Posts by Cassius

This is very useful for explaining the Epicurean position (in opposition to the Skeptics) that concepts such as "fair" and "foul" and "larger" and "smaller" are no less real than gold or silver, even though (the Skeptics argue) that the former are unreal because they are perceived and interpreted differently by everyone, while the latter are real because they are perceived the same everywhere.

Quote from Sedley Translation of Philodemus' "On Irrational Contempt" - From Epicurean Theories of Knowledge from Hermarchus to Lucretius And Philodemus

Or do you think, on the basis of the foregoing argument, that someone would not suffer the troubles which I mention but rather would make it convincing that fair, foul and all other matters of belief are falsely believed in, just because unlike gold and similar things they are not the same everywhere? After all, it must stare everybody in the face that bigger and smaller are also not perceived the same everywhere and in relation to all magnitudes […] So too with heavier and lighter. And the same applies also to other powers, without exception. For neither are the same things healthy for everybody, nor nourishing or fatal, nor the opposites of these, but the very same things are healthy and nourishing for some yet have the opposite effect on others. Therefore either they must say that these too are false –things whose effects are plain for everyone to see –or else they must refuse to brazen it out and to battle against what is evident, and not abolish fair and foul as falsely believed in either, just because unlike stone and gold they are not the same for everybody […] Relative predicates do not have the same status as things said not relatively but in accordance with something’s own nature. Nor does the one kind truly exist but the other not. So to expect them to have the same attributes, or the one kind to exist but the other not, is naive. And there is no difference between starting from these and eliminating those and starting from those and eliminating these: it would be similarly naive to think that since the bigger and heavier and whiter and sweeter are bigger than one thing but smaller than another, and heavier, and likewise with the other attributes, and since nothing has the same one of these attributes per se as it has in relation to something else, in the same way stone, gold and the like ought also, if they truly existed, likewise to be gold in relation to one person while having the opposite nature in relation to another; and to say that, since that is not the case, these things are falsely believed in and do not really exist (On irrational contempt,XXIII, 26-XXVI, 23). (Quoted from Sedley - Epicurean Theories of Knowledge from Hermarchus to Lucretius And Philodemus)

Sedley comments about this:

Quote

The opponents can be seen to draw heavily on Platonic dialectical materials in order to launch their attack on the reality of values, in particular in their contrast between the universally agreed determinate nature exhibited by minerals and the cultural relativity of values. As one might expect of the New Academy, this sceptical argument borrows its materials freely from the text of Plato (Phaedrus, 263a, cf. also Euthyphro, 7b-d, Theaetetus, 172b). More remarkable is how Polystratus, in his reply,appears himself to draw inspiration from Plato –a strategy with all the more ad hominem force when directed against Plato’s own self-declared successors. Plato had indeed never intended by this contrast between minerals and values to impugn the reality of the latter, any more than he had meant to infer from the relativity of large(r) and small(er) to their unreality. On the contrary, at Sophist 255c he had presented an exhaustive division of beings(ὄντα) into absolute and relative, a bicategorial scheme which became formal Academic doctrine under his second successor Xenocrates (F15 Isnardi Parente2).

...

... He resourcefully points out that the mere existence of an ontological difference between the two categories does not entail that one or other of them will fall short of reality. Anyone who thinks otherwise, he ingeniously adds, could as easily arguethat, since such relative predicates as beneficial and harmful manifestly arepart of the structure of reality, it must be the non-relative items such as minerals that are unreal!

Thank you Don! Here's a direct link to the full issue - "Hellenistic Theories of Knowledge" which has both articles:

View of 2018: Special Issue - Hellenistic Theories of Knowledge

Unfortunately for us the Verde article is in Italian, but it has this English abstract:

ABSTRACT:The main goals of this article are, on the one hand, to show the peculiar features of the Epicurean view of sense-perception (aisthesis), the first criterion of truth of Epicurus’ canonic; and, on the other hand, to critically discuss a recent contribution by Alexander Bown (“Epicurus on Truth and Falsehood”, Phronesis, 61 (4), 2016, p. 463-503), which deals with Epicurus’ double notion of truth (i.e. the truth of sense-perceptions/aistheseisand the truth of opinions/hypolepseis). Besides Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophersand Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus, columns LXXII-LXXIII of PHerc. 1012 (including a work by the Epicurean philosopher Demetrius Lacon) and a passage from Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Logicians(M, VIII,9) will be examined in order to explain the meaning of truth linked by Epicurus to perceptible objects (aistheta)

Thank you Tau Phi! If you (or anyone) finds a like to the work by "Verde" referenced in the first sentence of that paper please post it too. So far I find only a work that is later than Sedley's article and therefore cannot be the right link. These look like very useful articles.

