Posts by Cassius

Another new theme on request of Martin - it is labeled A-Default-Widescreen.

It's the same as the current default theme (Inspire) but it will go to 100% page width no matter how wide your screen might be - so there should be little if any background image visible to the right or left side of the screen.

The theme author tells me he is working on a "dark" version of the same inspire theme, and as soon as that is out we'll set it up and find an easy way to toggle between light and dark versions of the same main theme.

Thank you for responding David. We have several participants who are particularly interested in physics so I will yield to them to get started on energy.

Look forward to hearing more from you over time.

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In that regard we have found over the years that there are a number of key texts and references which most all serious students of Epicurus will want to read and evaluate for themselves. Those include the following.

"Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt

The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.

"On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"

"Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky

The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."

Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section

Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section

The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation

A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright

Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus

Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)

"The Greeks on Pleasure" -Gosling & Taylor Sections on Epicurus, especially the section on katastematic and kinetic pleasure which explains why ultimately this distinction was not of great significance to Epicurus.

It is by no means essential or required that you have read these texts before participating in the forum, but your understanding of Epicurus will be much enhanced the more of these you have read. Feel free to join in on one or more of our conversation threads under various topics found throughout the forum, where you can to ask questions or to add in any of your insights as you study the Epicurean philosophy.

And time has also indicated to us that if you can find the time to read one book which will best explain classical Epicurean philosophy, as opposed to most modern "eclectic" interpretations of Epicurus, that book is Norman DeWitt's Epicurus And His Philosophy.

(If you have any questions regarding the usage of the forum or finding info, please post any questions in this thread).

Welcome to the forum!

I don't want to sidetrack this specific discussion on prolepsis as it relates to gods, in part because this is going to be very helpful to Joshua and me as we have not even yet begun to deal with what Velleius has to say about prolepsis in OTNOTG, and I am sure we will want to talk about that for several weeks.

However in the meantime, and in a more general way for reuse in other contexts, I started this thread that might be of help here too, and later in other disussions:

Thread

What Are The Essential Elements Of Any Canonical Faculty According to Epicurus?

In conjunction with the current thread in which we are discussing prolepsis in relation to gods, I suspect it would be helpful to compose a list of considerations given in the thread title. What are the essential elements of ANY canonical faculty, according to Epicurus?

I have a couple of ideas but would appreciate additions, comments, suggestions, corrections, and citations to support these or their tweaked versions:

1. A faculty must be present at birth, given by nature, not created through our

…

Cassius

June 12, 2024 at 8:23 AM

In conjunction with the current thread in which we are discussing prolepsis in relation to gods, I suspect it would be helpful to compose a list of considerations given in the thread title. What are the essential elements of ANY canonical faculty, according to Epicurus?

I have a couple of ideas but would appreciate additions, comments, suggestions, corrections, and citations to support these or their tweaked versions:

1. A faculty must be present at birth, given by nature, not created through our own actions. It may be improved or tuned through use, but its essential mechanism or process is present at birth before it is ever used.
2. A faculty must be a mechanism or process, such as a microphone gathering sounds, a camera gathering light, an ear hearing sound, etc.
3. A faculty must not be a "conclusion" of any kind, as the "conclusion-making" process is separate from the data which is input into that process. (In that sentence words like "concept" or "idea" could be substituted.)
4. A faculty is never "right" or "wrong." The faculty delivers its data without any injection of opinion.
5. A faculty can operate normally or abnormally. We can be sick and our vision and our hearing be distorted or lost entirely, but the fact that they can be distorted or lost does not alter the fact that by nature there is in fact a "normal" range of operation.
6. A faculty was not born for its use, but its use follows from the fact that it has been born. (Lucretius 4:820-850)

Thanks Don. One thing I get from this passage is: "Overuse of the word 'they' in a difficult subject without specifying precisely what 'they' refers to is hazardous." Maybe it's just me being slow, but in that last sentence, when he uses "they," it looks to me like he's talking about "anticipations," and I think most of us would agree that "the activity of the subject in the acquisition of knowledge" is involved.

But the question we are asking is precisely *what* activity is involved. Because he has previously used "they" just above in an apparent reference to "general ideas," it's tempting to read him as saying that anticipations *are* general ideas, but then he goes on to refer to "ready-made categories for arranging the data of experience." But "categories" don't sound like "ideas" to me.

