Episode 354 - EATAQ36 - The "Monstrous Absurdity" of Academic Skepticism

Welcome to Episode 354 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 Section 18 of Book 2.

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

As we proceed through the end of Academic Questions, these are the topics we expect to cover:

24. Lucullus's Extended Rebuttal of the Academic Doctrine, and His Concluding Appeal to Cicero (2:XIII)
25. Cicero Begins His Reply (2:XX)
26. Cicero Lays Out the Syllogism About Assent and Opinion (2:XXI)
27. Cicero Turns to Antiochus's Own Inconsistency (2:XXII)
28. Cicero Defends His Citation of the Ancient Philosophers (2:XXIII)
29. Cicero Adds Chrysippus and the Cyrenaics, Then Returns to Arcesilas and Zeno (2:XXIV)
30. Cicero Returns to Attacking the Senses (2:XXV)
31. Cicero Presses the Sun's Size and the Limits of Trained Perception (2:XXVI)
32. Cicero Turns the "Art" Argument Back on Lucullus (2:XXVII)
33. Cicero Multiplies Examples From Madness (2:XXVIII)
34. Cicero Attacks Reason and Dialectics: The Sorites Paradox (2:XXIX)
35. Cicero Presses the Liar Paradox (2:XXX)
36. Cicero Presents Carneades's Own Positive Doctrine of Probability (2:XXXI)
37. Cicero Distinguishes the Academic Position From Epicurus's (2:XXXII)
38. Cicero Defends Probability Against the Charge That It Cannot Support Memory or Action (2:XXXIII)
39. Cicero Answers the "Self-Refuting" and "Two Incompatible Propositions" Objections (2:XXXIV)
40. Cicero Broadens the Argument Beyond the Stoics (2:XXXV)
41. Cicero Reflects on His Own Position Among the Competing Schools (2:XXXVI)
42. Cicero's Survey of Disagreement Among the Natural Philosophers (2:XXXVII)
43. Cicero Presses the Problem of Providence and the Limits of Physics (2:XXXVIII)
44. Cicero's Survey Continues: The Soul, the Antipodes, and the Motion of the Earth (2:XXXIX)
45. Cicero Asks Which Natural Philosopher He Would Even Choose to Follow (2:XL)
46. Cicero Turns to Ethics: Even the Gods Are Disputed (2:XLI)
47. Cicero's Roll Call of Rival Schools on the Chief Good, Part One (2:XLII)
48. Cicero's Roll Call of Rival Schools on the Chief Good, Part Two (2:XLIII)
49. Cicero Weighs Zeno Against Antiochus on Virtue and the Happy Life (2:XLIV)
50. Cicero Catalogs the Stoic Paradoxes About the Wise Man (2:XLV)
51. Cicero's Climactic Debate Between Pleasure and Honor (2:XLVI)
52. Cicero Turns to the Canon of Truth, and Zeno's Hand (2:XLVII)
53. The Dialogue's Close (2:XLVIII)

As we brought up in last week's episode, Lucullus (speaking for the Stoics) says that the skeptics like to cite Democritus (not Epicurus) for the position that nothing can be known.

This week the first statement in section 18 returns to that point, again without mentioning Epicurus. In doing so Lucullus distinguishes Democritus from "the more refined natural philosophers" who say that "everything has its own separate property."

We'll want to discuss whether this statement is referring to Epicurus. Also we'll want to discuss whether Epicurus would agree that "everything has its own separate property."

I suspect on first thought that the answers are "yes" and "yes -after we clarify what 'property' means," but we welcome all comments or opinions on those before we record.

This is the Yonge version so it will be interesting to check if Rackham or others have commented on this reference.

Quote

First of all I reply, that you are bringing me to the arguments of Democritus, with whom I do not agree. And I will the more readily refute them, on account of that doctrine which is laid down very clearly by the more refined natural philosophers, that everything has its own separate property.

I see from inital searching that there is an academic consensus that this is Lucullus talking about the Stoics themselves, and that Cicero himself seems to corroborate this later in Cicero's own part of the argument. So likely there are similiarities but also differences in the Epicurean view of this.

