Posts by Cassius

I agree with the thrust of post 15 but for the sake of breaking part of this down:

Quote from Julia

because it is the defining nature of an ideology to no longer have free discourse amongst equals; an ideology says of itself: "We found the truth, and it is xyz."

Is that ("finding the truth and saying it is xyz") not exactly what Epicurus does when he says things like:

Death is nothing to us....

Pleasure is the absence of pain...

Believe that a god is a living being blessed and imperishable.....

So:

Are we supposed to "leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning"? (letter to Herodotus)

Are we to "go on studying till old age the subjects that we ought to be ashamed not to have learnt in boyhood?" (Torquatus in On Ends 1)

Or are we to:

"give definite teaching and not profess doubt?" (Diogenes Laertius 121)

"never cease proclaiming the sayings of the true philosophy." (VS41)

This is a good discussion both at the detail and summary level.

As we pursue it I would like to prod, pursue, embrace, welcome, etc others to suggest their own versions of how you'd respond to the question. Don's post 5 is a good example but I am sure everyone has their own preferred way to express the issue simply. It would be helpful to everyone if we come up with as many variations as possible. That will help us see more clearly which versions are most persuasive.

So you're saying that the quoted sentence would be better as:

Nonetheless, it seems like [the structure of] supernatural religion lends itself to misinterpretation.

?

Or do you think that both the structure and ideology of supernatural religion lends itself to misinterpretation?

I crossposted with Julia but have one comment on post 8:

Quote from Julia

I, by virtue of being human, gravitate towards pleasure and comfort naturally; this happens on its own, I don't need to actively maintain it, as it is its own reward; I don't need to embrace it, I merely need to welcome it

I'm not sure about that last sentence, and taken out of context I suspect it doesn't quite ring right. "I merely need to welcome it" could be read as a kind of muted Stoic-sounding indifference. I think once you put everything in context of how short life is and how you have a limited opportunity to enjoy it, most people are going to see themselves as "pursuing" pleasure, rather than seeing themselves as sort of idly waiting to welcome whatever happens to come along.

In the context of the rest of the post I think there's no problem and it's consistent. The senses tell you the right thing to do by virtue of being human. But I also think some people have a constant temptation to gloss over the point that they need to take action, mental and physical, to live the best life possible to them. The temptation to avoid that realization is an interesting form of corruption.

Again as Torquatus stated it:

Torquatus In On Ends [30]: Every creature, as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein as in its supreme good, while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil, and banishes that, so far as it can, from its own presence, and this it does while still uncorrupted, and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions.

Yes I think that (post #5) is exactly the right direction! There's a pretty much infinite way to say the same thing in different ways, but the best of them are going to be high-level simple like that.

And it seems to me that it is important to convey that there is a presumption - the "desirability of life" - contained in that first bullet point that ties in to the observation that needs to be second nature and immediately evoke an affirming "Yes" when it is stated. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be clear to most people in the world today.

Menoeceus: And he who counsels the young man to live well, but the old man to make a good end, is foolish, not merely because of the desirability of life, but also because it is the same training which teaches to live well and to die well.

Torquatus In On Ends [30]: Every creature, as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein as in its supreme good, while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil, and banishes that, so far as it can, from its own presence, and this it does while still uncorrupted, and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions.

Remember this from On Ends Book Two, 9, as an example of how clear the equivalence is supposed to be:

Cicero: “…[B]ut unless you are extraordinarily obstinate you are bound to admit that 'freedom from pain' does not mean the same thing as 'pleasure.'"

Torquatus: “Well but on this point you will find me obstinate, for it is as true as any proposition can be.”

It's supposed to be as true as any proposition can be - so it really should not require an elaborate and obscure explanation.

Thanks for the link, but let's practice how we ourselves would answer the question in a couple of sentences in a non-technical-language way.

In other words, I think the answer to this question has to become so second nature to us that we should be easily able to explain it easily and in regular language at the drop of a hat.

And if we can't, then there's a good chance that we really don't have a confident view of what the answer really is.

Quote from Julia

Upon committing to pleasure as the guide to life, it becomes apparent that...

The framing of a recent post by Julia, combined with some other thoughts (the title of the book "Living for Pleasure") has revived today in my mind an old question. I think the discussions in this forum have come a long way in the last year, and I'd like to check on how the people who have been following along (primarily our regulars, but even lurkers if they want to set up an account to participate) react to the following question.

We've discussed it many times before, but now, in the context of many recent discussions in which we've pointed out cites that explain how Epicurus had a much more expansive definition of "pleasure" than most people (in his own time and today) generally apply to that word. So when they read a title like "Living For Pleasure," or "I am committed to pleasure as the guide of my life," many people are legitimately confused.