The term "ready-made categories" sounds ok and compatible with existing at birth and prior to experience, and I can see the potential for "gods" or "blessedness" being such categories. Those terms are general enough and evoke aspects of "pleasure" and "maximum pleasure" which relate to the in-born feeling of pleasure, especially when we define "pleasure" expansively as Epicurus appears to have been doing.

But I don't see that description as constituting "general ideas" such as the idea "the gods are blessed and imperishable." That kind of conclusory idea is what we are asking "Did it exist at birth?" with the almost certain answer "No."

As I write this it occurs to me to want to hold firmly to a test of "Did it exist at birth in at least rudimentary form?" as a necessary test of any suggestion that a faculty (including anticipations) is canonical. All sorts of opinions can be built on the data we get through faculties over time as we age, but I'm tempted to suggest that as to saying something is a "canonical faculty" then "If a one day old baby doesn't have it, then it's not a canonical faculty!" (And I would expect "one day after birth" is not the relevant factor either, as these faculties we are talking about have been developing since conception and even prior to that in the passing down of genetic coding over generations.)

And to pick up on an earlier comment I think you made, I would expect Epicurus would say that many if not all animals also have a corresponding form of this faculty.

Quote from Little Rocker

I guess it still seems to me that 'blessed' and 'indestructible' are essential features of the prolepsis of 'gods' for Epicurus. 'The many,' too, think the gods are blessed and indestructible. They just go off the rails when they try to put meat on the bones of 'blessed.'

That's the really sticky point that's hard to get one's mind around. Does every positive aspect of a god (or anything else) boil down to simply that our faculty of feeling is assigning this to the "pleasure" category? It seems clear to me that "pleasure" has something to do with considering anything we would describe as blessedness.

But isn't there more to what's going on in our minds in addition to finding the gods (or any other subject) to produce a "pleasant" response in us?

Doesn't the mind have to have some organizing process that would present to us a selection portion of our attention that the faculty of pleasure then deems to be pleasurable?

Some selected DeWitt from his anticipations chapter that I think make sense here, even if some of his conclusions that seem to point to "innate ideas" don't necessarily follow:

Quote

"Let the faithful Lucretius be called to the witness stand. Among his more striking and better remembered passages is one that emphasizes the proleptic or anticipatory behavior of all living creatures, including animals. Their first gestures anticipate the activities of their adult state. Children point with the finger before they can talk. Calves butt before they have horns. The cubs of lions and panthers fight with tooth and claw almost before they have teeth and claws. Young birds go through the motions of flying before their wings are fit for flight. Obviously all living things are preconditioned for life in their terrestrial environment. Is it, then, inconsistent with this observed fact to assume that human beings are preconditioned for life in their social environment?"

That calls to my mind the other section of Lucretius that I always have a problem getting my mind around -- how the eyes were not born so that should see, but that sight follows from the birth of the eyes. We talk about that mostly in terms of its relationship (or lack thereof) to Darwinian evolution, but wouldn't it also apply to the faculties of the brain being born with some capabilities within them?

Another good observation I think:

Quote

Let Epicurus himself be allowed to testify. Basic to his hedonism is the observed fact that all living creatures, brute or human, however young and helpless, reach out for pleasure and shrink from pain. Even before the five senses have begun to perform their parts, long before the dawn of conscious motivation, and long before the development of understanding, pleasure seems to be a good and pain an evil thing.⁴² This initial behavior, like the subsequent gestures of play, is at one and the same time prompted by inborn propensities and anticipatory of adult experience. In the growth of the living being and the unfolding of the faculties the attention of Epicurus is manifestly focused upon this principle, the priority of Nature over reason.

We don't often talk about "where pleasure came from" or "how it determines what is pleasurable and what is painful, but doesn't some kind of operation have to be "hard-coded" within us to get that process going from maybe as far back as the moment of conception? If that kind of mechanism is operational in terms of pleasure and pain, surely something analogous exists in our "thinking" processes, not in terms of a conclusion that this or that is painful, but that under certain conditions and contexts we're going to find some abstractions to be important and some not to be important?