It's possible that we ought to set up a separate thread on "Ways To Resist AI" or maybe the entire subject is better for other sites to cover and we leave "ways to resist AI" alone entirely beyond discussing how we deal with it here. [EDIT: That new thread is now set up and you're reading within it now.]

However until the answer to that question becomes clear, here's a recent article along the same lines as how to get past the google search problem. This one is above browsers that don't incorporate AI:

Quote

Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human

Browsing should push you to explore, chase ideas, and make your own decisions. It should light up your brain. Vivaldi is taking a stand. We choose humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship.

...

The field of machine learning in general remains an exciting one and may lead to features that are actually useful.

But right now, there is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.

Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.

We will stay true to our identity, giving users control and enabling people to use the browser in combination with whatever tools they want to use. Our focus is on building a powerful personal and private browser for you to explore the web on your own terms. We will not turn exploration into passive consumption.

Display More

Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human | Vivaldi Browser

Browsing should push you to explore, chase ideas, and make your own decisions. It should light up your brain. Vivaldi is taking a stand. We choose humans over…

vivaldi.com

This list might grow so large as to be useless, or it might turn out to be helpful to have a list of specific references which attest to Epicurus giving examples of pleasures that he himself endorsed. I'll start a list based on section XIX and XX of Part 3 of Tusculan Disputations. Of course even these specific endorsements are contextual, in that at times we will choose the bad over the good when the choice leads to greater pleasure when all consequences are considered. But we so often speak of pleasure just in the generic sense, or as abstract labels such as absence of pain, that it might be helpful to have a list for finding description of specific activities. I'll include here references to Lucretius or Diogenes of Oinoanda, and maybe Philodemus, but the purpose here is not to list all possible pleasures but to accumulate references from the authoritative texts.

1. Taste
   1. Food and Drink (presumably) (TD3,19-20)
2. Hearing
   1. Music (TD3,19-20)
3. Sight
   1. "Abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye." (TD3,19-20)
   2. "those forms which affect the eyes with pleasure" (TD3,19-20)
4. Touch
   1. Embraces (TD3,19-20)
   2. Sports (TD3,19-20)
5. Multiple Senses
   1. Agreeable Motions (TD3,19-20)
   2. "those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses" (TD3,19-20)
6. Pleasures of the Mind
   1. "I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain." (TD3,19-20)
   2. Confidence of continued pleasure ("and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain" (TD3,19-20)
   3. "It is sweet to see from what evils you are yourself exempt."

Quote

II-XX.¶

... Why, Epicurus, do we use any evasions, and not allow in our own words the same feeling to be pleasure, which you are used to boast of with such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what you say in that book which contains all the doctrine of your school; for I will perform, on this occasion, the office of a translator, lest any one should imagine that I am inventing anything. Thus you speak: “Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by what is good; for I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain.” And these are his exact words, so that any one may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted. Then he speaks thus, a little lower down: “I have often inquired of those who have been called wise men, what would be the remaining good if they should exclude from consideration all these pleasures, unless they meant to give us nothing but words? I could never learn anything from them; and unless they choose that all virtue and wisdom should vanish and come to nothing, they must say with me, that the only road to happiness lies through those pleasures which I mentioned above.” What follows is much the same, and his whole book on the chief good everywhere abounds with the same opinions.

...

II-XX.¶

It may be said, What! do you imagine Epicurus really meant this, and that he maintained anything so sensual? Indeed I do not imagine so, for I am sensible that he has uttered many excellent things and sentiments, and delivered maxims of great weight. Therefore, as I said before, I am speaking of his acuteness, not of his morals. Though he should hold those pleasures in contempt, which he just now commended, yet I must remember wherein he places the chief good. For he was not contented with barely saying this, but he has explained what he meant: he says, that taste, and embraces, and sports, and music, and those forms which affect the eyes with pleasure, are the chief good. Have I invented this? have I misrepresented him?

