Posts by Cassius

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  • Format Changes To Weekly Epicurean Zoom Meeting

    This week (October 26th, 2022) will be our last Weekly Zoom meeting on a Wednesday, and we will finish up our discussion of the last Principal Doctrines.

    Starting next week (November 3) we will move to Thursday night, and the main topic of each week will be those topics discussed in the preceeding Lucreius Today podcast.

    Moving to Thursday will give us more time to get the podcast up and allow people to listen and be ready for the discussion on Thursday night. For those who aren't able to listen, we will have the show notes available for each episode and we'll cover the main topics of discussion there.

    The main purpose of this change is to allow us to get more traction on the joint "project" that the Lucretius Today podcast represents. Now that we are going through DeWitt's "Epicurus And His Philosophy," what we are really in the progress of producing in the podcast is an up-to-date series of media presentations of the basic elements of Epicurean Philosophy. We will eventually put versions of this on youtube and it should become a major resource for outreach to newer students of Epicurus.

    This is an important project and we need all the help we can get to produce a quality product. By discussing the topics on Thursday, in a wider group setting that is not recorded, we can produce new notes for the episode thread and even decide if they are additional points that need to be covered before we move forward.

    Like Lucretius and Diogenes of Oinoanda, if we really take Epicurean philosophy to heart we need to find ways to share it with our circle of friends, and also find ways to widen that circle. Reviewing the podcast in the weeking discussion setting will help the podcasters sharpen their message and help us all work toward better material that we can share with others.

    Please consider joining us in this effort.

  • Bookcase project

    Yes even though there are numbers of "grey market sites" where they can be downloaded, it's not a good idea to post here and be trading PDFs of modern works that we know to be in copyright, for which distribution would appear to be in violation of applicable laws.

    In addition to books another difficult area is that of PDFs imprinted and downloaded from JSTOR, of which the status is not particularly clear but which seems likely to be controversial.

    I think Martin's main idea here is that of person-to-person forwarding of hard-copy books as in the example in the photos.

    Being one myself, I wonder if this is likely to appeal only to "Boomers," but that doesn't mean we should not do it. "We" (superannuated as "we" are) are probably the only ones who still have hard-copy libraries, and as we "age out" (when the play ceases to please us ;) ) do we really want our books to end up at the local Thrift store when we are gone? Nope.

    Death may be nothing to us but we need to make provisions for our Epicurean books!

  • Episode One Hundred Forty-Five - Part 01 (Chapter 1 of Epicurus And His Philosophy)

    I was listening to the final product and caught Kalosyni's comment to the effect that a simple "atheist" perspective is not nearly sufficient as a full worldview. That's an important benefit that Epicurus can bring to people who know enough to reject supernatural religion, but who don't know where to go from there and think that Western philosophy offers them nothing. That's something that Nietsche pointed out - that until Christianity took over (like bad money drives out good), many of the greatest minds of Greece and Rome were Epicurean.

  • Bookcase project

    I fixed the extra attachment Martin.

    Sounds like a great idea.

    Possibly we ought to expand the list of exceptions so that it includes all books that are overtly modern politics so as to not violate our general forum rules, but in this case I would not consider it inappropriate to trade copies of books devoted to other philosophies or most amy other topic beyond what you listed.

    Over the years I have had people send me books, and lent some from my library, and I think this is a great idea toward building community.

    We can set up a table feature using the "lexicon" tool and allow all registered members of a certain level of participation to edit the list.

    We can set that up and post a link here in the thread.

  • Episode One Hundred Forty-Six - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 02 - The Three Divisions of Epicurean Philosophy

    Welcome to Episode One Hundred Forty-Six of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

    Each week we'll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts, and we'll 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 you will find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.

    We're now in the process of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book "Epicurus and His Philosophy."

    This week we take a look at the three major divisions of Epicurean philosophy. Now let's join the discussion:

    Epicurus employed teaching devices which are important in understanding his philosophy.

