-Confucian philosopher
Cheng Hao is also associated with advocating quietism. He argued that the goal of existence should be calming one's natural biases and embracing impartial tranquility. One of the early 'ordinary language' works,
Gilbert Ryle's
The Concept of Mind, attempted to demonstrate that
dualism arises from a failure to appreciate that mental vocabulary and physical vocabulary are simply different ways of describing one and the same thing, namely human behaviour.
J. L. Austin's
Sense and Sensibilia took a similar approach to the problems of
skepticism and the reliability of
sense perception, arguing that they arise only by misconstruing ordinary language, not because there is anything genuinely wrong with
empirical evidence.
Norman Malcolm, a friend of Wittgenstein's, took a quietist approach to skeptical problems in the
philosophy of mind. More recently, the philosophers
John McDowell, Irad Kimhi, Sabina Lovibond, Eric Marcus,
Gideon Rosen, have taken explicitly quietist positions. Pete Mandik has argued for a position of
qualia quietism on
the hard problem of consciousness. == Varieties ==