Posts by Cassius

Two new questions being added to the list in the first post in this thread:

1. It seems that today Stoicism is much more popular than Epicureanism. What are the most important ways you see Epicureanism as different and superior to Stoicism?

2. What misunderstandings do you think exist as to Epicureanism that are most important to clarify? For example, is Epicureanism ultimately ascetic? Was Epicurus anti-science, or anti-progress, or anti-culture? Did Epicurus teach suppression of all ambition? Did Epicurus teach that the way to live is to totally withdraw from society and live in a cave on bread and water and cheese?

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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.

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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.

1. "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt
2. The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.
3. "On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"
4. "Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky
5. The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."
6. Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section
7. Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section
8. The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation
9. A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright
10. Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus
11. Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)
12. "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.

Welcome to the forum!

It's my understanding that in generic terms that would be exactly what Plato advocated, that the senses are insufficient to give us reliable information about the true world. And I would think in support of that you can cite Diogenes of Oinoanda saying that Epicurus agreed that there is a flux, as D of O attributed to Aristotle, but that Epicurus held the flux not to be so fast that our senses could not apprehend it.

Thank you Little Rocker! As I read the Hahmann article it seems to me to be largely consistent or at least compatible with the approach DeWitt takes in his article and book. As I read all three the key point seems to be something like that every impression strikes us as "real" from the perspective that it is in fact an impression received by a sense faculty, but that each impression has to be evaluated before our minds can judge any inference from that impression to be "true" or "false" to the full external reality.

Does anyone read these articles as going in significantly different directions?

I have made the changes Todd suggested and I bet that will fix the problem. If anyone has further problems with these or any other broken links, please report them. Thanks to Don and Todd for their help with this.

That makes sense and thank you Todd! Yes a couple of months ago I changed a setting in the forum software to tell it to start using "pretty" links as opposed to those with the PHP content. And Don has been around for so long he might have the old version cached. I will check those links again now.

Sorry to interrupt the chain of deep thought but this is a purely procedural post.

Don has reported that he is having trouble with most of the links being non-working in the box on the right side of the home page which looks like this:

(Note - the text needs rewriting but it still serves as a useful link to some key articles so I will defer a rewrite until later.)

The problem is that those links don't work for Don, but they do work for me and at least one other person who tried to access them. Could anyone who has time to check click on a couple of them and let me know if they report any "file not found" or other errors?

thanks very much.

Edit Note: The original post of the DeWitt article has been updated with cite added and some highlighting deleted. Thanks to Todd for catching that.

Joshua et al --- it looks like DeWitt updated and shortened his argument in the article and included it in his book starting on page 135 under "Epicurus not an empiricist."

It's been a long while since I read the article in full but I am expecting both Joshua and you Todd will find yourself in agreement with it. As DeWitt states in the summary, on it's face the statement is absurd, and since we don't usually expect Epicurus to be taking absurd positions, something else must be going on! As often is the case we might not all end up agreeing with DeWitt's precise phrasing, but I think points the way in the right direction.

Quote from Norman DeWitt

The aim of this article is to show reasons for believing that the statement in the heading is false as usually understood. It is absurd; the documentation is deficient, misleading, and from prejudiced sources; advocates of its validity go beyond their authorities. It is inconsistent with Epicurus' theory of perception, his terminology, his account of vision, his classifications, his treatment of the criteria in his Principal Doctrines, his account of heavenly phenomena in the letter to Pythocles, and his recommendations to students. Ancient proofs of it are polemical sophistries. Modern misinterpretations have arisen from the ambiguity of αληθής which has three meanings in Epicureanism: 1. real or self- existent; 2. relatively true; 3. absolutely true. Sensations have been confused with judgments.

Here is DeWitt's article focusing on the subject. I am having trouble getting the Greek word in the summary typed in - if any moderator has the ability to fix that in the description (where I have placed the ________) please do.

File

Norman DeWitt - "Epicurus - All Sensations Are True"

DeWitt's interpretation of the "all sensations are true" controversy.