Quote from Lucretius Book 2:1

It is sweet, when on the great sea the winds trouble its waters, to behold from land another’s deep distress; not that it is a pleasure and delight that any should be afflicted, but because it is sweet to see from what evils you are yourself exempt. It is sweet also to look upon the mighty struggles of war arrayed along the plains without sharing yourself in the danger. But nothing is more welcome than to hold the lofty and serene positions well fortified by the learning of the wise, from which you may look down upon others and see them wandering all abroad and going astray in their search for the path of life, see the contest among them of intellect, the rivalry of birth, the striving night and day with surpassing effort to struggle up to the summit of power and be masters of the world.

In Chapter 7 Frances Wright has Epicurus say this:

Quote

Zeno, in his present speech, has rested much of the truth of his system on its expediency; I, therefore, shall do the same by mine. The door to my gardens is ever open, and my books are in the hands of the public; to enter, therefore, here, into the detail or the expounding of the principles of my philosophy, were equally out of place and out of season. ‘Tell us not that that is right which admits of evil construction; that that is virtue which leaves an open gate to vice.’

In a generic sense Wright could have picked up this idea for her argument from any number of places in Cicero or Plutarch. As we are currently as of this writing dealing with Tusculan Disputations, Part 3, Section XX, it seems to me that some of the text here is particularly apt to have generated the need to frame the argument the way Wright did.

This section specifically comes to mind, with Cicero speaking against Epicurus:

Quote

The last mistake he falls into in common with some others; which is this: that as virtue is the most desirable thing, and as philosophy has been investigated with a view to the attainment of it, he has separated the chief good from virtue. But he commends virtue, and that frequently; and indeed C. Gracchus, when he had made the largest distributions of the public money, and had exhausted the treasury, nevertheless spoke much of defending the treasury. What signifies what men say, when we see what they do? That Piso, who was surnamed Frugal, had always harangued against the law that was proposed for distributing the corn, but when it had passed, though a man of consular dignity, he came to receive the corn. Gracchus observed Piso standing in the court, and asked him, in the hearing of the people, how it was consistent for him to take corn by a law he had himself opposed? “It was,” said he, “against your distributing my goods to every man as you thought proper; but, as you do so, I claim my share.” Did not this grave and wise man sufficiently show that the public revenue was dissipated by the Sempronian law? Read Gracchus's speeches, and you will pronounce him the advocate of the treasury. Epicurus denies that any one can live pleasantly who does not lead a life of virtue; he denies that fortune has any power over a wise man: he prefers a spare diet to great plenty, and maintains that a wise man is always happy. All these things become a philosopher to say, but they are not consistent with pleasure. But the reply is, that he doth not mean that pleasure: let him mean any pleasure, it must be such a one as makes no part of virtue. But suppose we are mistaken as to his pleasure, are we so too as to his pain? I maintain therefore the impropriety of language which that man uses when talking of virtue, who would measure every great evil by pain.

Yes Don, I don't think the article came to Martin's attention because it was the best science available or particularly well written. It's more of a data point give a current generic summary of arguments we seen thrown around by average people (to the extent average people get around to discussing the issue). You're certainly right about how easy it is to publish things nowadays.

Quote

Quote But this says nothing about the origins of such life, either here or elsewhere. The salient question: is it physically or chemically possible for living, self-replicating organisms with internal metabolic processes to come about through entirely naturalistic processes unaided by intelligence? The evidence seems to say, resoundingly, No.

Quote from Joshua

The evidence is inconclusive. To say that the evidence is inconclusive is not at all the same as saying that the evidence suggests (resoundingly or otherwise) that abiogenesis is impossible.

My slight twist on Joshua's point would be to differ on whether the evidence is inconclusive. I think Epicurus would likely say that the evidence IS conclusive.

We do see the existence of living self-replicating organizes with internal metabolic processes in existence, and the examples include us as human beings.

We (Epicurus) also holds that the eternality of the universe as (1) uncreated by an intelligence force, and (2) infinite in extent, to be rendering impossible that there is an intelligent force before or over or outside the universe. Our observations and the logic supporting these conclusions are "conclusive evidence" in the only real meaning that that term can have.

There are no gods or supernatural forces or higher realms to overrule these conclusions, and absolutely no reason to believe that any "new evidence" will be discovered to overturn that conclusion. Speculation without evidence is not admissible in most court, nor should it be admissible in a rational discussion of these issues.

And if someone wants to appeal to irrationality, then that's why there are wars and all sorts of lesser levels of expressing disagreement. But while wars and the like do exist, if you're going to approach life as an Epicurean, you aren't going to be considering irrational and groundless speculation about important issues.

