Posts by Cassius

Quote from Julia

However, it never bothered me, because I enter the forums through a bookmark directly to https://www.epicureanfriends.com/wcf/notification-list/ so that I can see what I've missed and take things from there.

Yes, I think we want to encourage people to bookmark either the notification list (lists the updates in short form) or the "Recent Activities" page (gives a brief summary of the update) or the Dashboard (pretty much the same as "Recent Activities, but gives a selection of latest graphics etc from other areas of the forum.

The "Home" Page will not change much over time, and so it doesn't make sense for regular users to start on that one. However it's the place that new people googling will find first, so it makes sense to have the Welcome video and other sample material there.

I am sure at some point we'll also move the bulk of the long essay on Pleasure to a separate page, but it's a recent addition, and it's targeted to address the number one issue that distinguishes "some Epicureans" from "other Epicureans." I think it's important for people to realize that up front, so for the time being we'll try it out and see what happens.

I really expect the welcome video (and associated Welcome page) added this past weekend will constitute what most people will check out first. [ Underneath the video it says Click here for Self-Paced Slides of the above presentation, or here for the Welcome Page with the text of the narration. ]

No doubt we'll continue to tweak that front page a lot, but regular users definitely should bookmark one of the other pages as the best way to check in on the forum.

That was the problem. You'll see it now. Yes it was the box that had the "Remember..... quote and said 'Welcome Back (username)." That has been turned off for that customized theme so you only see the logo / navigation bar at top.

Oh Darn I bet I made the same mistake as before - I did not "Enable" it. Be right back.

Yes Julia, Kalosyni is correct that it should be in the list -- maybe the name is being truncated on the screen you are using? If so I can shorten the name or give it a different starting letter. Let me know if you don't see it and we'll try that.

As for customized artwork that is a great idea and we'd welcome any suggestions you want to make. Like everything else here the styling is a "work in progress" so we're not wedded to any single decision.

Holly your recent Basil Rathbone post reminded me of your interest in movies, and we have a section on Epicurean-Friendly Movies here that you might have some suggestions for:

Movies / Books (fiction) With Epicurean Philosophical Themes

And i see that Don just welcomed you and you may find some commonailities to discuss since he is a luminary in the world of library science, though in an adjoining state so there may be some rivalry involved

For Julia in particular (but I think others will like this as well) we now have the option to turn off the "Welcome Box" at the top of each page. The Welcome Box serves an important purpose for default new users who drop by the forum for the first time, but if you get to the point where you want to turn off the Welcome section but keep the other aspects of the Inspire theme (mainly the header bar) you can now change your style to "A-Default Theme Without Welcome Bar At Top."

If someone is using one of the other Inspire Colors and wants a "No Welcome Box" variation of that style, let me know and I'll fix up one of those too.

I am still in the early editing phase of this episode but I now realize that early on, Joshua and I discussed including references to Marcus Aurelius within the discussion of the Stoic viewpoint on the gods. For obvious reasons Velleius doesn't include reference to anything Aurelius said, but I think it would be helpful to listeners who are familiar with Stoicism if we include a couple of references to Aurelius on gods, since Aurelius is probably the Stoic with whom they are most familiar.

We can add in reference to that in our next episode if we come up with something particularly interesting, so if anyone knows of interesting statements by Aurelius on the gods, please let us know. The context of this will become more clear too when we release this Episode 233, hopefully in the next several days,

This post is primarily for Don but I think we have more than one participant who works in Don's field (maybe now including HollyGraves? ) and I came across a website today advocating a method that might at some point be useful to consider some version of implementation for this site.

The website i came across is https://johnnydecimal.com/ I see he has a video here: https://johnnydecimal.com/10-19-concepts…cimal-workshop/

First of all, I am wondering if Don or others use any kind of similar system in their personal or work life.

i ask this in part because it's a challenge to categorize forums and concepts so that they are findable. I think it definitely makes sense to use the "Physics, Canonics, Ethics" categories, but I'm wondering if it would be useful to impose some more formal structure on the subdivisions within those. Does anyone attempt to categorize their notes into anything resembling a "JohnnyDecimal-like" system?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Welcome HollyGraves

[I am very happy to welcome HollyGravesto the forum. I'm including the standard "Welcome Message" below in case someone has decided to hijack the username, but if this is "the" HollyGraves the we have someone who's been very helpful to Elli and Martin and I (and others) in the past, and who we are very glad to have an account over here!]