Additional notes - this from Claude:

That cross-reference carries the argument, because in §85 Cicero, replying to Lucullus, names the doctrine's owners himself. He says the claim that everything is in a class of its own and that nothing is the same as anything else is a Stoic argument, and not a very convincing one: that no hair or grain of sand is in every respect the same as another. So the identification comes from the text itself, not only from editorial guesswork. The doctrine is the Stoic principle of the idiōs poion, the "peculiarly qualified individual": no two individuals can be indiscernible. The principle is attested elsewhere too, for example in Plutarch's On Common Conceptions and Seneca's Letter 113. attalusThat cross-reference carries the argument, because in §85 Cicero, replying to Lucullus, names the doctrine's owners himself. He says the claim that everything is in a class of its own and that nothing is the same as anything else is a Stoic argument, and not a very convincing one: that no hair or grain of sand is in every respect the same as another. So the identification comes from the text itself, not only from editorial guesswork. The doctrine is the Stoic principle of the idiōs poion, the "peculiarly qualified individual": no two individuals can be indiscernible. The principle is attested elsewhere too, for example in Plutarch's On Common Conceptions and Seneca's Letter 113. attalus

We are referring today (in part) to Seneca's letter 113:

Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 113 - Wikisource, the free online library

This episode will be released later today, and I want to echo something that Bryan raised in a recent live session:

The "four points of academic skepticism" can seem very overwrought and unnecessarily detailed - why don't they say that it's simply impossible to know one thing from another?

It appears that at least part of the reason the Skeptics got so verbose about this is that they were bouncing off Democritus taking the position that due to the infinite universe and infinite combinations of atoms, that there are complete duplicates of everything in the universe - even people. As a result, the Skeptics were using Democritus to argue that you can never be sure if you are dealing with one particular thing or its complete doppleganger.

This led the Stoics to argue that there are NOT actual duplicates, but that things can be distinguished by their "marks" - which it appears they attributed to their god marking everything at lts creation.

This left Epicurus in the position of having to articulate that -- yes -- there are complete duplicates of things in an infinite and eternal universe - but no - things are not "marked" by their creator. And that leaves us needing to find a way to articulate that we *can* be certain of some (not all) judgments.

And that's where the Epicurusan has to be able to thread the needle and explain when and how judgments can be true. We're NOT going to give in to the Skeptics and say NO judgments are ever true, and we're NOT going to give in to the divine creation argument and say that God gives us marks to separate (kataleptically?) true from false.

Both skeptics and Epicureans are saying that there are many times we will have to "wait" or "suspend judgment" pending more information, but in the case of Epicurus, we don't wait for divine guidance on when we conclude something to be true.

There are lots of implications about where this is going that we need to articulate further in the podcast and in our discussions.

Also, I want to be careful and not get too bogged down in Seneca's letter, but I think it's interesting that the question in the letter was posed by Luculius, who is arguably an Epicurean, and Seneca is also arguably trying to deflect the question, and at times arguing that it is irrelevant and not worth the time to discuss.

If we drill down further into this we could probably reconstruct that Luculius may have been following an Epicurean perspective that led him to reject the Stoic view on this, and that's why Seneca seems uncomfortable with it.

The issue presented seems to me to likely be poorly worded in the translation (whether virtue is a living thing) when the real issue under discussion is precisely this question of identical things and their relationship to the possibility of knowledge. The Stoic position here is very weak and this is where we need to understand the Epicurean alternative.

Failing to drill down deep enough can make these letters seem remote and too abstract when what they are really talking about is something that we are missing the importance of entirely.

I'll note also here that when you hear Joshua quote Seneca saying in his letter that "anything a man does is not necessarily the man himself" it seems to me we are getting very close to Lucretius' discussion of the Trojan war and Helen:

1-464

For when the poets sing of Helen's rape, or of the Trojan State subdued by war, we must not say that these things do exist now in themselves, since Time, irrevocably past, has long since swept away that race of men that were the cause of those events; for every act is either properly the event of things, or of the places where those things are done. Further, if things were not of matter formed, were there no place or space where things might act, the fire that burned in Paris' heart, blown up by love of Helen's beauty, had never raised the famous contests of a cruel war; nor had the wooden horse set Troy on fire, discharging from his belly in the night the armed Greeks: from whence you plainly see that actions do not of themselves subsist, as bodies do, nor are in nature such as is a void, but rather are more justly called the events of body, and of space, where things are carried on.

We hit on these issues around the twenty minute mark of the podcast. All this emphasis on the relationship of "living things" to each other certainly reminds me of the title given to Lucretius' poem On The Nature of Things.

No wonder at Diogenes Laertius said the Epicureans tended to combine the discussion of physics and canonics.

More food for thoughtful comparison:

- The Stoics appear to admit (according to Cicero) that the truly wise man who is able to be confident of separating the true from the false is as rare as a phoenix.... so that the Stoics are vulnerable to the charge that most of them (all who do not claim to have hit the summit of wisdom) don't even know if they are standing in their own house.

- In contrast Lucretius speaking for Epicurus says hogwash - even a COW is able to be sure when her own calf is missing.

Now in addition to all other possible interpretations I'm not sure that the cow illustration is not also a direct insult to the Stoics. The truth of some important issues is so easy to know that even cows - who the Stoics love to use as a caricature of worthless living - can do it.

Lucretius Today Podcast Episode 354 is now available: "The 'Monstrous Absurdity' of Academic Skepticism."