Welcome Beasain!

Salve Cassius!
I was browsing through all the material and it is like a gold mine. Thanks to everybody for their contributions. It is pure pleasure discovering all this!

Let's introduce myself. I am from Spain and was the worst student in Latin, although I adored ancient philosophy. I studied geology and specialized in geochemistry. A friend of mine who is a teacher of Latin and Greek, and Epicurist draw my attention some years ago on the De Rerum Natura, and when reading it I was so amazed that somebody in the first century B.C. was able to describe Brownian motion of dust in a sun beam with the exact explanation, as in the beginning of the 20th century was used by Einstein to definitively demonstrate the existence of atoms (and to approximatively calculate their radius).
The perfect explanation of smell, the way eyes works (although not with atoms but photons as elementary particles), and a few other things. But also the ethics seemed to me so modern, more or less the values that were teached to me by my liberal parents. I started quite intensely digging deeper and discovered that this was one of the principle Roman influences since the Renaissance. How is it possible that nobody told me about Lucretius - Epicurus at school, or at university?

In my 101 course of philosophy at the university it was the first half hour some name dropping of Pre-socratics, then Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Augustinus and a lot of Descartes (never enjoyed him), Kant (I was not bright enough to get it ), Hegel (how boring), some utilitarists etc., Nietzsche (I liked him, and discover now his texts on epicurism), some Marx (nobody told us about the phD of Marx on Epicurus), a bit about Kierkegaard and some other melancholic continental philosopher, the enigmatic Heidegger (very important!), some existentialism. And still... if you open a one volume of the history of philosophy, it is remarkable that there are no women (Simonne De Beauvoir maybe) and no or almost nothing reasonable about Hellenism (and in each case almost nothing about Epicurism). I remember the remark of the professor that philosophy is basically the footnote to the work of Plato. This is the way you introduce young people to philosophy?it seems to me a kind of indoctrination, just the opposite of learn to think. What are the reasons of hiding Hellenistic philosophy, and especially Epicurism? The Plato mafia of Hegel?

If even Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, wrote a poem on Lucretius, and Lucretius makes some useful suggestions on evolution of better formed organisms, would it be too daring to think that there was some transmission here too? (I researched this a bit and nobody has demonstrated this yet, but it is far from unthinkable in my dilettante opinion).

But I come here especially to seriously learn and understand, and I fully support the claim to give publicity to an 'orthodox' epicurism, although I guess that there is no THE correct interpretation, and that this is an ongoing investigation, no?

I found Epicurean Friends through San Google (as we call it in Spain).

I have also a question. Maybe it is not exactly on it is place here, but you will tell me where it would be more appropriate, I hope.

¿Is there somebody that has an opinion on the book of the French philosopher Pierre Vesperini "Lucrèce : archéologie d'un classique européen?" For those who understand French there is a quite interesting interview here:

Basically, he defends, based on a serious investigation (his phD work) that Lucretius was in fact like Virgil a extremely talented professional poet that wrote on demand, as a supposed client of Gaius Memmius, (apparently a kind of corrupt senator - who was not at that time? - and according to a letter of Cicero the owner of the house of Epicurus in Athens, which he even wanted to destroy to build a new house for himself). The thesis of Pierre Vesperini, after closely investigating all the available evidence, and he discovered a lot of unknown evidences, is that Lucretius would be just a professional poet without links with Epicurism, which of course sounds as blasphemy to most of us. In each case the book is a treasure for new information about the circumstances and the early reception of this wonderful poem. (I have the impression that Vesperini excludes the thesis that Lucretius operated as a client and a professional poet, but indeed was passionate about epicurism and an expert too).

beasain Welcome aboard, and thank you very much for the introduction to yourself and how you arrived here!

Welcome Beasain!

Lucretius must have done extensive studies of Epicurus' philosophy before or while writing the poem to provide so many details and repeatedly addresses Memmius directly to persuade him of Epicurus' philosophy. Therefore, a statement that Lucretius had no links with Epicureanism is not convincing.

Welcome to the forum Beasain!

Thank you for your introduction and for sharing about your reading of Lucretius.

Quote from beasain

What are the reasons of hiding Hellenistic philosophy, and especially Epicurism? The Plato mafia of Hegel?

