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I agree with most of what is written above, but one additional point I would include is that the Latin authorities were much closer to the Greek language and to the Epicurean texts than we will ever be (as to both).
So when we know that someone like Lucretius is trying to be faithful, I think their interpretations are entitled to great deference, even to the extent of considering them to have much more expertise than our own efforts to grasp the Greek.
Welcome Marabrabant (whose post above is I think their first). I usually get around to posting a "Welcome" thread more quickly, but I was unusually tied up today. Again Welcome and I hope you will let us know a little about your background in Epicurus. Welcome Marabrabant!
I suppose I have been around too many hunters or something so when I heard the term "scattershot" i was immediately taken back as I interpret the term as generally negative. I should have had more confidence in Joshua and I wouldn't have been alarmed and had to backtrack. 
I have been really tied up today and not able to keep up so trying to do that now. At the moment my primary thought is:
I really like Post #83
Welcome Marabrabant
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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.
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.
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!
Yes.
Well if it is, that is what we need to work to explain, and we haven't even cracked the book on beginning to describe a tentative elaboration on that, or on what its implications are, or on how something very real and concrete relates to something abstract and conceptual like a "greatest good."
As I wake up this morning it strikes me as potentially obvious at least from our modern biological point of view that all pleasures are the same in at least (1) the way we define them as pleasure and (2) in the biological way that the sensation registers within our brains. What I mean there is, and I am not up on modern terminology, is that whatever the electro-chemical process is by which or minds recognize pleasure, that electro-chemical process likely functions in the same way for all pleasures. So in that sense the way in which we perceive pleasures internally likely IS pretty much the same for all pleasures. Is *that* what Epicurus was talking about?
How do you parse his calling "practical wisdom" as the "greatest good"
I could definitely see this observation as part of the whole list of examples we are assembling that indicate that Epicurus was challenging conventional non-Epicurean notions of the greatest good.
It seems possible that he was not just in contrasting Pleasure vs Virtue vs Piety as concepts, but emphasizing that what's important (practical wisdom) is much more a moment to moment process than some kind of state that falls under normal "greatest good" terms.
In regard to "the same thing"....
When i was editing the podcast this afternoon I became pretty dissatisfied with some of my formulations on "the same thing." I know that we can talk in categories and hierarchies as well, and that pleasure could be in the category of good or virtue, or virtue in the category of pleasure or good, or whatever, so I don't mean to obsess over whether pleasure and virtue and good are entirely the same thing in every respect.
But if they are not the same thing in every respect, but they share something, then we need to be clear about what it is they share, and what that thing is, and describe that thing in a way that makes clear that it isn't either a "Platonic ideal" or an "essence" in Arisotelian terms.
So to get back to sex and filing fingernails, they certainly are not the same thing in every respect, and what they share in common is probably describable only as "a feeling of pleasure." However does that answer whether there are two pleasures, or is it more proper to say two activities that "bring a feeling of pleasure." Is the "feeling" part of those two things really exactly the same though? We might call both feelings pleasure, but I have a hard time believing that both things are identical in every respect. They seem to me to differ at least in intensity, and maybe even in time or other qualities.
This is that vexing "one and many" issue, or "universals" issue. I am not ever sure that we are clear on what Epicurus' position was on whether "universals" exist, or whether he held that there are only discrete experiences which we choose to call by the same names.
I tend to think that Epicurus did not believe in "universals" as having any kind of independent existence apart of the atoms and void involved, so when we start talking about something as High-level (or so it appears to me) as "good" then we really need to understand what it is that unifies "things that are good."
Plato and Aristotle clearly had views of what makes something "good" that differ dramatically from Epicurus, and on their framework it made perfect senses that there are ideals or essences that unify all "Goods" into the category of "good."
But does it make sense to say that Epicurus held anything to be good at all unless it is directly associated with bringing pleasure or avoiding pain? Is frances wright correct that we (speaking as Epicureans to Epicureans) can boil all this down to very simple statements that there is nothing good but pleasure, and nothing bad (or evil) except pain?
I'm probably not advancing the ball in this post but I wanted to note that I realize that there are different perspectives in looking at things, and just because two things like virtue and pleasure cannot be dissasociated from each other, which seems to be the point of PD5, does not mean that they are themselves identical. (Or at least I don't think at this moment that it does!)
That was in The Swerve? How in the world did I miss that.... Thank you!
Nate thanks for that info! If anyone has not read the article by Nikolsky on the kinetic katastematic distinction, this would be a good time.
The premise of that article, which I believe is persuasively argued, is that later writers were forcing Epicurus improperly into their own paradigms, and that seeing this error explains much confusion.
It is easy to argue that that is what is going on here - that Cicero and later writers through today are insisting on viewing Epicurus through the paradigms of hostile and incompatible philosophic frameworks, and that this leads to major errors.
Remember too that in addition to Nikolsky that probably the longest and most detailed work on the topic, The Greeks on Pleasure by Gosling and Taylor, reaches much the same conclusion and was the foundation for Nikoloskys conclusions.