Almost everyone who is new to Epicurus is going to ask, either out loud or in their own minds:

I certainly know what pleasure is, but I've never thought of pleasure as absence of pain. Why does Epicurus consider the absence of pain to be pleasure?

I'd be very interested in whatever formulations of an answer anyone would like to suggest. I'll come back and add my own after some others have commented, but presume you're talking to a normal person in a normal conversation, and they've just read some generic article on the internet and read that Epicurus considered the absence of pain to be pleasure.

They turn to you in normal conversation and they ask "Why did he do that?"

What do you say in reply?

We've linked to this Dawkins debate before -

Join critically-acclaimed author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and world-renowned theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss as they discuss biology, cosmology, religion, and a host of other topics. The authors will also discuss their new books. Dawkins recently published The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, an exploration of the magic of discovery embodied in the practice of science. Written for all age groups, the book moves forward from historical examples of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena to focus on the actual science behind how the world works. Krauss's latest book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, explains the scientific advances that provide insight into how the universe formed. Krauss tackles the age-old assumption that something cannot arise from nothing by arguing that not only can something arise from nothing, but something will always arise from nothing. Founded in 2008, the ASU Origins Project is a university-wide transdisciplinary initiative aimed at facilitating cutting edge research and inquiry about origins questions, enhancing public science literacy, and improving science education. Since its inception, the Origins Project has brought the world's leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, to Tempe to explore origins questions. The Origins Project has hosted workshops and public events that have focused on questions as fundamental as the origin of the universe, how life began, the origins of human uniqueness, and the origins of morality.

Quote from Kalosyni

"Nothing comes from nothing" = there are causes for what exists and there are conditions (natural laws) that everything is conditioned and governed by...cows don't pop out of thin air, because they depend on causes and conditions of the material world of matter.

As you say there, the isue is "natural" causes. I know I am being legalistic here in the framing of the words, but in the philosophical context I think that's important. I gather from Frances Wright's chapter 15 that she was concerned about a narrow focus on "causes" as being infinitely regressive unless you have a starting point (which in Epicurus' case was the eternal atoms).

Simply saying "everything has a cause" does not rule out that the cause is "God." To rule out "God" being the cause, you need a theory on what is the point of "origin" of the regression -- or you have a have firm position that there was no "origin" and that the elements are eternal.

I would push back against the idea of "popping in and out of existence"..... Changing from one *form* to another however is certainly plausible, like ice to water. But the word *existence* is probably exactly what "cannot" happen.

I raise that last question because of a part of a discussion we had I think in a recent Zoom:

How tightly is "Nothing comes from Nothing" tied to "Atomism?"

"Atomism" seems to postulate that the way the universe works with regularity is that there are eternal irreducible particles which when moving through empty space come together to form bodies, and that this process explains and underlies the regularity of all that we see.

Would a "plenum" (no empty space anywhere) work just as well?

If not, why not?

One thing I'll suggest for sure: Just as in the issue of life in the rest of the universe and whether humans are the longest living and happiest forms of life, it's not sufficient from Epicurus' point of view to say "I don't know and I'm not going to think about it." It's important to have a working theory that makes sense to support whatever position you want to take, otherwise you're just a Socratic "I don't know anything except that I don't know anything" gadfly.

Same goes in the field of "do gods exist?"

And in my view we have painful proof of why it's important to take a position:

When the claims of Judaism-Christianism intellectually conquered the ancient world, the Academic-Skeptic position of "I don't know whether you're right or wrong because it's impossible to ever be sure of anything" didn't have the intellectual/emotional force to prevail in the battle of ideas. Radical skepticism simply doesn't win minds or hearts.

As Nietzsche said in his "Anti-Christ," Epicurus was working in a direction which, if it had been more widely adopted, would have given the ancient world more fortitude to stand up to the claims of Judeo-Christianism. Just like the Epicureans were the ones who stood up against the claims of Alexander the Oracle-Monger, you need a philosophy that gives you confidence to stand up against claims of the supernatural, and "I think you're wrong but I don't know anything about anything" doesn't cut it.

Epicurus choose atomism and his view of gods as a logical and defensible high-level position about how things really are. This gave him the ability to say to his opponents, "You're wrong on certain important claims, and here's why."

So if you're going to take the position that "nothing comes from nothing" then you need to offer a plausible explanation to explain why. Is atomism required for that? Would a "plenum" work just as well? I think it would be very interesting to try to reconstruct why Epicurus chose atomism.

