Prolepsis of the gods

I am sure others will have suggestions but let me take a stab at it:

Quote from Rolf

How does prolepsis help defend against skepticism and allow us to be confident in our knowledge?

It provides a framework which points to both a starting point for knowledge and way of expressing how we get to the point of concluding that some things are right and some things are wrong. Epicurus is constantly looking back to the ultimate questions of the universe, such as whether the universe is eternal in time or infinite in size or has any supernatural elements. If you can't point to a mechanism through which conceptual thinking began to be accumulated by living beings, then you are left with the concern that all this - including our thought processes - have been supernaturally created. I would say that prolepsis does for human thought what atomism does for pure physics - it provides a non-supernatural framework of analysis, and then it's up to us to go from there to understand more about atoms and more about the brain. But if you don't have such a framework, then many people will decide just to go with the flow of the gods and never challenge the orthodoxy. When you have conceptual framework for the development of concepts and truth that makes sense, you can confidently dismiss radical skepticism and have confidence in those things that you can hold to be true, vs those that are false and those where you have to "wait" and accept alternative possibilities until you have more information.

Quote from Rolf

Additionally, why is prolepsis necessary for us to know certain things? Isn’t it possible that we simply learn them from experience? I get that Epicurus had to respond to Meno’s paradox, but why didn’t he simply disagree with the whole premise that we need to have some foreknowledge of something in order to know it?

Because there is a root of truth to the question being asked in Meno. How do you conclude that you are "Right" about something if you don't already know what "right" is? How much experience is enough in order to be confident about something? Ultinately there has to be a framework in which you take a position on how much experience, and what kind of experience, is enough.

Quote from Rolf

Something like prolepsis is an important concept within the overarching philosophy even if it doesn’t directly relate to happiness or maximising pleasure.

Well of course I would say that it is absolutely essential to both happiness and maximizing pleasure unless you are confident that pleasure and happiness should be your goal, and that you are pursuing them correctly, then you will be plagued with doubt and all the problems that doubt creates

Have I missed something? I tend to think that the prolepsis discussed by Epicurus was based on a limitation of his access to modern science 2,300 years ago. I think it is becoming clearer that a conception that you can know something before you apprehend it, or use your senses to learn it, is not how we know things.

Quote from Rolf

How does prolepsis help to disprove that “all this - including our thought processes - have been supernaturally created”? From what I understand, prolepsis just describes instances of in-built knowledge, right? But not where those preconceptions come from? Couldn’t a supernatural believer still just respond, “well those preconceptions come from god”?

It "disproves" a supernatural basis for thought processes by providing a rational non-supernatural basis for understanding what we observe to be the case in the way people think and make decisions, without resorting to pre--existence or other supernatural arguments. This is very parallel to atomism, which provides a non-supernatural basis for the way the world works. In both cases you're now asking how atomism or prolepsis/canonics "disprove" the supernatural, and the answer to that has to come down to your conclusions about what kind of proof is possible and what is required. If you fall into the belief that only god can provide certainty, then you can never meet that standard -- but there is no reason to accept that supernatural standard in the first place. This is an issue far beyond the prolepsis alone and falls under general canonics, but prolepsis is an important part.

Quote from DaveT

Have I missed something? I tend to think that the prolepsis discussed by Epicurus was based on a limitation of his access to modern science 2,300 years ago. I think it is becoming clearer that a conception that you can know something before you apprehend it, or use your senses to learn it, is not how we know things.

Others may agree with you DaveT, but speaking only for myself I don't think Epicurus would have cared any more what science today says than we should care about what science in 4500 AD will say. We can only live our lives with the information that we have. Epicurus knew that using the word "prolepsis" does not convey all the details of thought, just as he knew that talking about "atoms" doesn't explain all the workings of the human body.

It seems clear that prolepsis was considered to be an advanced topic, and that's why it is not explained at length in Epicurus' letters or in Lucretius.

