Posts by Cassius

One more thing as we solicit comments on this video. I am thinking that this presentation by Sagan is so clear and so basic that it ought to be part of a background "reading list" for anyone beginning the study of Epicurus in general or Epicurean physics in particular. The linking of these issues to problems with Pythagorus, Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity is just priceless. I can't recall whether he mentions "Stoics" but they are clearly implicated negatively too.

It's really frustrating that Sagan does not mention Epicurus by name, and mentioned that Epicurus fought back against the same idealist gang that Sagan is criticizing. But again the implications are clear once you scratch the surface of the subject.

No doubt there are other videos and materials which make this same point, but this is the best I am aware of. Anyone who reviews this and thinks "I've seen _______ make the very same point in another video....." - Please post a link or info where we can try to find it and add to a "basics" list.

Quote from Don

My only question would be: do we *know* it's Lucretius the poet and not another 1st c. BCE member of the gens Lucretia:

I love the way you phrased that question. It calls for both a history debate, or even more so, a canonics discussion on the proper definition to be given to the word "know!"

Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" episode "The Backbone of the Night" praising atomism and attacking the mysticism / idealism of Pythagorus, Plato, and even Aristotle first aired in 1980, before many of the current readers of this forum were even born. Carl Sagan died in 1996, and this presentation isn't nearly as well known today as it once was. Even though the video does not mention Epicurus, it's my view that the issues discussed in the part of this video reviewing Greek philosophic issues are highly relevant to our discussions here at EpicureanFriends.

For anyone who has time to review at least the part from about the 25 minute mark to the 45 minute mark, I would very much appreciate hearing your comments - on any aspect you care to comment about. That goes equally for those who know nothing about Carl Sagan to those who watched every episode of Cosmos when it first aired.

My bet is that very few of us have watched this argument since you've started studying Epicurus, and it would be very helpful to know what your reaction is to it now.

Thanks for pointing that out Todd I meant to delete that sentence fragment and will do so now.

Episode 157 - part two of our very special interview with Dr. Emily Austin, is now available. In this episode we continue our discussion of the differences between Epicurus and Stoicism, and we dive deeper into other important aspects of the philosophy.

Thanks for the new poll, but am I overlooking it or did you leave out the Brown 1783 version? We don't know the translator's name, but I actually consider that one of my favorites due to the rendering of several important passages - one that stands out to me is his use of "events" rather than exclusively "accidents" in describing emergent properties.

Let's see if this works. Here's the section. Someone who is unfamiliar with the material might well be confused, but when you know what to expect his point to be, it probably makes sense. He's not saying that "the gods ordered that nothing be created from nothing. He's saying "Nothing is ever created from nothing by the gods will (with the implication of... or by any other means either.) What do you guys think? Kalosyni's reaction is very very understandable, and this just reminds me of how important it is to educate new readers to the subtleties or else they will tend to interpret things in our modern paradigm rather than from the Epicurean perspective. And it might be especially confusing to hear that if they think that Epicurus was an atheist. Knowing that Epicurus was NOT an atheist, it's easy to put this in perspective. "The gods" do exist, but neither they nor anybody or anything else creates things from nothing.

Nothing was ever born from nothing by the gods will .mp3

Ha well I have to slightly disagree with your analysis of Humphrey on that point, but I am glad you said this because it points out how hard it is to be precise. On this point I think Humphreys (and Charlton Griffin, in the way he read it, probably got it right. The problem is that the issue is new to us and the way it reads it isn't immediately clear where the "at the will of the gods" fits in. I think you're interpreting it as meaning that the gods ordered that nothing come from nothing. I don't think it really comes out that way when you hear it a few times. Let me get the audio and let's check. -- Will Update....

A perfect place here for Nate's new graphic, since this gives the context of who Epicurus was really rebelling against:

Time stamps:

25:00 - Anaximander and evolution (positive)

26:27 - Empedocles discovers air; discussion of "water thief" (positive)

28:36 - Democritus and atoms (positive)

33:30 - Anaxagorus advances in astronomy but was persecuted (positive)

34:13 - Pythagorus "The mystics were beginning to win" - continuity between him and Christianity. Mathematical harmony underlies all of nature - "music of the spheres" - "cosmos means 'ordered.' Pythagorus said laws of nature deduced by PURE THOUGHT - they were mathematicians and thoroughgoing mystics- the dodecahedron - ordinary people to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron - they suppressed knowledge of the square root of two as "irrational" Pythagoreans ignored "experiment" (highly negative)

39:07 Plato -- Followed in steps of Pyathagorus and extended them - ideas are more real than the natural world - advised ignoring astronomy in favor of thinking - taught contempt for the real world - he and his followers extinguished the light of science and experiment. Unease with the world of the senses and dominated and stifled western philosophy.

40:44 - Pythagorus and Plato "provided an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order.""

41:13 - "Plato and Aristotle were comfortable in a slave society. Thy offered justifications for oppression. They served tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind - a natural enough idea I suppose in a slave society. They separated thought from matter. They divorced the earth from the heavens. Divisions which were to dominate western thinking for more than 20 centuries. The Pythagoreans had won. ... The books of theionian scientsts are entirely lost. Their views were suppressed, ridiculed and forgotten by the Platonists and by the Christians who adopted much of the science of Plato.

