Episode 344 - EATAQ26 - What Is Our Mind's Role In Determining Truth?

Welcome to Episode 344 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero's "Academic Questions" from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato's Academy and helps us understand Epicurus' position on the same issues. This week will continue in Sections 11 and 12 of Book Two.

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We'll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we'll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Last week's transcript, on which we'll build this week

This episode will be up later today - in the meantime as a note to myself and Joshua, we discuss in this one that the Stoic position is that some perceptions are so clear that they cannot be denied -- and yet the stoics are talking about "assent" to the perception as required. Now, how the stoics square their requirement for "assent' to their view that essentially all things are determined / preordained by their nature/god is a contradiction that we'll want to address as we go further.

For Epicurus, there is no such contradiction, because there are no perceptions which are so clearly true that they cannot possibly be false. With Epicurus, ALL perceptions are constantly weighed against the anticipations, feelings, and senses, and our formation of opinions are in our minds (never in the senses themselves) so the praise or blame for reaching correct opinions is always in play. It's always up to us to assess things accurately, there are no divine "marks" or "signs" that can always be considered to be the indicia of truth.

We left this point hanging because we ran out of time, but we'll come back to this next week when we continue comparing this to Socrates' positions in The Republic.

Episode 344 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week our episode is entitled: "What Is Our Mind's Role In Determining Truth?"