Finally I have got the latest Lucretius Today posted and anyone who has braved the length of this thread so far will want to catch it at some point. It doesn't solve any of the issues raised here but might articulate them differently. I wonder how many ways I contradicted myself between there and here after questioning from Don! All he had to have done was appeared with us on the podcast and we'd have cleared all this up last weekend!
Episode 109 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. In this week's episode we discuss the Epicurean View of Friendship:
Editing is finally coming along. One of the highlights of this episode is Martin taking Torquatus to task for his citation to Theseus and Orestes!
Is there a goal other than pleasure that you would suggest?
Not ME! But there are a lots of other philosophers who would beg to differ, and they insist on arguing on "logic" grounds for other goals.
That's Epicurus's answer, as I see it, to the question of "what is that to which everything else points?
My answer to that part Don would be that it is not clear to me AT ALL that in an atomistic universe as we understand it to be, that there IS or SHOULD be something "at which everything else points." We *don't* think that in regard to the movement of the atoms through the void, so why should at some other point there be a single goal?
That is a *huge* presumption for the Platonists et al to be making -- that there is a "single good" that makes sense to everyone.
What I am suggesting is that if you come at the world through religion, then you stipulate that "god" sets the terms. But religion isn't the only way, and from the Pythagoreans and their numerology on through to Plato and his world of ideal forms, there is a "logic-based" approach through which you can allegedly conclude that there is a single good.
I'm suggesting that Epicurus rejected *both* approaches.
In religion, it's pretty simple to say "You're wrong because there is no god."
But in "logic-based approaches" it's not so simple to understand what they even are saying, must lest decode and refute it.
They are postulating things in their formulas and their syllogisms that have to be questioned lest you be tricked. Is it really self-evident that it makes sense to talk of a single highest good? That's pretty much the question we're debating. If we're all in good faith about the basic fundamentals that there's no supernatural realm then we can presume that no one is trying to pull anything over on us, and we can talk about pleasure being "good." But while we agree on what pleasure is (a feeling) no one has ever defined explicitly what "good" is, and so you get packed into that word various presumptions which are at least potentially at odds with Epicurus. Among them are:
Can something be "good" without it being directly attached to pleasure and pain? The world seems to shout "yes" but I am not sure Epicurus would agree.
Are there in fact then many "goods"?
If so, what makes something good? We say pleasure, but the rest of the world shouts that it's more than that.
We pretty much agree I think that there are many pleasures, but they are unified to an extent because our feeling tells us they are pleasures. But all those many pleasures aren't identical to each other in every respect. Sex is not the same as filing your fingernails.
Are all pleasures equally pleasing? Are all goods equally good? If they are not equal and identical in every respect, can they be ranked?
Is there an absolute ranking to which all can refer, or is it purely personal how to rank them?
All these questions tend to get hidden if we jump to "pleasure is the greatest good" and think that ends the process.
Those are questions enough, but I seem to recall (and I bet someone can remind us) that Plato traps some of his interlocutors in his dialogues by talking about "cookery."
As I understand it (and I may be grossly wrong) he asks questions like we are discussing now, and he asks "How do you know which pleasure (or good) is the greatest?
And he ends up suggesting that the only way we can know which good is the greatest is through WISDOM.
As a result, you end up concluding that if you have to have wisdom in order to know what is the greatest good. Thus by that reasoning it is wisdom itself, and not any other good that's in the competition, that therefore must be considered to be the greatest good.
(And that's the analogy to "cookery" -- the cook must know how to combine the elements in order to produce the best result in the food that is eventually to be served.)
I am concerned that that what I am arguing is going to sound like "nominalism" -- which I understand to mean that words have absolutely no meaning except what we give them, with the presumption that everything is totally relative in life and no certainty is possible in anything. I don't mean to be arguing that. But to a certain degree it is true that words are just symbols that we assign in our human brains, and that process of assembling symbols seems to me to be the "opinion" part of the thought process, which Epicurus held is preceded (and guided or tested by) the three canonical faculties, including pleasure and pain. So ultimately I think Epicurus was stressing that the feeling of pleasure is the only ultimate guide, but that as soon as we translate any of this into "opinions" we have to be on the lookout for errors.
So to repeat something I've asserted already, I think we are always on firm ground when we talk about the feeling of pleasure as being the guide of life. But when we talk about happiness or "good and evil" and other higher-level concepts, it looks to me like Epicurus was saying something like "Yes use those words because you have to, but be careful how you use them and be careful what you're admitting when you use them."
I want us to at least get to the point where we can clearly articulate the issues involved. We're getting closer, but I am not sure we are quite there yet. However I think we will get there.
One way to make progress would be if we were all clear on what Epicurus was warning about in his "don't walk about uselessly talking about the good" statement, and also what Torquatus is talking about when he said that Epicurus didn't hold that logical argument was necessary to establish that pleasure is desirable. We ought to at least be able to agree that he was warning about *something* and be able to articulate what he was warning about.
I am working to try to catch up on editing this week's podcast and I realize I am doing everyone a disservice by not posting it before we got so far into this conversation. Not that we solved anything in the podcast, but I for one have probably been all over the board between here and in the podcast in trying to focus in on these issues. Will get it up hopefully later today.
