Epoché (ἐποχή) — “suspension of judgment.” The Greek term epokhḗ literally means “a halting,” “a stopping,” “a withholding,” and designates the act of withholding assent—that is, of neither affirming nor denying the truth of a proposition. In ancient skepticism, especially in the Pyrrhonist tradition set out by Sextus Empiricus, epoché is the upshot of realizing that for every argument there stands another of equal and opposite force (isostheneia): unable to decide between opposing claims about the nature of things, the skeptic suspends judgment. This suspension is not a doctrine but an attitude, and from it follows, according to the Pyrrhonists, ataraxia—the tranquility or freedom from disturbance that is skepticism’s ultimate aim. Twenty-three centuries later, Edmund Husserl repurposes the concept as a cornerstone of phenomenology. In the phenomenological epoché, described in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), the philosopher “brackets the world” (Einklammerung): he does not deny that the world exists but suspends the natural attitude, the naive, habitual belief that things exist independently of us. With this thesis of existence neutralized, attention turns to the way objects are given to consciousness, opening the field of the phenomenological reduction and the study of intentionality—the structure whereby all consciousness is always consciousness of something. In both its ancient and its modern use, epoché is a gesture of stepping back: not a denial, but a putting of judgment out of play in order to see more clearly.
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