So I would not admit that the existence of life without the supervision of intelligent design is an open or undetermined question or that the evidence is inconclusive. We have all the evidence we need to conclude firmly that life is a product of natural processes and did not originate from a supernatural intelligence. And we have absolutely no evidence on which to base a supposition that the gods of the supernaturalists or the platonists or anyone else are going to appear tomorrow or at any time in the future.

Hi Scott:

To me, these discussions are almost as interesting for what they say about the terminology as what they say about the science. What does "definitive answer" or "certainty" really mean? In order to say that anything is definitive do we have to stand in the shoes of a Plato in contact with ideal forms, or a supernatural god who can claim "I know the real answer because I created everything"?

I think the answer to both those is of course "no, we can't and shouldn't and don't claim such levels of authority." And in fact anyone who does claim them is a sham and a fraud.

On the other hand what we can talk in terms of is "confidence" give the observations that re possible and our logical reasoning based on those observations.

And what it appears that Epicurus has done is to take as starting point that the universe is eternal in time (nothing can come from nothing) and infinite in size (there can logically be no ultimate boundaries, and combine those with the observation that what we see here on earth is that nature never makes a single thing of kind, and that what happens here we would logically expect to happen whereever conditions are similar.

And from those and similar observations it's a hop skip and jump to conclude that there is really "nothing new under the sun," and that life as a category (not the same living things, but "life") has always existed throughout the universe.

At least for me, once I discard the fake standards of certainty suggested by religion and Platonists, I have no problem accepting Epicurus, line of reasoning, so I personally am as confident that "life" has always existed in the universe just as all other natural processes have existed, and will exist, forever.

Of course my confidence and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee, but I think an approach similar to this is inherent once the problem of skepticism is identified for the self-contradictory nonsense that it really is. Sure there are lots of specifics that we don't have enough evidence to be confident about. Has life existed on Mars subsequent to its formation? That's a specific question where we can do nothing but weigh and balance the evidence as it changes, but the "universal" or "cosmic" scale is different, and generalizations about infinity and eternality are as logically compelled as just about anything can be -- at least enough that it is more rational to be confident that life does exist elsewhere than earth than it is to say that we are unique in the universe.

I would argue that saying "I don't know, maybe life only exists here" is as good as laying down to be walked over by the religionists or Platonists on every other issue as well. So the issues of eternality and infinity of both the universe and of life within it seems about as good a place to start in standing up to those guys as anywhere else. And again regardless of what I think, that seems to have been Epicurus own approach.

I see there is at least one video of a lecture by Professor Nikolsky:

Tau Phi has updated this excellent PDF of Diogenes Laertius Book X.

Version 1.0.3 has the following changes:

- fixed the alignment in sections 96/97 for Greek text (thanks to Bryan for noticing the misalignment)
- added Public Domain Mark Button at the very end of the document for clarity regarding the license

Martin has brought the attached article to my attention. First let me state the usual caveats: no endorsement of the author or the author's views (here or elsewhere) is expressed or implied by posting this here. At first glance, however, it does appear that the article does a good job of bringing up competing explanations for the existence of life, although it arrives at answers that disagree with Epicurus. For those who find this subject interesting (as do I) I am posting this as another exercise in our ability to understand and respond to issues regarding the existence of life both here on earth and elsewhere in the universe.

Fantasizing About the Origin of Life

A hundred years of materialist science comes up empty.

stevenyates.substack.com

We had a very good followup discussion on this in today's zoom meeting.

Clearly people are coming at this from different angles, all of which are legitimate. The reaction of some, however, was "I thought this problem was settled," or to the effect that they did not understand why the question exists.

That was the intent of my followup to Raphael's post. In addition to the on-the-surface question of whether pleasures differ from one another, and in what contexts (if any) it is good Epicureanism to consider that some pleasures are different, better, or more valuable than others, I see a very practical application of this question being as follows:

Cicero, Plutarch, and many critics, including some "friends," say that Epicurean philosophy leads to the conclusion that the best life for everyone is the equivalent of "playing pushpins" - with pushpins being understood to mean any very simple, very unambitious, very safe, past-time. Is this a correct conclusion? If not, why not? {I trust it is clear that my own answer is a very firm "NO", but just in case lurkers read this in isolation I want the record to be clear.}

And while "Epicurus didn't do that" may be part of the answer, the full answer needs to be clear, concise, persuasive, and compelling, both philosophically and practically.

We'll return to this next Sunday and can continue in the meantime here on the forum.

Thanks for that post Raphael!