Another quote that stems from the same issue (the status of pleasure -- is it proleptic?):

Quote

Even within Epicurean circles the term prolepsis underwent unjustified extensions. For instance, Epicurus, recognizing Nature as the canon or norm, had asserted that, just as we observe fire to be hot, snow to be cold, and honey to be sweet, so, from the behavior of newborn creatures, we observe pleasure to be the telos or end. Certain of his followers, however, shaken no doubt by Stoic criticism, took the position that the doctrine was an innate idea, that is, a prolepsis.⁴⁸ In strict logic this error was a confusion between quid and quale. The problem was not to decide what could be predicated of the end or telos but what was the identity of the end. Was it pleasure or was it something else?

I have a feeling that a lot of our problem in dealing with this issue is that we too are still "shaken by Stoic criticism."

I don't think DeWitt does a great job of wrapping all this up into a neat conclusion (especially when he occasionally talks about "innate ideas") but his "intuitionism" rings better, and along the way he makes what i think are a lot of good points that we can use today to make headway.

Sorry guys, and I will tag Julia so she sees this too. We failed to "enable" the new options, so we have changed that and now you will find the ones we referenced. There is a "Stars" and a Kaloysni Inspire version at present - both works in progress.

Thanks guys - that may mean there is a permission problem we need to investigate

Quote from Don

Plato, Philebus, section 39b

Socrates: When a man receives from sight or some other sense (αἰσθήσεως) the opinions (δοξαζόμενα doxazomena) and utterances of the moment and afterwards beholds in his own mind the images of those opinions and utterances.

As another physics experiment to complement Don's, and one which the ancients I gather would have been familiar, I'd consider another possible analogy.

It seems Epicurus and Democritus thought that non-visible images could be received by natural mechanical means over a distance. Of course they didn't have tuned radios, but they did presumably observe how their musical instruments worked, such as tuning forks:

(There are lots of questionable videos about ancient science on youtube but I'll not link to those here.)

It seems we ultimately need to take a position on whether the "canonical" status of prolepsis tells us that something is "true or real" in terms of fully-formed correct opinions, or simply "true or real" in the sense of honestly reported to us by the faculty of perception.

By analogy the tuning fork isn't conveying any opinions, it's just "mechanically", due to its makeup, resonating in response to a particular frequency of vibration emanating from somewhere else. That might constitute a "true and real" perception received at a distance through non-visible means, and one that doesn't require bringing in supernaturalism as the explanation. In their discussions such as the one Don cited about how the mind retains images received through experience,it's possible that when they seem to be taliking about a faculty of prolepsis as being "etched" in the mind at birth then maybe thinking about tuning forks could provide at least a partial analogy.

Very thorough - thank you!

Sounds like that theme may be on a second page of a list (perhaps due to a screen size difference) or we need to change the permissions to make it more widely available. We'll figure that out and report back. Is anyone else able to see Kalosyni's style by using the "Change Style" button at the bottom of a page? I see it, but that might be due to a privilege setting.

Quote from Don

I've entertained on this forum that the prolepsis of the gods is our innate faculty to feel awe.

Do you see "awe" as a sort of appreciation of a relationship that makes it fit as a prolepsis, or does it fit as a prolepsis for some other reason?

I ask that in context of trying to identify what characteristics divinity and justice might have in common with awe that could explain why divinity and justice are the primary examples of where Epicurus thought prolepsis was involved.

Is there anything else to suggest beyond building materials to identify what type of building materials? If eyes are processing light and ears are processing sound, what are prolepses processing? Do you see "relationship" useful as a term to describe at least in part what prolepses are perceiving?

If what we are talking about is some aspect of concept formation, what else comes before fully-formed concepts that might partially justify the term PRE-conceptions?

There would seem to be something involved in selecting similarities between particulars before some subset of particulars are then by judgment assembled into fully-formed concepts. I think we are all mostly agreeing that only then at the duly formed stage do we then evaluate something as in some way either right or wrong.

Quote from Little Rocker

It seems to me like the prolepsis for the gods in Letter to Menoeceus 123-4 is that 1) they exist and that 2) they are 'blessed and indestructible,' which offers at least some kind of skeletal conceptual structure.