Please check out our Getting Started page, but in the meantime there is one last step to complete your registration:

All new registrants must post a response to this message here in this welcome thread (we do this in order to minimize spam registrations).

You must post your response within 72 hours, or your account will be subject to deletion.

Please say "Hello" by introducing yourself, tell us what prompted your interest in Epicureanism and which particular aspects of Epicureanism most interest you, and/or post a question.

This forum is the place for students of Epicurus to coordinate their studies and work together to promote the philosophy of Epicurus. Please remember that all posting here is subject to our Community Standards / Rules of the Forum our Not Neo-Epicurean, But Epicurean and our Posting Policy statements and associated posts.

Please understand that the leaders of this forum are well aware that many fans of Epicurus may have sincerely-held views of what Epicurus taught that are incompatible with the purposes and standards of this forum. This forum is dedicated exclusively to the study and support of people who are committed to classical Epicurean views. As a result, this forum is not for people who seek to mix and match some Epicurean views with positions that are inherently inconsistent with the core teachings of Epicurus.

All of us who are here have arrived at our respect for Epicurus after long journeys through other philosophies, and we do not demand of others what we were not able to do ourselves. Epicurean philosophy is very different from other viewpoints, and it takes time to understand how deep those differences really are. That's why we have membership levels here at the forum which allow for new participants to discuss and develop their own learning, but it's also why we have standards that will lead in some cases to arguments being limited, and even participants being removed, when the purposes of the community require it. Epicurean philosophy is not inherently democratic, or committed to unlimited free speech, or devoted to any other form of organization other than the pursuit by our community of happy living through the principles of Epicurean philosophy.

One way you can be most assured of your time here being productive is to tell us a little about yourself and personal your background in reading Epicurean texts. It would also be helpful if you could tell us how you found this forum, and any particular areas of interest that you have which would help us make sure that your questions and thoughts are addressed.

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!

Thank you Julia! I'll see if I can tweak that in an upcoming revision!

Thank you Tau Phi!

Today I posted the first version of a new 9 minute "Introduction to EpicureanFriends" video on the front page of the website.

The video itself is here:

And a "slide show" version is here.

Here is an outline of the arguments we will cover:

1. [XIV] Zeno (to come to your sect, Balbus) thinks the law of nature to be the divinity, and that it has the power to force us to what is right, and to restrain us from what is wrong. How this law can be an animated being I cannot conceive; but that God is so we would certainly maintain. The same person says, in another place, that the sky is God; but can we possibly conceive that God is a being insensible, deaf to our prayers, our wishes, and our vows, and wholly unconnected with us?
2. In other books he thinks there is a certain rational essence pervading all nature, indued with divine efficacy. He attributes the same power to the stars, to the years, to the months, and to the seasons.
3. In his interpretation of Hesiod’s Theogony, he entirely destroys the established notions of the Gods; for he excludes Jupiter, Juno, and Vesta, and those esteemed divine, from the number of them; but his doctrine is that these are names which by some kind of allusion are given to mute and inanimate beings.
4. The sentiments of his disciple Aristo are not less erroneous. He thought it impossible to conceive the form of the Deity, and asserts that the Gods are destitute of sense; and he is entirely dubious whether the Deity is an animated being or not.
5. Cleanthes, who next comes under my notice, a disciple of Zeno at the same time with Aristo, in one place says that the world is God; in another, he attributes divinity to the mind and spirit of universal nature; then he asserts that the most remote, the highest, the all-surrounding, the all-enclosing and embracing heat, which is called the sky, is most certainly the Deity. In the books he wrote against pleasure, in which he seems to be raving, he imagines the Gods to have a certain form and shape; then he ascribes all divinity to the stars; and, lastly, he thinks nothing more divine than reason. So that this God, whom we know mentally and in the speculations of our minds, from which traces we receive our impression, has at last actually no visible form at all.
6. [XV] Persæus, another disciple of Zeno, says that they who have made discoveries advantageous to the life of man should be esteemed as Gods; and the very things, he says, which are healthful and beneficial have derived their names from those of the Gods; so that he thinks it not sufficient to call them the discoveries of Gods, but he urges that they themselves should be deemed divine. What can be more absurd than to ascribe divine honors to sordid and deformed things; or to place among the Gods men who are dead and mixed with the dust, to whose memory all the respect that could be paid would be but mourning for their loss?
7. Chrysippus, who is looked upon as the most subtle interpreter of the dreams of the Stoics, has mustered up a numerous band of unknown Gods; and so unknown that we are not able to form any idea about them, though our mind seems capable of framing any image to itself in its thoughts. For he says that the divine power is placed in reason, and in the spirit and mind of universal nature; that the world, with a universal effusion of its spirit, is God; that the superior part of that spirit, which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature, containing and preserving the chain of all things; that the divinity is the power of fate, and the necessity of future events. He deifies fire also, and what I before called the ethereal spirit, and those elements which naturally proceed from it—water, earth, and air. He attributes divinity to the sun, moon, stars, and universal space, the grand container of all things, and to those men likewise who have obtained immortality. He maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter; the air, which pervades the sea, to be Neptune; and the earth, Ceres. In like manner he goes through the names of the other Deities. He says that Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us in our manners; and this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the doctrines contained in his first book of the Nature of the Gods. In the second, he endeavors to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musæus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that the most ancient poets, who never dreamed of these things, may seem to have been Stoics. Diogenes the Babylonian was a follower of the doctrine of Chrysippus; and in that book which he wrote, entitled “A Treatise concerning Minerva,” he separates the account of Jupiter’s bringing-forth, and the birth of that virgin, from the fabulous, and reduces it to a natural construction.