My first comment is to think about how someone outside our Epicurean analysis community might react to reading that.

I can imagine an outsider saying: "You mean to tell me he needs to write an essay to explain that the pleasure of artwork is different from the pleasure of eating, and that the pleasures of a great physicist have more impact on wider human affairs than a lion eating lamb? What's up with those guys that they have to write walls of text to say what everyone already understands?"

That's of course not to be critical of the post, but to say that there are issues going on behind the fact that we are having this discussion that need to be made front and center.

My outsider might say to me: "Is someone arguing that here is no difference between creating art or exploring physics and eating a steak? is someone arguing that a lion eating a lamb has the same impact on world affairs as a discovery in nuclear fusion? No one i know thinks that way, certainly Epicurus doesn't either, does he?"

And I would say to my outsider that therein hangs the tale. Epicurus doesn't say that the pleasures of eating and the pleasures of art and discovery are the same, or that one doesn't have more impact on world affairs or produce a greater impact on us individually.

And my outsider would say, "Then what is the problem?"

In another post we've got the full version of this article, but this brief section is an excellent summary of the position that the kinetic / katatastematic distinction was heavily influenced by the skeptic Carneades:

Quote

— From the comments on Cicero's treatise, you came up with an article about different types of pleasure in Epicurus. How adequately did the Roman orator translate his thoughts?

— In the treatise "On the Limits of Good and Evil" Cicero's dependence on academic doxography is obvious. One of the main sources for him, following which he expounded the teachings of the Hellenistic schools, was Antiochus of Ascalon, a philosopher of the Platonic school. In the era preceding Antiochus, the Platonists were skeptics, they denied the possibility of an exact and unambiguous establishment of truth, primarily engaged in discussions with other schools and the refutation of their philosophical systems. An important figure in this skeptical period was Carneades. In order to analyze and criticize the ethical teachings of different philosophical schools, he came up with a way to classify them. His classification was based on the principle of thesis - antithesis - synthesis. Carneades contrasted the teachings of two schools on a particular subject, for example, on the highest good, as a thesis and antithesis. He said, for example, that the Stoics see it only in the soul, and the Epicureans - only in the body.

Applying the dichotomy of soul and body to these schools distorts our understanding of them.

Of course, both the Stoics and the Epicureans used the concept of the soul, but since they were materialists and monists, the very idea of the soul played a completely different role for them than for the Platonists. Carneades wrote that man is a combination of soul and body, and therefore the highest good must be sought in the combination of the good of the soul and the good of the body. This synthesis of thesis and antithesis was presented by the followers of Carneades as a plausible, most probable judgment, while still refraining from asserting the truth.

Antiochus of Ascalon, in a sense, makes a revolution within the academic school, becoming a dogmatist, that is, rejecting a skeptical attitude towards the knowledge of truth. But as dogma he affirms all the same judgments that his predecessors expressed as plausible and used in criticizing their opponents. That is, for Carneades, the judgment that the highest good should be seen in the good of the soul and body together is needed only to refute the insufficient teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans, and Antiochus turns this judgment into a dogma. He traces this dogma back to the "ancients", to Plato, his very first academic students, to Aristotle and the Peripatetics, believing that he is restoring their true teaching.

In my article "Pleasure in Epicurus" I suggested that Epicurus's opposition between dynamic and static pleasures, which we find neither in Lucretius nor in Plutarch, has nothing to do with Epicurean teaching. This opposition is quite absurd. It is assumed that for Epicurus the highest form of pleasure was simply the absence of pain - static pleasure. The other type of pleasure, which consisted of movement, or kinetic, he supposedly considered inferior.

At the same time, Cicero does not give a clear definition of kinetic pleasure: in some passages, movement refers to a change in the state of the organism (for example, when we eat or drink), in others - when something affects our organs of perception (say, listening to music). These two types of movement are difficult to connect with each other.

Epicurus did indeed write that the absence of suffering is pleasure, and even the highest pleasure, but he by no means rejected what Cicero called kinetic pleasures.

On the contrary, in some places he even extols them: in his suicide letter he says that when he had terrible pains associated with urolithiasis, memories of meetings and conversations with friends helped him overcome these pains. If we use Cicero's dichotomy, then such pleasure can be called kinetic, and it turns out to be stronger than the absence of "static pleasure".

These inconsistencies led me to turn to other authors who expound the Epicurean doctrine. As a result, I became convinced that the dichotomy of kinetic and static pleasure is found only in Cicero and in two other texts influenced by the same doxographic tradition: Diogenes Laërtius and Athenaeus.

