Episode 332 - EATAQ 14 - Not Yet Recorded (Starting Book 2 of Academic Questions)

Welcome to Episode 332 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 start are continuing our series reviewing Cicero's "Academic Questions" from an Epicurean perspective. We are focusing first on what is referred to as Book One, which provides an overview of the issues that split Plato's Academy and gives us an overview of the philosophical issues being dealt with at the time of Epicurus. This week will focus on Section 12. and transition to Book Two, where we will begin with Section 7

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We'll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we'll also refer to the Rackam translation here:

• Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

In episode 332 we are going to build off of the way that we ended 331, with Joshua's indictment of radical skepticism as being a self-defeating paradox:

Quote

Joshua:

There's kind of a paradox inherent to blatant in that he adopted the physics of Heraclitus in that everything is in constant flux and that this is part of why we can't know anything and why we need to retreat into the abstract mental space of geometry and why we need to ascend morally to the realm of ideal forms. But the paradox is this, because everything is constantly changing around you, life is going to force your hand. You have to make real decisions in the real world. Most of the guys we're talking about here in academic questions were associates of the Roman General Sulla or Sons of fathers who were associates of the Roman General Sulla whose involvement in the Mithridaic war, which is discussed to some extent in book two, which is a part we're going to skip over, led to the destruction of the academy in its physical sense, at least partially and the complete deforestation of the area around the city of Athens to a distance of a hundred miles.

What are you going to do in a situation like this? What are you going to do? And it's no good hiding behind the claim that you don't know, so you shouldn't be asked. You shouldn't be forced to make a decision because of your own ignorance. You have to make decisions in life. It's like I said earlier, if we were to all base our lives on this, we wouldn't even get out of bed in the morning because there's no justification for that kind of thing. There's no justification for the belief that we should live virtuously because we can't even know if we know nothing what it means to live virtuously. It's such a self-defeating paradox that lies at the core of these systems of thought, and it's incredibly frustrating to have to deal with that.