This coming Sunday we will be addressing what is probably for us today the most important of the erroneous positions about the gods - those held by the Stoics. We will be in section 14 of Book One, so if anyone has any time to suggest resources we should review before this episode, or has comments or suggestions, please let us know.

Welcome to Episode 233 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.

For our new listeners, let me remind you of several ground rules for both our podcast and our forum.

First: Our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it.

Second: We won't be talking about modern political issues in this podcast. How you apply Epicurus in your own life is of course entirely up to you. We call this approach "Not Neo-Epicurean, But Epicurean." Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy of its own, it's not the same as Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Atheism, Libertarianism or Marxism - it is unique and must be understood on its own, not in terms of any conventional modern morality.

Third: One of the most important things to keep in mind is that the Epicureans often used words very differently than we do today. To the Epicureans, Gods were not omnipotent or omniscient, so Epicurean references to "Gods" do not mean at all the same thing as in major religions today. In the Epicurean theory of knowledge, all sensations are true, but that does not mean all opinions are true, but that the raw data reported by the senses is reported without the injection of opinion, as the opinion-making process takes place in the mind, where it is subject to mistakes, rather than in the senses. In Epicurean ethics, "Pleasure" refers not ONLY to sensory stimulation, but also to every experience of life which is not felt to be painful. The classical texts show that Epicurus was not focused on luxury, like some people say, but neither did he teach minimalism, as other people say. Epicurus taught that all experiences of life fall under one of two feelings - pleasure and pain - and those feelings -- and not gods, idealism, or virtue - are the guides that Nature gave us by which to live. More than anything else, Epicurus taught that the universe is not supernatural in any way, and that means there's no life after death, and any happiness we'll ever have comes in THIS life, which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion.

Today we are continuing to review the Epicurean sections of Cicero's "On the Nature of The Gods," as presented by the Epicurean spokesman Velleius, beginning at the end of Section 10.

For the main text we are using primarily the Yonge translation, available here at Archive.org. The text which we include in these posts is available here. We will also refer to the public domain version of the Loeb series, which contains both Latin and English, as translated by H. Rackham.

Additional versions can be found here:

• Frances Brooks 1896 translation at Online Library of Liberty
• Lacus Curtius Edition (Rackham)
• PDF Of Loeb Edition at Archive.org by Rackham
• Gutenberg.org version by CD Yonge 

A list of arguments presented will be maintained here.

Today's Text

XIV. Zeno (to come to your sect, Balbus) thinks the law of nature to be the divinity, and that it has the power to force us to what is right, and to restrain us from what is wrong. How this law can be an animated being I cannot conceive; but that God is so we would certainly maintain. The same person says, in another place, that the sky is God; but can we possibly conceive that God is a being insensible, deaf to our prayers, our wishes, and our vows, and wholly unconnected with us? In other books he thinks there is a certain rational essence pervading all nature, indued with divine efficacy. He attributes the same power to the stars, to the years, to the months, and to the seasons. In his interpretation of Hesiod’s Theogony, he entirely destroys the established notions of the Gods; for he excludes Jupiter, Juno, and Vesta, and those esteemed divine, from the number of them; but his doctrine is that these are names which by some kind of allusion are given to mute and inanimate beings. The sentiments of his disciple Aristo are not less erroneous. He thought it impossible to conceive the form of the Deity, and asserts that the Gods are destitute of sense; and he is entirely dubious whether the Deity is an animated being or not.