    • Setting The 'Attitude' or (diathesis, Greek). This device stresses at the very beginning the attitude to take toward the subject. For example, the Principal doctrines set the attitude to take toward gods, death, pleasure, and pain.
    • Start With An 'Outline' or the 'Synoptic View.' This means starting with the 'big picture' before proceeding to detailed discussion of the finer points, so that the fine points are kept in perspective. Epicurus' teachings were therefore presented in order from the general to the particular.
      • Physics:
        • The first principles of Physics were presented as the Twelve Elementary Principles
        • The First Epitome of Physics was the Letter to Herodotus
        • The Second Epitome of Physics is what we have today as the material adapted into poem form in Lucretius On The Nature of Things.
        • The Full presentation of Physics was the Thirty-Seven Books on Nature.
      • Ethics:
        • Ethical passages of 40 Doctrines
        • Letter to Menoeceus
        • Longer Works Now Lost.
      • Canonics:
        • Epistemological passages of 40 Doctrines
        • Epistemological passages in “On the Nature of Things”
        • The “Celestial Book” on Canonics now lost.
      • Warning: View The Literature On Epicurus With Great Care
        • Little remains of the trustworthy texts other than a small amount of original material from Epicurus, supplemented by the poem of Lucretius. The secondary literature is mostly hostile and cannot be received uncritically. Most modern scholars prefer to “hunt with the pack” and take the secondary literature at face value. This results in the greatly distorted picture of Epicurus dominant today.
        • In separating out the false material it is useful to employ another device used by Epicurus: that of contrasting and opposing “True Opinions” against “False Opinions.”


  • Forum Downtime on 10/21/22

    Quote from Don

    Logistical question: If we get a 404 Error and can't access the site, how do we contact you to tell you we can't access the site?

    Great question and this is a great time to update the home page with this information, mentioned in the past here: Backup Communications for EpicureanFriends.com

    We'll add a box to the right sidebar that highlights this URL - CassiusAmicus.com. That URL was chosen as a name that's hopefully easy to remember in the event of an emergency. It's nothing but a "link tree" of other places where we should be able to communicate in the event of extended downtime, such as Facebook, Twitter, and other established accounts that should not be affected in the event of a problem with our main host.

    As a practical matter it's likely that the best place to report outages and communicate when the forum is down will be the newly-established Telegram group which can be found by clicking here.

    Most of us don't monitor Facebook regularly, but it's also likely that if something were to happen to the main site it would be discussed at the Facebook group here.

  • Forum Downtime on 10/21/22

    Last "tech support" post: I just identified the problem which i know affected at least two separate accounts. if you were logged in this morning when the site went off line, your browser may have continued to attempt to connect and thereby triggered the hosting provider to think that you were a hacker, which automatically added your IP address to a ban list. Therefore if you have any trouble logging in from any device, let us know and we can arrange to remove you from that list, and that should fix any problem anyone has. End of tech report!

  • Forum Downtime on 10/21/22

    I hope you didn't lose anything; I know you tend to write in the mornings first thing. I doubt that any loss of data happened because I don't think the database in which messages are stored was affected. But if anyone notices anything please let me know.

Finding Things At EpicureanFriends.com

What's the best strategy for finding things on EpicureanFriends.com? Here's a suggested search strategy:

  • First, familiarize yourself with the list of forums. The best way to find threads related to a particular topic is to look in the relevant forum. Over the years most people have tried to start threads according to forum topic, and we regularly move threads from our "general discussion" area over to forums with more descriptive titles.
  • Use the "Search" facility at the top right of every page. Note that the search box asks you what section of the forum you'd like to search. If you don't know, select "Everywhere." Also check the "Search Assistance" page.
  • Use the "Tag" facility, starting with the "Key Tags By Topic" in the right hand navigation pane, or using the "Search By Tag" page, or the "Tag Overview" page which contains a list of all tags alphabetically. We curate the available tags to keep them to a manageable number that is descriptive of frequently-searched topics.