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?"

This is from the wikipedia page:

Epistemology

Main article: Epistemology

According to the Stoics, knowledge can be attained through the application of reason to the impressions (phantasiai) received by the mind through the senses. The mind can judge (συγκατάθεσις, synkatathesis)—approve or reject—an impression, enabling it to distinguish a true representation of reality from one that is false. Some impressions can be assented to immediately, but others can achieve only varying degrees of hesitant approval, which can be labeled belief or opinion (doxa). It is only through reason that people gain clear comprehension and conviction (katalepsis). Certainty and true knowledge (episteme), achievable by the Stoic sage, can be attained only by verifying the conviction with the expertise of one's peers and the collective judgment of humankind.

Quote from Patrikios

Does this imply a conscious thought process to choose to accept the truth of a sense input; which animals do not have?

So i think the answer is yes - and it's more than just implication. This is the voluntary step in which a person evaluates whether to accept an impression or not.

I don't know that every statement made in that Wikipedia section is correct (especially, Certainty and true knowledge (episteme), achievable by the Stoic sage, can be attained only by verifying the conviction with the expertise of one's peers and the collective judgment of humankind. ) but that definitely seems to be the way they are going.

The section we're in right now is not by any means over so we hopefully will get a better understanding as we read further in what Cicero has to say, but I think the general outlines are becoming clear, including --

- to the Stoics certainty is possible but it is exceedingly hard to get, as true sages are "as rare as a phoenix"

- on the other hand there appear to be some impressions that they believed to be so strong that they could not possibly be false.

The Stoics are trapped in the dilemma that they refuse to accept Epicurus's view that all sensations are true, so they have to come up with some process that allows them to determine that some are true and some are false. Epicurus will revise his opinions at any point that they are contradicted by sufficient evidence from the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. The Stoics - believing in intelligent design - have to come up with something that they think is unchangeably true. ("It is only through reason that people gain clear comprehension and conviction" -- this implies reason alone is the arbiter, since the senses cannot be trusted to be honest )

And i think that problem - looking for unchangeability - is directly related to our parallel discussions about whether pleasure is a process of change and therefore inferior to a "state" that allegedly has an absolute aspect that never changes.

We've been debating whether to skip some of this in Academic Questions but currently we are seeing the sweep of arguments that Cicero is going to bring to the table about all sorts of topics that we'd better stay with it.