Cleanthes, who next comes under my notice, a disciple of Zeno at the same time with Aristo, in one place says that the world is God; in another, he attributes divinity to the mind and spirit of universal nature; then he asserts that the most remote, the highest, the all-surrounding, the all-enclosing and embracing heat, which is called the sky, is most certainly the Deity. In the books he wrote against pleasure, in which he seems to be raving, he imagines the Gods to have a certain form and shape; then he ascribes all divinity to the stars; and, lastly, he thinks nothing more divine than reason. So that this God, whom we know mentally and in the speculations of our minds, from which traces we receive our impression, has at last actually no visible form at all.

XV. Persæus, another disciple of Zeno, says that they who have made discoveries advantageous to the life of man should be esteemed as Gods; and the very things, he says, which are healthful and beneficial have derived their names from those of the Gods; so that he thinks it not sufficient to call them the discoveries of Gods, but he urges that they themselves should be deemed divine. What can be more absurd than to ascribe divine honors to sordid and deformed things; or to place among the Gods men who are dead and mixed with the dust, to whose memory all the respect that could be paid would be but mourning for their loss?

Chrysippus, who is looked upon as the most subtle interpreter of the dreams of the Stoics, has mustered up a numerous band of unknown Gods; and so unknown that we are not able to form any idea about them, though our mind seems capable of framing any image to itself in its thoughts. For he says that the divine power is placed in reason, and in the spirit and mind of universal nature; that the world, with a universal effusion of its spirit, is God; that the superior part of that spirit, which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature, containing and preserving the chain of all things; that the divinity is the power of fate, and the necessity of future events. He deifies fire also, and what I before called the ethereal spirit, and those elements which naturally proceed from it—water, earth, and air. He attributes divinity to the sun, moon, stars, and universal space, the grand container of all things, and to those men likewise who have obtained immortality. He maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter; the air, which pervades the sea, to be Neptune; and the earth, Ceres. In like manner he goes through the names of the other Deities. He says that Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us in our manners; and this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the doctrines contained in his first book of the Nature of the Gods. In the second, he endeavors to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musæus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that the most ancient poets, who never dreamed of these things, may seem to have been Stoics. Diogenes the Babylonian was a follower of the doctrine of Chrysippus; and in that book which he wrote, entitled “A Treatise concerning Minerva,” he separates the account of Jupiter’s bringing-forth, and the birth of that virgin, from the fabulous, and reduces it to a natural construction.

Episode 232 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week Velleius attacks the Platonic and Aristotelian views of the gods.

Updated. That page is much better now. Thanks to Don for his commentary and to Godfrey and Tau Phi for the suggestions.

Good suggestions - thank you. Yes those links were set for the subforums which were just deleted. Thanks for picking that up.

Quote from Julia

using Dark Reader (a browser plugin)

I use that too and it's a great idea. I'm working toward getting the designer's version of a dark theme as well, plus I want to see a toggle button (dark to light and back) always available. It's currently possible for a user to go back and forth by going into their "Control Panel" and selecting "Settings and Privacy," but that's probably more work than it should be. On sites that have a toggle button I switch back and forth fairly regularly depending on time of day.

Update - I had not been using Dark Reader recently with the new default theme but I just tried it and it does work very well, as Julia says!

Yes as to Godfrey's point, I gather that's exactly what both DeWitt and Clay say that they did - they went through the letter to Herodotus and Lucretius and compared the sections of basic physics to assemble a likely list of the twelve "most important" or that seem to stand out in the sequence of building the physics system up to its highest level outline form.

As with the rest it's a shame we don't have Epicurus' version of this text, just as Don says, and that we have to re-create our own.

Also I should note that the only reason this thread got started was that I deleted subforums that had been set up for discussing potential individual items since those subforums had not been used. This thread is just a general comment, and future discussion of individual aspects can be posted as individual threads, rather than worrying about subforums.