If you have not seen this episode of Cosmos, this one - Episode Seven - has a great deal of good material that is supportive of the general Epicurean position and very critical of Pythagorean and Platonic idealism. It has been a long time since I watched it and if someone watches it again it would be good if we could make note of some time stamps in the thread below. I seem to remember that Sagan talks approvingly of Democritus but may largely skip over Epicurus, but this is from distant memory.

What i did take the time to verify as that at about the 39:00 Minute mark Sagan begins to take Plato apart. However if you have the time I suggest you start watching more like the 20 minute mark, where he really begins to focus on Greece:

Carl Sagan Cosmos Episode 7 - The Backbone of Night - Greek subtitles, ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΟΙ ΥΠΟΤΙΤΛΟΙ

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was…

odysee.com

I wish I could downvote Leonard Just got into an exchange with Kalosyni this afternoon about a very important passage in Lucretius where Leonard seems to have deviated strongly from the consensus.

Here in the first "nothing from nothing" sequence in Book 1 Leonard translates:

This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,

Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,

Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,

But only Nature's aspect and her law,

Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

While virtually every other translator makes notse that it's not just "nothing from nothing ever yet was born, but that:

Munro: [146] This terror then and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature; the warp of whose design we shall begin with this first principle, nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.

Martin Ferguson Smith: This terrifying darkness that enshrouds the mind must be dispelled not by the sun’s rays and the dazzling darts of day, but by study of the superficial aspect and underlying principle of nature.22

The first stage of this study will have this rule as its basis: nothing ever \[150\] springs miraculously out of nothing.

Brown: [146] These terrors of the mind, this darkness then, not the Sun’s beams, nor the bright rays of day, can ever dispel, but Nature’s light and reason, whose first of principles shall be my guide: Nothing was by the Gods of nothing made.

ETC Most everyone else (I wish i had time to check them all to see if anyone else does this but I don't) makes some reference to by the gods or divinely, because the Latin is:

Principium cuius hinc nobis exordia sumet,

nullam rem e nihilo gigni divinitus umquam. 150

quippe ita formido mortalis continet omnis,

quod multa in terris fieri caeloque tuentur,

quorum operum causas nulla ratione videre

possunt ac fieri divino numine rentur.

I mean, I know the general rule is that nothing comes from nothing FOR ANY REASON, and that in fact that's the way that Epicurus says it in Herodotus (if I recall correctly) -- no direct linking to "the will of the gods." But Lucretius here is in the middle of a long argument against divine supernatural influence, so it should have been left in by Leonard here IMHO.

If someone can show me that I am libeling Leonard without justification, I will gladly withdraw this comment. But for the time being I can't resist the suspicion that Leonard is not to be trusted on key passages -- and yet his version is almost everywhere on the internet!

Don, especially given your interest in the translation details -- am I missing something here in Leonard vs the others? And Leonard is the one Perseus uses too, if I recall correctly.

Joshua I have not seen that Cameo before. Possible, but do you know anything about it? Maybe in your research tomorrow,

Godfrey the etched version you find is indeed the one I have found to be "standard" over the years. To me, that one doesn't look much at all like the ring, so I suspect it is unrelated, but again no idea where it came from

Thanks to all. I'd like to get some better pictures of that bust Nate found cause that looks to me like a reasonable likeness of the ring.

But I will suspend judgment waiting on Joshua!

Great finds, Joshua! Also we need some eye comparisons:

Does it look to people here like the bust in the gardens was modeled after, or with reference to, or with intent to extrapolate from, the ring?

Or is there no intended or accidental resemblance at all?

If we are able to determine that that bust is ancient we will really want to start highlighting it.

If we determine it is modern we will still likely want to use it as a good reconstruction based on the ring.

Either way this is well worth investigating and documenting.

And trying to get more angles and better pictures.

I answered Humphries because to me I think it is good combination of literal and poetic sounding, but it depends on the purpose.

For most up to date I would say MFSmith.

For most up to date public domain I would say Bailey.

For most insightful on difficult issues I always like to check Brown.

For perhaps most literal I check Munro.

I can't believe that Munro would not have made note of that statue - and Munro was the original source of my info on that ring, as he put it on his copy of his translation.

Is it possible that statue is newer than the late 1800s, and that the statue was inspired by the ring?

Wow that does sort of match the ring! Do we know anything about the background of that statue?

Seems like most of us are pretty comfortable with "corrosive."

The use of "extravagant" is a little more open to debate, as Emily herself says. I think in our podcast interview she indicated she liked variations of "enrich / enriching / enrichment" to indicate that they are not necessary but still desirable if available (presumably always understood to mean "available at a cost in pain that you personally find to be worth it).

Enrichment / etc is probably better, but the trick is to find something that clearly conveys that the desire is not "necessary" for a full life but that if available at a cost we find acceptable then it's a given that we would pursue it.

Yes a special happy birthday to @EricR. Eric has had an account here since 2016 and has been a good friend during that time, It's interesting how patterns tend to repeat, and I don't think Eric would mind my saying that he has always struck me as someone very similar to our Joshua -- similar "radio" voice, background in Buddhism, poetry, and very creative.