Posts by Cassius

Yes Dave those are several of the most key references to prolepsis in the major texts. I would say that any good interpretation of prolepsis needs to be reconcilable with them. I don't find that DeWitt's choice of words is always the best, in that he sometimes comes close to calling them innate "ideas," but his list of the examples there is as I understand it correct.

I think it's very relevant to point out that Velleius pretty clearly divides the core attributes of blessedness and imlerishability from any other speculations, diving that from what the mind strives for further:

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We have then a preconception of such a nature that we believe the gods to be blessed and immortal. For nature, which bestowed upon us an idea of the gods themselves, also engraved on our minds the belief that they are eternal and blessed. If this is so, the famous maxim of Epicurus truthfully enunciates that "that which is blessed and eternal can neither know trouble itself nor cause trouble to another, and accordingly cannot feel either anger or favor, since all such things belong only to the weak."

If we sought to attain nothing else beside piety in worshiping the gods and freedom from superstition, what has been said had sufficed; since the exalted nature of the gods, being both eternal and supremely blessed, would receive man's pious worship (for what is highest commands the reverence that is its due); and furthermore all fear of the divine power or divine anger would have been banished (since it is understood that anger and favor alike are excluded from the nature of a being at once blessed and immortal, and that these being eliminated we are menaced by no fears in regard to the powers above). But the mind strives to strengthen this belief by trying to discover the form of god, the mode of his activity, and the operation of his intelligence.

And later on he says:

XVIII. With regard to his form, we are directed partly by nature and partly by reason

"I can't find any arguments that would justify Epicurus' claims..."

To what claims are you referring? I see no claim other than that a god is a totally happy and totally deathless being. And I see examples of some things that are happier than others, and some things that love longer than others, all around me.

Now you may object to happy and death as being concepts, but those concepts arise from real particular examples whether I label them or not.

I would see prolepsis as an ability or disposition to pick out similars from among randomness.

Quote from sanantoniogarden

An analogy (imperfect at best) I use to describe prolepsis, which should be familiar to most these days, are the cameras on our phones. Say that your mind is like a camera constantly taking pictures of various things.

I agree this is useful. Like a camera, the eyes and other senses are continuously receiving stimulation and input. Something in our brains has to decide what inputs to pay attention to and to assemble into relevant connections before we start rationally evaluating them. We don't constantly state to ourselves in words what our senses are receiving. We act on and assemble relationships between data automatically, and then process those into words when appropriate.

Bryan will likely do better than me but I would say:

Quote from TauPhi

1) Prolepsis is a canonical faculty, knowledge is possible but prolepsis of gods is logically impossible (we know now that eidolas is a failed theory and images of gods do not reach human minds travelling from intermundia). That means Epicurus blundered with his description of gods being incorruptible and blessed. He had no input data to form prolepsis of gods and make any claims about gods, whatsoever.

I think according to your own reasoning, with which I agree, saying "prolepsis of gods" is improper. Eyes don't see gods or trees or birds or any other "object" either. Once you assign a word or name to what you are talking about you are selectively choosing from the inputs of the eye to the brain, and I would say the same applies to "gods." What we seem to be revolving around is seeing proplepsis as a form of automatic selectivity among the inputs provided by the sensations and feelings, by which the brain then in a separate step takes that selected raw data and then assembles the patterns into concepts and attaches names to them.

Quote from TauPhi

2) Prolepsis is a form of reasoning and cannot be considered canonical faculty or knowledge is impossible. That means Epicurus blundered with his description of canon or applied pure reasoning in his description of gods. Whether his reasoning is correct or incorrect remains forever undetermined as knowledge is impossible in this case and everything goes.

Same point as above. I would not see prolepsis as a form of "reasoning." Regardless of whether you pursue the "real" or "ideal" view of gods, the prolepsis that Velleius is talking about need not be anything more than the selective pattern-recognition of "blessed/happy" and "deathlessness." After those patterns are realized as applicable to life here, other observations about living beings here, that nature never makes a single thing of a kind, that the universe is eternal and filled with life, etc, would be enough to extend the concept through conceptual reasoning to conclude that such beings do in fact exist somewhere in the universe.

So in both cases I think your original point of reasoning - that prolepsis must be pre-rational and is never a "conclusion"- is the way forward. That original point just needs to be followed to its logical conclusion so that we rigorously separate the faculty of prolepsis from including "conclusions" or "ideas" of any kind.