As to "a conception that you can know something before you apprehend it, or use your senses to learn it, is not how we know things" I don't think that this gets to the heart of the issue. I think the best way to get to that is to read some of the material on the Meno paradox, as that sets out the logical dilemma that Plato was trying to throw in the way of any philosophy based on the senses. To me the prolepsis issue is geared toward that debate, and I suspect that it leads to a lot of spinning wheels to read something "clinical" into it that will improve day to day pleasure/pain decisionmaking.

Quote from Rolf

Actually, could somebody take a crack at explaining fundamentally what prolepsis is? Is it innate knowledge that we’re born it? I’m more confused than I thought!

The HUGE problem is that there are not a lot of surviving texts that speak specifically to prolepsis. That's one reason Bryan 's compiling uses of the word and related words is so helpful, seeing the word/s in context.

The are a VARIED number of interpretations of prolepsis, starting as far back as Cicero! I don't know whether we'll ever have the concept from an Epicurean perspective definitively described.

That said, with due respect to Cassius and others bringing in Meno and the theory of knowledge, I **personally** see prolepsis, ancient concepts of memory formation, the workings of the psykhē (mind/soul), to be of tangential importance to applying Epicurus' philosophy in the modern world to my way of living. I find the investigations that the ancients dealt in and how they arrived at their findings of fascinating intellectual curiosity. But eidola do not grind grooves into my psykhē to make subsequent similar eidola easier to intercept. Brains don't work that way.

What Epicurus does give me is a firm commitment to finding physical causes completely devoid of woo-woo. It might not be eidola and psykhē, but it is a physical, natural, material cause to my memories, thought, and other mental processes. The Letter to Pythocles is a testament to finding material, physical causes to phenomena.

So, I don't get hung up on the specific details taught in the ancient school; but I think there are principles that are directly applicable from then to now.

Rolf: Try this analogy:

What is an example of a sight? What is an example of a hearing? What is an example of a smell? You can describe a tree or a song or a flower at a conceptual level, but that is not the question.

Prolepsis is a faculty, not an idea or a conclusion.

The sense of smell is given to us by nature and we use it all the time without understanding or caring about its nature, so this is an example of a faculty that gives us input to knowledge, but not knowledge iteself.

Anytime you can state an idea as a proposition, such as "there is a god" you are already past the proleptic stage, in my opinion.

And so Velleius does not really reference, to my understanding, "a prolepsis of a god." Rather, he is saying that we have a proleptic faculty which disposes us to thoughts which leads to the idea of a god, just as we have a nose which functions in a way that gives us input into a final conception of a flower.

Now, if what you are really focusing on is the proof of the existence of a god, then it's my view that that proof goes far beyond just prolepsis. I think that's why Velleius then goes on to talk about isonomia, because the particular concept of a particular type of god is another issue for chain reasoning that incorporates other issues, such as the infinity and eternality of the universe and that nature never makes a single thing of a kind.

So the ground floor is back at the point of realizing that prolepsis is a faculty parallel with seeing or hearing or pleasure or pain. It reacts in particular predisposed ways, but it does not itself provide content.

Also, most of us think in terms of prolepsis being related to pattern recognition.

Think about if you were programming a computer to do pattern recognition. In addition to the camera and microphone (equivalents of eyes and ears) you would need some kind of software mechanism to take those inputs and detect recognizable patterns. Without that software mechanism the input of the camera and microphone would mean nothing. But the detection itself cannot be a set of pre-programmed patterns to match against - else those would be "innate ideas." We're talking something more akin to "AI" that can assemble patterns into ever-increasing layers of complexity.

But the faculty of prolepsis is the assembly process, not any particular pattern that is detected or assembled.

And in case we haven't mentioned this recently, a conclusion can be based in part on a prolepsis and still be wrong, Faculties are never true or false, but the conclusions we draw based on them can be. That's pat of the exaplanation for how people can come to so many incorrect conclusions about the gods, even though everyone has their own faculty of prolepsis.