So what position are you guys taking as to whether "empty space" exists?

Lucretius Today Episode 253 is now available: "How The Riddle of Epicurus Fits Into The Epicurean View Of The Gods"

Episode 253 will be released later today. As I complete editing I am struck by Joshua's summation on a subject that isn't expressed in the episode title but which I am increasingly convinced is the heart of Epicurean philosophy: it's not Epicurus' precise conclusions about gods, or even about pleasure, that Lucretius and others seemed to see as his greatest achievement. It was Epicurus' "canon of truth" - the volume that they talk about as celestial or falling from the heavens, that is the real core to understanding Epicurus. And the core of that approach was the response that Epicurus developed to the great challenge of radical skepticism.

Coming up soon.

Does the article state that quantum foam really doesn't have any existence? Leaving aside the issue of the necessity of some kind of void in order for things to change place, Just skimming the article I thought the direction of the writer was that even as you bore down to lower levels there's still "something" there(?)

Thanks to Kalosyni for this link. I don't agree with a premise of this article (that the universe as a whole will come to an end) so in the end it doesnt deal with true infinity. But still it's new and on point with the discussion so throwing it into the hopper

'Infinite monkey theorem' challenged by Australian mathematicians

Australian researchers have poked holes in an old thought-experiment known as the "infinite monkey theorem".

www.bbc.com

Yes. That will work, and we will repost the link tomorrow night too

Thank you for letting us know Eric. Good luck to you and drop in anytime!

Two things to add at the moment:

1) So where does that "WHY CALL HIM GOD?" structure come from in the English formulation? Are we not seeing that in any of the authorities, even Hume?

2) As to the Academic Skeptics wanting to construct arguments against the Stoics as much as against the Epicureans, we not only have that setup in Humes Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion, where one of the main speakers is named Cleanthes, and the anti-Stoic sections (which we have not covered) in On Ends and On The Nature of the Gods, but also this from the opening sections of Cicero's Academica (Yonge translation). He's previously in the text referenced conflicts between the Academics and Epicureans and Stoics, and then says this:

Quote

... For those men are so simple as to think the good of a sheep and of a man the same thing. While you know the character and extent of the accuracy which philosophers of our school profess. Again, if you follow Zeno, it is a hard thing to make any one understand what that genuine and simple good is which cannot be separated from honesty; while Epicurus asserts that he is wholly unable to comprehend what the character of that good may be which is unconnected with pleasures which affect the senses. But if we follow the doctrines of the Old Academy which, as you know, we prefer, then with what accuracy must we apply ourselves to explain it; with what shrewdness and even with what obscurity must we argue against the Stoics!

Just in terms of our own discussions in the podcast and the forum, there is a lot of background evidence that would justify re-orienting our thoughts to how Cicero considered the Stoics to be almost as wrong-headed as the Epicureans, but since Cicero didn't quarrel with the Stoic ethics Cicero isn't as remembered today for being anti-Stoic. And in our discussions we haven't scratched the surface of Carnaedes, who appears to have been oriented against the Stoics similarly as Cicero.

---

Even a brief review of the first book of the Academic questions helps a lot to put the relationships between the Academics, the Peripatetics, the Stoics and even the Epicureans into perspective, with everything revolving around the issue of knowledge and when (or if) we are ever justified in claiming it:

Quote

Then I replied—Arcesilas, as we understand, directed all his attacks against Zeno, not out of obstinacy or any desire of gaining the victory, as it appears to me, but by reason of the obscurity of those things which had brought Socrates to the confession of ignorance, and even before Socrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and nearly all the ancients; who asserted that nothing could be ascertained, or perceived, or known: that the senses of man were narrow, his mind feeble, the course of his life short, and that truth, as Democritus said, was sunk in the deep; that everything depended on opinions and established customs; that nothing was left to truth. They said in short, that everything was enveloped in darkness; therefore Arcesilas asserted that there was nothing which could be known, not even that very piece of knowledge which Socrates had left himself. Thus he thought that everything lay hid in secret, and that there was nothing which could be discerned or understood; for which reasons it was not right for any one to profess or affirm anything, or sanction anything by his assent, but men ought always to restrain their rashness and to keep it in check [pg 021] so as to guard it against every fall. For rashness would be very remarkable when anything unknown or false was approved of; and nothing could be more discreditable than for a man's assent and approbation to precede his knowledge and perception of a fact. And he used to act consistently with these principles, so as to pass most of his days in arguing against every one's opinion, in order that when equally important reasons were found for both sides of the same question, the judgment might more naturally be suspended, and prevented from giving assent to either.