I don't know enough about Hegalian philosophy, but this question is interesting to me. I tend to focus mostly on the ethics of Epicureanism, and I would say that it is a very subtle teaching that not everyone can understand. Not only does it require a certain ability to critically think, but it requires one to think outside the box of Western civilization and the abstractions of thinking which come down from Platonic philosophy, and which have been reinforced and continue to be reinforced by Christianity. I think Epicureanism will remain a philosophy only for the few, as it requires one to move beyond "either-or" thinking and live a viceral and sensorial life within the physical world, while always remembering that this very life is all that we have. So we have this focus on the importance of making it a pleasant and pleasurable life, which goes against the current understanding of pleasure -- pleasure as being an escape from responsibility, or pleasure always leading to excess (and even being synonymous to excess). But we who are Epicureans are wiser than this. First we have to overcome all our previous conditioning with regard to experiencing pleasure. So at the beginning, it may seem that dancing with pleasure is like walking across a sharp edge of a razor blade: one misstep and you fall off. But yet with the practice of paying attention, then it is more like learning to ride a bike, and you see that it is quite natural actually, and it is the best way to live.

Quote from Kalosyni

I don't know enough about Hegalian philosophy, but this question is interesting to me. I tend to focus mostly on the ethics of Epicureanism, and I would say that it is a very subtle teaching that not everyone can understand. Not only does it require a certain ability to critically think, but it requires one to think outside the box of Western civilization and the abstractions of thinking which come down from Platonic philosophy, and which have been reinforced and continue to be reinforced by Christianity.

Yes, I completely agree and epicurism makes me think of a kind of Western local form of Buddhism (There were for sure strong contacts with India in the Hellenic World), but this is not what I want to focus on now. Let's go back to Hegel and the German idealistic philosophy of Hegel. Nothing is better than going to the sources, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy Part One: Greek Philosophy. Section Two B. Epicurus: https://www.marxists.org/refer…gel/works/hp/hpepicur.htm

Hegel demonstrates in my humble opinion that he doesn't understand (or rather wants to understand) most of Epicurus' work, although he sees something in Epicurus' ethics and some parts are even interesting. But he doesn't mention Lucretius (and not because he was unknown to him; Goethe e.g. for instance was fond of Lucretius). With the perspective of two centuries, Hegel's rejection of atomism is a bit embarrassing, but his History seems to have been very influential and seems still to influence curricula in the Philosophy Departments (I often wonder if philosophy professors are able to think out of the box , they seem often so dogmatic to me as an outsider).

Another interesting source is the article of James I Porter, "Epicurus in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Hegel Marx and Nietzsche" from the Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism (2020) (costs about 140$, but individual articles can sometimes be found in Academia.com): https://www.academia.edu/43798…_Hegel_Marx_and_Nietzsche (page 3-7 is about Hegel's vision).

The article is also very interesting for the views of Marx and Nietzsche. I think it is worth to be well studied. It comments also in a critical way some apparent flaws in the reasoning of Epicurus and illuminate some of Hegel's critiques (or at least in the few materials of his work that pure luck brought to us). All good excuses to learn more about the works of Epicurus .

Quote from Martin

Therefore, a statement that Lucretius had no links with Epicureanism is not convincing

I shall try to translate one of the reviews of the book from French to English to give you a flavour of his arguments (mostly about patron-client relations). Although they don't convince me neither (but who am I), they are interesting to learn more about the circumstances. One of the favourite themes of Pierre Vesperini is that literature is studied without exhausting study of the circumstances. Conclusions are made from the lecture, while some historical details, often not well founded, are added, without evaluating the whole range of available evidence.

Quote from Cassius

I hope we can one day find more material to allow us to speculate further about his background.

Maybe in the well known Villa of the Papyrus in Herculaneum. According to what I have read, there should be beneath 30 meters of volcanic deposits be the Latin library of 79 AD. Apparently the directors of Pompeii and Herculaneum don't want to excavate more, because of a lack of funds and expertise to correctly treat the excavated treasures (in the case of Herculaneum houses up two to three floors!). We can dream of that. The Greek library, the only library one conserved, as you know, contained about 900 scrolls that with high tech can be read, curiously a lot related with epicurism, which is not less than an incredible miracle, although miracles don't exist .

Welcome beasain!

An interview with James Warren on Epicurianism. I like James Warren and I like Epicurus

An interview with Angie Hobbs, David Sedley and James Warren from the beautiful BBC podcasts In our time

Enjoy dear Epicurean friends