Cassius

December 29, 2022 at 12:23 PM

Quote from Todd

If by "true", you mean, "corresponding to reality", I would have to say that statement is false.

"Corresponding to reality" is exactly the sense in which Dewitt says "true" is NOT meant in the formulation "all sensations are true.

His analogy is to a courtroom witness who is testifying "truthfully" as far as he or she was able to see, but due to perspective or some other issue that witness did not see the full big picture. They report without any intent to deceive the raw data that they observe, but they (the witness, or the sense) does not report any "opinion" about what they saw at all.

That's the essential issue and DeWitt's suggestion makes perfect sense to me

Here's one reference, but there is more. I also have an article he wrote I thought was already here but will upload again to be sure:

It has always struck me that this sentence seems to be particularly thorny for the translators to make clear. This is Bailey:

[500] And if reason is unable to unravel the cause, why those things which close at hand were square, are seen round from a distance, still it is better through lack of reasoning to be at fault in accounting for the causes of either shape, rather than to let things clear seen slip abroad from your grasp, and to assail the grounds of belief, and to pluck up the whole foundations on which life and existence rest.

The different translations I have seen almost never fail to seem awkward, but the meaning seems to be:

It's better to admit that you don't know rather than to admit that there is anything beyond or above the senses that will let you determine the answer without them, or in contradiction of them. Because if you fall for that trap then you'll be totally lost in imaginary traps.

[Edit: Scratch that. More importantly, the sentence that is even harder to translate seems to be at the end of that, because the "senses" should not be described as false. (As it seems to me he often does Brown does a little better):

Bailey: [513] Again, just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry, and if the square is wrong and out of the straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked, all awry, bulging, leaning forwards or backwards, and out of harmony, so that some parts seem already to long to fall, or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements; even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which all springs from false senses.

Brown: So the reason of things must of necessity be wrong and false which is founded upon a false representation of the senses.

Munro: Once more, as in a building, if the rule first applied is wry, and the square is untrue and swerves from its straight lines, and if there is the slightest hitch in any part of the level, all the construction must be faulty, all must be wry, crooked, sloping, leaning forwards, leaning backwards, without symmetry, so that some parts seem ready to fall, others do fall, ruined all by the first erroneous measurements; so too all reason of things must needs prove to you distorted and false, which is founded on false senses.

]

If we don't have a theory that allows us to understand this approach, then that's when we lose confidence in the natural faculties and start looking for other means of understanding the "true world" that is allegedly beyond the reach of our senses.

Quote

[500] And if reason is unable to unravel the cause, why those things which close at hand were square, are seen round from a distance, still it is better through lack of reasoning to be at fault in accounting for the causes of either shape, rather than to let things clear seen slip abroad from your grasp, and to assail the grounds of belief, and to pluck up the whole foundations on which life and existence rest. For not only would all reasoning fall away; life itself too would collapse straightway, unless you chose to trust the senses, and avoid headlong spots and all other things of this kind which must be shunned, and to make for what is opposite to these. Know, then, that all this is but an empty store of words, which has been drawn up and arrayed against the senses.

[513] Again, just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry, and if the square is wrong and out of the straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked, all awry, bulging, leaning forwards or backwards, and out of harmony, so that some parts seem already to long to fall, or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements; even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which all springs from false senses.

[522] Now it is left to explain in what manner the other senses perceive each their own object—a path by no means stony to tread.

Quote from Joshua

Another way to put this would be to say that any given sensation gives accurate information, buy no individual sensation contains all possible accurate information.

Yes I think that's the key. The senses are irrational and do not inject any opinion when they report something. The report what they receive without comment. But no single sensation tells the whole story, nor does a later sensation have the power to say that the first one was "wrong." The key seems to be that all issues of
"right" and "wrong" or "true" or "false" are issues that are assembled in the volitional mind, and a large part of all this epistemology we are about to discuss is how to assemble the data into concepts or pictures or opinion or whatever, and what standards we are going to use to decide whether the concept or picture or opinion is "true" or 'false."