I don't know that what Don and i are saying is really that different. The word "pleasure" is just like any other word - it is a placeholder for innumerable numbers of individual pleasures which we have to decide to choose or avoid. It is only one among several starting points for action, which is what I mean as "answering the philosophical question."
Obviously it's tremendously important to do that properly, because the major alternatives are "virtue," "piety," and "logic" (maybe I would add "nothingness" if we want to include certain other viewpoints). And yes i agree that answering that question is tremendously important so as not to associate with the wrong people and so as to know how to answer the question when it comes up. Identifying the greatest good solves those problems for us. It tells us to which school we should belong. And of course that is tremendously important.
But we still arrive at the same point once we identify "Pleasure is the Greatest Good:" because the daily question that has to be answered moment by moment is "What next?"
My view as to why Don and I seem to be dancing around but not appearing to agree is that we don't at this point have the same attitude toward the "role of logic'" question. I think Epicurus considered the Platonic / Aristotelian assertions of "logic' to be equally as deadly as the arbitrary assertions of religions, and that he was arguing against both with similar intensity. Even though Plato and Aristotle did believe in their gods, their error was not primarily one of religion - it was the way they were applying their logic. Therefore i think Epicurus saw TWO major enemies of right thinking, religion and improper use of logic, and what I am trying to do is to bring out that side of what he was attacking and what he was saying.
Just as with "gods' and "all sensations are true" and the subtleties of "absence of pain" (and probably more terms if I thought about it longer) I think that "pleasure" and "greatest good' have to be parsed for their deeper meaning and not taken at face value. Saying "pleasure is the greatest good" in his time was filled with implications that need to be brought and, rather than treated as if that formulation answers every question.
To repeat Wright, in a passage where I think she was right in seeing this in Epicurus:
"In the schools you have hitherto frequented,” she continued, addressing the youth, “certain images of virtue, vice, truth, knowledge, are presented to the imagination, and these abstract qualities, or we may call them, figurative beings, are made at once the objects of speculation and adoration. A law is laid down, and the feelings and opinions of men are predicated upon it; a theory is built, and all animate and inanimate nature is made to speak in its support; an hypothesis is advanced, and all the mysteries of nature are treated as explained."
And I don't consider this to be a "fight' in any way between me and Don but an extremely helpful way to get at some issues that I am not sure I previously recognized.
In the past I was criticized (not here) by harping too much on pleasure, and I hope to always continue to be criticized for that because I think that "pleasure" is the ultimate answer to these questions. But going into it as deeply as we are doing helps us understand (i think) where Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were wrong and have to be attacked.
They weren't just wrong because they attacked Pleasure, they were wrong in their reasons for attacking it, which involved not just religion but their logic and/or their implications as to their logical analysis of "The Good." They didn't base their attack on Pleasure as "I attack it because Zeus told me so." They based their attack on Pleasure on a logical framework which Epicurus found to be in error.
Godfrey my reading is the answer to your question is yes. These programs like the zettlekasten system Seem to revolve around putting information in discrete notes with tags and an indexing system that lets you combine them in different ways.
Both obsidian and logseq are tools which index and make the linking easier.
The latest fad (which I think is going to last) is that these programs avoid complicated proprietary formatting like Microsoft Word uses and stick to very simple formation using asterisks and pound signs and underline characters and similar, which makes them readable by the human eye without a lot of computer code. That's what "markdown" is.
Libre office files are in Word or a type of XML format and it's my understanding that obsidian can read them, but can't manipulate them optimally like markdown.
But libre office and make other utilities can easily convert or export them to markdown if desired.
I now have most of the key Epicurean texts in markdown and I need to zip them up and upload that somewhere so that people can use them in either logseq or obsidian. Of the two I am finding obsidian more helpful for this.
In my Observation logseq is more of an outlining program useful for generating new content, and obsidian is lending itself to organizing lots and lots of large files and searching through them.
Wow Don thanks for the lengthy summary.
Maybe I am jumping to a conclusion too early but it does seem to me that the ultimate issue is still in the area of "What was Epicurus own opinion of discussing an 'ultimate good?'.
He clearly did use similar terms himself. So no one can argue that he did not talk about the subject.
The issue is more a question of what limitations or caveats did he imply in his usage that differs from the other philosophers.
It seems to me that he differs not only in selecting his ultimate good ("pleasure") but in warning against placing too much weight on the discussion.
Like one of the Frances Wright quotes above, it seems to me that the other philosophers we're implying a "magic" to the discussion in that once the proved logically there was an ultimate good, they thought they had actually accomplished something.
I read Epicurus as saying that the exercise really accomplishes very little other than answering the philosophic question that the others insist on asking. Once you have identified "pleasure" as the answer to the logic game, you're still at the very beginning of your analysis of how to act in a particular situation.
Which tells me that Epicurus was much less interested in the application of the logic game than he was in identifying that there is no supernatural god, and no life after death, and no logical magic that answers the truly practical question of how to live. What we are left with is "feeling" in the same generic sense as is any other living animal. Our reasoning ability lets us pursue far more elaborate means of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain than other animals, but we're ultimately all one big family of life doing the best we can with the time we have.