And of course Heraclitus comes in for direct mention in Lucretius:

1-635 (continuing in following sections....)

Wherefore those who have thought that fire is the substance of things, and that the whole sum is composed of fire alone, are seen to fall very far from true reasoning. Heraclitus is their leader who first enters the fray, of bright fame for his dark sayings, yet rather among the empty-headed than among the Greeks of weight, who seek after the truth. For fools laud and love all things more which they can descry hidden beneath twisted sayings, and they set up for true what can tickle the ear with a pretty sound and is tricked out with a smart ring.

There is also a lot of good discussion at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

2. Theory of Knowledge

Heraclitus sees the great majority of human beings as lacking understanding:

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Of this Word’s being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Word they are like the unexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and declare how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep. (DK22B1)

Most people sleep-walk through life, not understanding what is going on about them. Yet experience of words and deeds can enlighten those who are receptive to their meaning. (The opening sentence is ambiguous: does the ‘forever’ go with the preceding or the following words? Heraclitus prefigures the semantic complexity of his message.)

On the one hand, Heraclitus commends sense experience: “The things of which there is sight, hearing, experience, I prefer” (DK22B55). On the other hand, “Poor witnesses for men are their eyes and ears if they have barbarian souls” (DK22B107). A barbarian is one who does not speak the Greek language. Thus while sense experience seems necessary for understanding, if we do not know the right language, we cannot interpret the information the senses provide. Heraclitus does not give a detailed and systematic account of the respective roles of experience and reason in knowledge. But we can learn something from his manner of expression.

Describing the practice of religious prophets, Heraclitus says, “The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign” (DK22B93). Similarly, Heraclitus does not reveal or conceal, but produces complex expressions that have encoded in them multiple messages for those who can interpret them. He uses puns, paradoxes, antitheses, parallels, and various rhetorical and literary devices to construct expressions that have meanings beyond the obvious. This practice, together with his emphasis on the Word (Logos) as an ordering principle of the world, suggests that he sees his own expressions as imitations of the world with its structural and semantic complexity. To read Heraclitus the reader must solve verbal puzzles, and to learn to solve these puzzles is to learn to read the signs of the world. Heraclitus stresses the inductive rather than the deductive method of grasping the world, a world that is rationally structured, if we can but discern its shape.

For those who can discern it, the Word has an overriding message to impart: “Listening not to me but to the Word it is wise to agree that all things are one” (DK22B50). It is perhaps Heraclitus’s chief project to explain in what sense all things are one.

3. The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites

According to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus held extreme views that led to logical incoherence. For he held that (1) everything is constantly changing and (2) opposite things are identical, so that (3) everything is and is not at the same time. In other words, Universal Flux and the Identity of Opposites entail a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Plato indicates the source of the flux doctrine: “Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and comparing existents to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river” (Cratylus 402a = DK22A6).

What Heraclitus actually says is the following:

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On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. (DK22B12)

There is an antithesis between ‘same’ and ‘other.’ The sentence says that different waters flow in rivers staying the same. In other words, though the waters are always changing, the rivers stay the same. Indeed, it must be precisely because the waters are always changing that there are rivers at all, rather than lakes or ponds. The message is that rivers can stay the same over time even though, or indeed because, the waters change. The point, then, is not that everything is changing, but that the fact that some things change makes possible the continued existence of other things. Perhaps more generally, the change in elements or constituents supports the constancy of higher-level structures.As for the alleged doctrine of the Identity of Opposites, Heraclitus does believe in some kind of unity of opposites. For instance, “God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger . . .” (DK22B67). But if we look closer, we see that the unity in question is not identity:

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As the same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and conversely those having changed around are these. (DK22B88)

The second sentence in B88 gives the explanation for the first. If F is the same as G because F turns into G, then the two are not identical. And Heraclitus insists on the common-sense truth of change: “Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet” (DK22B126). This sort of mutual change presupposes the non-identity of the terms. What Heraclitus wishes to maintain is not the identity of opposites but the fact that they replace each other in a series of transformations: they are interchangeable or transformationally equivalent.

Thus, Heraclitus does not hold Universal Flux, but recognizes a lawlike flux of elements; and he does not hold the Identity of Opposites, but the Transformational Equivalence of Opposites. The views that he does hold do not, jointly or separately, entail a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Heraclitus does, to be sure, make paradoxical statements, but his views are no more self-contradictory than are the paradoxical claims of Socrates. They are, presumably, meant to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers.