And I think that's where the issue of "certain" or "confident" comes in, and we have to define what those words mean, beause we're not fictional supernatural gods who have access to omniscience or omnipresence to be able to say that your own perspective or conclusion is "final." We don't have access to that kind of finality (which is made up in the first place) and yet we still have to have an understanding of what it is for us to "know" something with enough confidence to base our life on it and make decisions.

That section of Lucretius that we are discussing in Book 4 is probably one of the best ways to get at all this, in my view. And it's interesting that that discussion comes right around the same place as the discussion of "illusions" and also "images."

Just for the record we were also talking last night about the contrast between

Descartes: "I think therefore I am"

vs

Jefferson:

Jefferson to John Adams, August 15, 1820:    (Full version at Founders.gov)

…. But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May 12. on matter, spirit, motion etc. It’s crowd of scepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it, and laid it down, again and again: and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, ‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organisation of matter, formed for that purpose by it’s creator, as well as that attraction in an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall shew how he could endow the Sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the tract of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and, by that will, put matter into motion, then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart.

Quote from Joshua

Since I've only focused on sensations in the chart I'm going to restrain myself to one thing right now--which is that I question whether error really does enter in that late in the process.

"that late"? Just so I am clear what you are saying, what is your current view of "all sensations are true"?

....this is the Lucretius book iv material we discussed last night:

[478] You will find that the concept of the true is begotten first from the senses, and that the senses cannot be gainsaid. For something must be found with a greater surety, which can of its own authority refute the false by the true. Next then, what must be held to be of greater surety than sense? Will reason, sprung from false sensation, avail to speak against the senses, when it is wholly sprung from the senses? For unless they are true, all reason too becomes false. Or will the ears be able to pass judgement on the eyes, or touch on the ears? or again will the taste in the mouth refute this touch; will the nostrils disprove it, or the eyes show it false? It is not so, I trow. For each sense has its faculty set apart, each its own power, and so it must needs be that we perceive in one way what is soft or cold or hot, and in another the diverse colours of things, and see all that goes along with colour. Likewise, the taste of the mouth has its power apart; in one way smells arise, in another sounds. And so it must needs be that one sense cannot prove another false. Nor again will they be able to pass judgement on themselves, since equal trust must at all times be placed in them. Therefore, whatever they have perceived on each occasion, is true.

DeWitt reconciles this by concluding that "true" means "truly reported" without injection of opinion. Is that what you are saying or do you see it differently?

And one more thing Joshua, I would not set in stone any thoughts on this chapter (Canon, Reason, Nature) until you have read the upcoming chapter (Sensations, Anticipations, Feelings) as they are tightly connected.

Also Joshua topics to be considered here are:

1 - We've been discussing anticipations since the forum started and there likely is not enough evidence to be 100% sure which theory is correct. I personally think that DeWitt is onto something with his "intuition" word, and I think the most persuasive discussions we've had in the past consider words like a faculty of "pattern-recognition" which is not so far from intuition. In this discussion the "images" discussions are critical to include and not just exclude, like some people want to do when the read the Diogenes Laertius description and conclude that it's simple: we see series of oxes and put together a picture in our minds of an ox. Surely that does happen as part of the thinking process, but i think the great weight of the evidence is that this comes later in the thought process, while anticipations are a faculty that generate raw input closer to the beginning of the process.

2 - And closely related is the whole "blank slate" issue. I think DeWitt and others are persuasive that "blank slate" is Arisotelian or otherwise, and that Epicurus did NOT consider himself to be a blank slate person who thinks that everything in our minds comes strictly through the five senses.

Of course what we are talking about now is not all in this chapter - it's in the later discussions of Anticipations.

There is a good Voula Tsouna article on Anticipations in which she reviews what Sedley has said and disagrees with some of his analysis, so if those two are not together then we are going to have to go in from the beginning keeping several alternatives in mind. Personally however I think the best way to steer clear of an improper conclusion is to insist that "images" be included in the picture before we can conclude we have a good answer as to what Epicurus really thought.