Correct me if I'm misremembering, but Lucretius's poem was considered unfinished even in the ancient world, right?
Very good question but if so I am not aware of anything to establish that. Isn't one of the only ancient comments someone (a church father?) making the comment about Cicero "emending" it?
Joshua has me thinking about this subject again due to his post about the plague. Rather than put this note in that thread and disrupt the chain of thought, I will add this here:
If in fact the point of the ending is related to the point that the citizens of Athens who lived through the Plague were thereby freed from their religious superstitions (as Emily Austin suggests), it strikes me that the famous lines from Virgil might actually fit at the very end of the poem too.
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari
Which translates to something like:
Happy was he who was able to learn the causes of things,
and who set under his feet all fear of unrelenting fate,
and the noise of greedy Acheron.
Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas - Wikipedia
Wouldn't it be interesting if Virgil was thinking of the end of Lucretius' poem when he inserted that line into verse 490 of Book 2 of the "Georgics" (29 BC)?
Joshua I should look up what Santayana said before writing this, but as usual I will blunder forward without doing my research:
Is Santayana looking for Mars just to balance Venus in the opening because he thinks there should be another reference to the role of gods?
Maybe Lucretius had no desire to balance gods but to leave them behind, and the full reason for ending on the death and destruction note is that he intended to state or at least evoke the true ending of the Plague story, which is that the people of Athens gave up on worrying about the gods at all, and tried to enjoy life as best the could?
I gather that is what Emily Austin's book is suggesting?
And if so Santayana would be wrong in looking for an allusion about gods except as to a dismissal of them? (Meaning that part of Lucretius' point was that Mars on the warpath is exactly what did NOT happen to cause the plague?)
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Absolutely in my case probably head and shoulders THE most important book in turning my thinking was Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. For me it was important in opening my mind to see that someone with a pretty sterling "Founding Father" reputation thought the way he did. Starting with that I went on a binge reading campaign of other deist writers, and of course including Jefferson's material as well. But Age of Reason stands out as so clearly written as to be in a class by itself. So many writings of that period seem dated when you read them today, but Paine's writing style seemed to me (at least at the time) to be like it was written yesterday.
Yes you're right of course that Paine and most of the others in that period were into Deism, so that's a major limitation. Figuring out why they considered themselves to be materialists but refused to go full Epicurean would be an interesting study in itself.
Eventually the deism reading led me to Thomas Cooper who produced some good material too, which I have found useful at times with religious people:
Especially his Jeffferson-endorsed: Scripture Doctrine of Materialism
I didn't realize that the PDF supporting the article is behind a paywall. A search of cellular memory indicates some people think it is quackery, but other articles seem to take it seriously. Might be worth splitting this off into a separate topic if anyone is interested or has access to the full ScienceDirect article to see how serious it is.
Also, probably more closely related to particle flows affecting the brain directly:
I seem to remember that we may have discussed this before, but can't remember at the moment:
This thread comes to mind because Joshua recently took a stab at a diagram of Epicurean epistemology that he prepared on Draw.io. The picture below is just an excerpt to liven up this post, but the full current product is available here:
Joshua obviously put a lot of work into this, but it's a huge project, and a lot of the benefit will come from annotating what the branches and boxes are intended to illustrate.
I am going to pin this thread to the Canonics section, and I will try to work on a variation myself. There should be a variety of technologies that would help us, so don't feel obligated to stick with Draw.io . I think there are probably free and collaborative "mind map" alternatives that would do the job as well, so we are very open to proposals on how this might be accomplished.
I haven't had time to study Joshua's first draft, but I feel sure that a large part of the difficulty is going to be to try to somehow illustrate "core" aspects of what Epicurus was suggesting, which would apply to most every question to be considered by the mind, while also separately showing that there are "non-core" circumstantial inputs that need to be shown in order to see the big picture. I am not at all sure what format makes best sense to use to show that. A tree, starting with roots and growing up to a trunk with branches? Or is it best to use sort of a time line view as Joshua has done, or some other format entirely?
Such a diagram would always end up being very conceptual, but might well help us think about the issues that are involved.
It also strikes me that what we are talking about is not entirely different from Artificial Intelligence models, and there are very likely all sorts of new web technologies being developed to assist with that. Maybe some kind of Epicurean Canonical AI-bot is also something to consider.
All suggestion are welcome!
I don't know anything about this person or his book but I just saw this on Twitter:
[ADMIN EDIT - This thread was split off from here: RE: "Epicurean Philosophy: An Introduction from the 'Garden of Athens'" edited by Christos Yapijakis Possibly the topic name needs further adjustment, and I see we don't really have a forum dedicated to "human body" issues. We can set one up if needed. The topic is really something more like "Modern Research that might link to Epicurean Views of Images and other influences on the mind.]
Probably way off topic but this just caught my eye. Probably reflective of how we need to be flexible in keeping open to undiscovered - but natural - ways that thoughts can be influenced by physical changes:
History is complicated and I am sure the Stoics would howl at that. And the Sedley article on the Ethics of Brutus and Cassius implies that the Stoics were not the most consistent of fighters (Brutus was not primarily a Stoic and apparently there were not many Stoics helping B & C against Caesar).
But at the very least I think it is safe to say philosophically that when you think you have a divine sanction, or a categorical imperative that everyone should follow the same rules all the time and everywhere, then you have a strong tendency to plant seeds that will likely grow into a major conflict that will violate all sorts of otherwise ethical norms.
Also, I was trying to think of examples of phenomena that might not seem crazy to entertain.
It's not just in movies, but how many times have we "felt" that someone out of our vision was looking at us. Maybe I've seen too many war movies where the explorers say "We're being watched" but I do from personal experience think that there are times we "feel" something going on which is not strictly a matter of hearing rustling leaves or catching glimpses of things out of the corner of our eyes. I need to read back up the thread to see the list Don gave, but I don't think it is likely a good bet to draw a bright line at "five" or "six" or "ten" or whatever. The big issue is whatever there is is going to be natural, and in order to believe it it's going to require repetition and some kind of concrete demonstration of its reality.
Probably bears repeating that I don't think it's too productive to get too far into the weeds on these issues without looking back at the big picture.
It seems to me that the big picture is that Epicurus is saying that Nature equips us with faculties through which we can make sense of what is going on around us, and that those faculties operate naturally and are not divine or prophetic or inherently deceptive in nature. Using those faculties we can make sense of many things within the flux and we don't have to throw up our hands and give in to radical skepticism. We also don't have to worry that there is some divine or ideal or true world to which we can get access only through revelation or esoteric logical maneuvering.
As far as the details of what those faculties are and how they operate, some of that is obvious (that the senses are honest but don't constitute truth in themselves - we have to evaluate the data to decide what we think is true) and some of it is less obvious (that the mind can be influenced by things other than the 5 classic senses - which is where the images apparently come in as a proposed explanation).
I certainly think there can be lots of varying positions and disagreements about how to get into the details of how these faculties operate, and that's largely a matter of advancing scientific knowledge that we gain through better technology. But the bigger picture that all this is natural simply gets clarified in details by the advancing technology, it doesn't get reversed or called into serious question.
One reason for my concern would be that if we are focusing on "images" as the topic of the discussion, then why not just consider the receipt of images, as Lucretius does in Book IV, along with the other phenomena of the senses like seeing, hearing, etc.? It's not like Epicurus said (as far as we know) that there are only 5 senses. Lucretius talks about those 5 in the same chapter as he discusses images, so if someone wanted to focus on the information derived from images directly by the mind, I don't see why that would would not constitute just an extension of the "sense" leg, rather than an entirely separate fourth leg.