I've moved this over to a new thread so that it will be easier over time to explore this precise relationship. In the meantime pending a better source of quotes, here is what Wikipedia says:

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Little is known of Heraclitus's life. He wrote a single work, only fragments of which have survived. Even in ancient times, his paradoxical philosophy, appreciation for wordplay, and cryptic, oracular epigrams earned him the epithets "the dark" and "the obscure". He was considered arrogant and depressed, a misanthrope who was subject to melancholia. Consequently, he became known as "the weeping philosopher" in contrast to the ancient atomist philosopher Democritus, who was known as "the laughing philosopher".

The central ideas of Heraclitus's philosophy are the unity of opposites and the concept of change. Heraclitus saw harmony and justice in strife. He viewed the world as constantly in flux, always "becoming" but never "being". He expressed this in sayings like "Everything flows" (Greek: πάντα ῥεῖ, panta rhei) and "No man ever steps in the same river twice". This insistence upon change contrasts with that of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who believed in a reality of static "being".

...

Heraclitus is said to have produced a single work on papyrus,^[a] which has not survived; however, over 100 fragments of this work survive in quotations by other authors.^{[note 5]} The title is unknown,^[20] but many later writers refer to this work, and works by other pre-Socratics, as On Nature.^[21][a]...

The opening lines are quoted by Sextus Empiricus:

Of the logos being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this logos they are like the unexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and declare how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep.^[x]

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Also:

Diogenes Laërtius relays the story that the playwright Euripides gave Socrates a copy of Heraclitus's work and asked for his opinion. Socrates replied: "The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it."^[38]

There is one passage the relevance of which I think is underappreciated in the prolepsis discussion. This below from fragment 5 of Diogenes of Oinoanda gets referenced frequently in regard to Epicurus' canon in general, but I wonder if it not a specific reference to the function of prolepsis:

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Fr. 5
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Now Aristotle and those who hold the same Peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable, because things are continually in flux and, on account of the rapidity of the flux, evade our apprehension. We on the other hand acknowledge their flux, but not its being so rapid that the nature of each thing [is] at no time apprehensible by sense-perception. And indeed [in no way would the upholders of] the view under discussion have been able to say (and this is just what they do [maintain] that [at one time] this is [white] and this black, while [at another time] neither this is [white nor] that black, [if] they had not had [previous] knowledge of the nature of both white and black.

When you're living in an age when most every educated person would be aware that Heraclitus has said everything is in such flux and flows so fast that it is impossible to apprehend anything at all, you need a description of the process by which you DO apprehend things and make sense of them.

I wonder if prolepsis then might best be understood as Epicurus' answer not just to Plato and Aristotle, who were themselves apparently responding to Heraclitus by postulating that there are true forms or essences (neither of which exist).

Epicurus' prolepsis provides the foundation of an answer to Heraclitus' flux challenge in a natural faculty, just like pleasure and pain, to how we actually understand the things around us without reliance on forms or esences which do not exist, or on preexisting innate ideas from a time before birth. In providing a theory of understand the assembly of knowledge, it is parallel to atomism in providing a theory of physics.

Even as to the title we generally give to Lucretius' poem, how would we know what a "thing" is, or distinguish one "thing" from another, if we did not have a faculty which continuously organizes the raw data from the senses into something intelligible?

As I understand it there are not many reliable quotations from Heraclitus available, but those that do make it clear that this "flux" problem demanded a real-world answer.

Thanks Eikadistes. I want to revamp our way of accessing and discussing the Doctrines and Sayings and I will work to incorporate those crossreferences in whatever I come up with.

Quote from Eikadistes

This might be a sort of marker about the limits of un-disturbedness.

I think this is correct Eikadistes. What I think we can see in the discussion in Tusculan Disputations is that the Stoics were asserting that the good/wise/happy man is going to have no part of evil, and therefore we cannot ever label pain as evil. Epicurus is willing to call pain evil, but he knows that the happy man will still have times when he experiences pain, so he stresses that we can still be happy even when we are in pain, as in his last days.

Epicurus' view of happiness is therefore much more logical and consistent with human experience than that of the Stoics.

This discussion thread will serve as a crossreference to the new blog article posted by Elli.