My best thought at the moment is that the prolepsis "faculty" (and I think that's the major point, it's got to be a faculty like seeing through the eyes) has to be keep separate and apart from ideas, just like we keep the eyes and ears separate and apart from ideas. Otherwise it won't report "honestly," and won't have that canonical status, because it will be reaching its own conclusions.

So "the gods are blessed and imperishable" seems to me to necessarily be a a conclusion of the mind, which rules it out from being considered a prolepsis itself. But it's a conclusion which would not exist but for faculty of being able to recognize the relationships involved in being blessed vs not blessed, or deathless vs not deathless.

And I would also think that the prolepsis faculty does not function independently of the mind any more than the eyes function independently of the mind. If we take the position that we aren't born with these ideas about gods, then the mind has available to it not only the relationship organizing function, but also the past experiences of the five senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain on what we observe here on earth. And I would include there the issues of isonomia and deductions that life exists throughout the universe and that the universe is boundless and eternal. All of those would have to be brought together in the mind to conclude that divinity means total blessedness and deathlessness, and again the point may be that we would *not* bring all those things together for consideration at all if not for prolepsis disposing us to evaluate the possibilities.

So I'd see the two fundamentals of deathlessness and blessedness as hard to rank as "anticipations" in themselves. It seems to me they fit better from Epicurus' perspective as "correct conclusions," which are based on and consistent with all the data from all three of the canonical faculties. In contrast, the ideas that gods are arbitrary and capricious are false conclusions, contrary to our experiences, even though the people who reach that conclusion are also basing their opinions on the same canonical faculties. If that's the case then the prolepsis aspect would be a necessary part of the starting point for analysis, but not the end point of the conclusion that "gods are blessed and imperishable."

No doubt this is a very speculative subject for us to discuss, but maybe in conclusion I'd say that the main point I can't get past in fitting everything together is that if the prolepsis is indeed part of the canon, which it appears to be, then it *cannot* have any "fully-formed-idea" content to it. If it did, it wouldn't be parallel to the five senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain, both of which exist at birth and are in full operation at birth before we open our eyes and see our first sight or hear our first sound.

Quote from Little Rocker

So the chief option would be that it's part of our biological nature/cognitive architecture to categorize the world in a particular way or arrive at a particular conclusion in light of experience. We would be pre-disposed to eventually conclude, 'there must be gods,' or 'justice must be about entering agreements to avoid harm.'

Since Bryan quoted that I would suggest some possible tweaking, along the lines of:

So the chief option would be that it's part of our biological nature/cognitive architecture to categorize the world in a particular way, and thereby we are disposed to form conclusions about those categories in the light of experience. We would be pre-disposed more to something like sensing that, 'the subject of the best form of existence is important enough to us to become alert to under a particular name such as 'divinity,'" or 'the subject of our relationships with others is important enough to become alert to under a particular name such as "justice."

That sounds more to me like a "faculty" (which is what i gather "prolepsis" or "anticipations" must be, in order to be one of the three legs of the canon as a means of perception. Given its equivalence to the five senses or the feelings of pain and pleasure, we have to accept the workings of prolepsis as part of our makeup, and constructed "honestly" like pleasure and pain and the five senses, which do not inject their own opinions. The workings of the prolepsis faculty would then become "perceptions" combined in our minds with all other perceptions of the other faculties, and there processed to eventually form ideas.

So specific conclusions such as "there must be gods" or "it is good to enter into agreements with my particular neighbors to avoid harm" would to me be outside of the prolepsis process. Those would be "conclusions" that are part of the functioning of the mind, which turns all the inputs into ideas. So if we keep the focus on the view that it's in the mind that errors can happen, then we recognize the possibility of error in subjects where prolepsis is involved. We can make the mistake of concluding that "the gods must be supernatural," or "as Hatfield I should treat all my neighbors the same, even if they are McCoys and are dying to kill me," because even though those involve divinity and justice, prolepsis doesn't deliver to us "conclusions" or "ideas" but just the disposition to recognize the issues and process them in the mind -- where right or wrong conclusions get made.

Under this perspective it would be wrong to ever consider "a prolepsis" to be an idea or a conclusion of any kind. That's where i think we implement Epicurus' observation that the opinions of the hoi polloi about the gods are not true, and are indeed false, even though they are about a subject in which prolepsis is involved. The prolepsis would dispose us to evaluate the subject and consider it important, but the prolepsis would not provide the correct conclusion -- conclusions occur only in the mind.

The input provided by the faculty of prolepis would never be any more right or wrong than the input from your eye or your ear is right or wrong - it is what it is, and has to be taken as canonical, but it's not an idea or a conclusion. it's the tool we use to make contact with reality and then from that form ideas and conclusions in our mind. But the distinction between the two is sharp, and it's the same distinction I think Jackson Barwis makes so well in pointing out the flaw in Locke's empiricism.

"When we are told that benevolence is pleasing; that malevolence is painful; we are not convinced of these truths by reasoning, nor by forming them into propositions: but by an appeal to the innate internal affections of our souls: and if on such an appeal, we could not feel within the sentiment of benevolence, and the peculiar pleasure attending it; and that of malevolence and its concomitant pain, not all the reasoning in the world could ever make us sensible of them, or enable us to understand their nature."

In analogy to eyes enabling us to see light and ears enabling us to hear sound, I would paraphrase Barwis and see prolepsis as the human faculty that "makes us sensible to [divinity and justice] and enables us to understand their nature -- without which we would neither be sensible to or have the capacity to form any understanding about them.

And this is the point in the argument of analogizing prolepsis to a "sense" where I quote Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787:

Moral Philosophy. I think it lost time to attend lectures on this branch. He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his Nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the [beautiful], truth, &c., as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings. .....

In hopes of easing confusion caused by major "theme" revisions and swapping menus around so no one can find anything anymore, we've added a significant new page that needs a thread of its own to announce.

We now have a SITE MAP  page which sets out to list every major page on the site in a single place where they can (hopefully) be found when all other navigation tools fail.

If you see a significant feature of page that's not included in this list, please let us know and we'll add it. I'd like to maintain this page over time as a "master list" of all events and activities here, so if you see something is missing let us know and we'll add it in.

This page will henceforth be accessible as the second item under the "Home" drop-down menu, and we'll probably link it other places as well.

Site Map - Epicureanfriends.com

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Don't worry - we are working on new options!

For anyone who checks out my Jackson Barwis link I urge them to read up to the point in Dialogue One where he writes these two paragraphs, which I find not only persuasive but poetic:

Quote from Jackson Barwis - Dialog On Innate Principles

"The innate principles of the soul, continued he, cannot, any more than those of the body, be propositions. They must be in us antecedently to all our reasonings about them, or they could never be in us at all: for we cannot, by reasoning, create any thing, the principles of which did not exist antecedently. We can, indeed, describe our innate sentiments and perceptions to each other; we can reason, and we can make propositions about them; but our reasonings neither are, nor can create in us, moral principles. They exist prior to, and independently of, all reasoning, and all propositions about them.

When we are told that benevolence is pleasing; that malevolence is painful; we are not convinced of these truths by reasoning, nor by forming them into propositions: but by an appeal to the innate internal affections of our souls: and if on such an appeal, we could not feel within the sentiment of benevolence, and the peculiar pleasure attending it; and that of malevolence and its concomitant pain, not all the reasoning in the world could ever make us sensible of them, or enable us to understand their nature."

Great topic to pursue. I will write more later but in my mind I think inmate " ideas" is a total nonstarter, and Dewitt was being sloppy when he used that reference.

My preferred explanation of what is innate is more on the order of pleasure and pain, extended to the innate ability to recognize relationships that then as we examine them are formed into ideas.

The best and even poetic presentation of such a position I have found is in the section from the work that Jackson Barwis wrote in the late 1700s against John Locke - the first of his "Dialogues on Innate Principles" found here: https://jacksonbarwis.com. (Specifically starting here: https://jacksonbarwis.com/DOIP-One/ )

In that work Barwis argues strongly against innate "ideas" but says that innate "principles" - such as feeling pleasure at the recognition of acts of benevolence - is a very different thing.

If I were forced to take a position on the direction Epicurus would likely have gone, that would be it.

Thanks for introducing yourself Remus! Looking forward to hearing more from you!