PRINCIPAL DOCTRINE XIV – ANALYSIS & CONTEMPORARY APPLICATION - Epicureanfriends.com

PRINCIPAL DOCTRINE XIV – ANALYSIS & CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONThis work was authored by George Kaplanis, a retired notary and founding member of the Group for…

www.epicureanfriends.com

The blog feature of the forum has a place at the bottom of the article to allow for quick comments, but if someone wants to discuss the article I recommend doing that HERE - in this discussion thread - so it is more easily findable later.

Yes I will make sure there are several different ways to find all the threads tagged with a particular doctrine number.

In the near future, we will eliminate the subforums currently located within the "Principal Doctrines" and "Vatican Sayings" forums. Most of these forums only have one or two threads on each item, and we will rename each thread to start with, for example, "PDO1" or "VSO1" rather than have forty or eighty-three separate subforums that are time-consuming to scroll through. If anyone has any comment or suggestion about this reorganization before we implement it, let us know here.

Note: It may not be possible to sort a large forum by title so as to get them in order (e.g., PD01, PD02, etc) but it will be possible to set up a page where each doctrine's post can be located by tag, which is similar to the method we are using to organize tags on this page below:

Search Assistance - Epicureanfriends.com

www.epicureanfriends.com

Crossreference:

As it will be relevant to this podcast series on Part 3 of Tusculan Disputations, please post any links to articles or publicly-available material relevant to Philodemus' "On Anger" in this thread below:

Thread

Philodemus' "On Anger" - General - Texts and Resources

I have long suspected that a number of people who come to Epicurus from other philosophies or religious backgrounds tend to presume that Epicurus was very passive and frowned on all forms of anger. This topic comes back to mind after our most recent A Few Days In Athens Discussion (on Chapter Eight ) in regard to the exchange between Metrodorus and Epicurus on the subject near the end of the Chapter.

Frances Wright does not develop this issue very far, but I think it's important for us to…

Cassius

April 1, 2022 at 5:36 PM

This topic is going to be relevant to our discussions of Part 3 of Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations."

At the moment the primary source is probably the 2020 SBL Press version translated by David Armstrong and Michael McOsker.

Philodemus, On Anger (Writings from the Greco-roman World) (Writings from the Greco-Roman World, 45)

It appears that the edition linked below may be the same as that listed on Amazon:

An Epicurean Theory of Anger: A New Edition of Philodemus’ De Ira (PHerc. 182)

www.rivisteweb.it

If anyone knows of any material on "On Anger" that is publicly accessible on the internet, please post here in this thread.

Happy Birthday to jason! Learn more about jason and say happy birthday on jason's timeline: jason

Definitely the book and our podcast interview with Marcello Boeri!

Thread

Episode 197 -LucretiusToday Interviews Dr. Marcelo Boeri

Welcome to Episode 197 of the Lucretius Today Podcast. Today we are very privileged to present to you an interview with Dr. Marcelo Boeri, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Dr. Boeri is originally from Buenos Aires, and after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Salvador in 1995, he has worked extensively in the field of Ancient Greek philosophy ever since, lecturing at many distinguished universities around the world.

We are greatly…

Cassius

October 22, 2023 at 7:36 AM

Crossreference:

Thread

Special Emphasis On "Emotions" In Lucretius Today Podcast / Tusculan Disputations - Should Everyone Aspire To Emulate Mr. Spock?

Beginning with Episode 288 of the Lucretius Today Podcast recorded today, for the next six weeks or longer we are going to be dealing with important issues as to emotions: Should emotions be considered to be "diseases," as Cicero explains is implied in the Greek "pathe" terminology, or considered as "perturbation" as he says in Latin?

Should all strong emotions be suppressed by the wise man, as the Stoics suggest, or is the wise man going to experience strong emotions?

These issues are discussed…

Cassius

June 29, 2025 at 3:39 PM

Beginning with Episode 288 of the Lucretius Today Podcast recorded today, for the next six weeks or longer we are going to be dealing with important issues as to emotions: Should emotions be considered to be "diseases," as Cicero explains is implied in the Greek "pathe" terminology, or considered as "perturbation" as he says in Latin?

Should all strong emotions be suppressed by the wise man, as the Stoics suggest, or is the wise man going to experience strong emotions?

These issues are discussed in Part 3 of Tusculan Disputations, which begins here.

Cicero criticizes the Stoics for playing word games with these issues, but to some extent it is in fact necessary for us to explore the meaning of the word choices we use to be sure we are not accepting false or misleading labeling.

I suggest that over the next couple of weeks when we are looking for topics for meetings that we begin exploring this topic in more detail. This subforum will be a good place to post threads on this topic.