What did Epicurus really mean when he called the absence of suffering the highest pleasure? He did not separate this state from the process of replenishing a deficiency in the body - he did not separate satiety from food. Epicurus simply wanted to say that the extent of our pleasure from food is determined by our satiety, and not by what exactly we eat. We will receive equal pleasure from ordinary bread and from luxurious dishes.

The limit of pleasure is satiety - this was the teaching of Epicurus. He disputed Plato's thesis, according to which we receive pleasure only in the process of, for example, eating, and therefore, if pleasure is a good, then a person striving for pleasure must constantly provoke hunger in himself.

Epicurus saw that satiety is also a part of pleasure, and that pleasure is not limited to the process of replenishment.

However, academic doxography aimed to contrast the Epicureans with another hedonistic school, the Cyrenaics. And the academics applied here the very same classification principle I mentioned: thesis - antithesis. They attributed to the Cyrenaics, who strove for momentary pleasures, a devotion to kinetic pleasure, and called Epicurus an admirer of static pleasure. In the very opposition of movement and rest, of course, a Platonic dichotomy is revealed, which is not at all characteristic of either the Epicureans or the Cyrenaics. In fact, everything was much simpler. Epicurus did not preach insensitivity, not static pleasure in rest. The main thing he wanted to say is that we can experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest joy from the smallest things, therefore pleasure is available to everyone.

Display More

Oh wow that article has some very pithy analysis of his views on Epicurus I did not see at first. I'll create a separate post on that. It's very interesting to see a recent reflection by him on that thesis. He's had years to think about it and how to express it concisely.

Thank you again NKULINKA!

This is copy of the English translated version of the original which is in the Russian language magazine "Knife" of an interview with Boris Nikolsky, author the article "Epicurus On Pleasure." Thanks to nkulinka for reporting this to us!

“We have remained the same people as the ancient Greeks”: interview with classical philologist Boris Nikolsky on the modernity of ancient tragedy and philosophy

Boris Nikolsky is a Doctor of Philology and a classical philologist. Boris Mikhailovich's main research interest is ancient Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, whom he has been studying for many years. In addition, his interests include philosophical topics, including Stoic logic and grammar, the problem of pleasure in Epicurus, and, more recently, the critical edition of medieval Armenian translations of Greek philosophers. Timofey Anufriev spoke with Boris Nikolsky about how his scientific career developed, why ancient Greek tragedy is close to modern people, and what are the prospects for classical philology in Russia.

Share24Repost

— How did you end up at the Philological Faculty? What influenced your choice?

— I got into the philological faculty primarily because my parents were philologists. At first, they did not want me to follow in their footsteps, and I myself did not intend to become a philologist. At school, I was more interested in mathematics, and my mindset can hardly be called humanitarian. However, in the ninth grade, I devoted so much time to mathematical studies that I eventually simply got tired of them, and I was drawn in the opposite direction — to philology, which my parents studied. At that time, I read a lot, and this choice seemed natural to me.

At first I enrolled in the Russian Philology department, but I lacked the feeling that I was learning a craft. Much of what we did there I could have done myself: just read books and think about them. There were only two subjects I really liked: Latin and Church Slavonic. So I decided to transfer to the Classics department, where they study dead languages.

I had no special interest in Antiquity itself at that time - at that time I knew almost nothing about ancient culture. I simply liked to study rare and complex, dead languages.

I really enjoyed Ancient Greek. Learning it is an intellectual challenge.

The morphology of the ancient Greek language, which is covered in the first year, at first seems chaotic and confusing, but then the structure of the language begins to emerge through this chaos, you understand that behind this chaos there is a clear structure, but in its historical development. At first, I approached ancient Greek from a linguistic or even mathematical point of view, until some of my teachers showed me the real charm of this language: we began to read authors in whom you could feel the intonation, rhythm, see witty linguistic devices.

But for quite a long time I was more interested in historical linguistics, which was the subject of my first term papers, rather than classical literature. In the end, however, the desire to read texts in Greek overcame everything else. So I began to study classical philology.

— Whom of your teachers can you remember, those you would like to tell us about?

— I studied linguistics under the guidance of the outstanding linguist Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin. He amazed me with the clarity of his thought, which was able to embrace the most complex and diverse material and find a clear structure in it. Then I moved from linguistics to classical philology, because I wanted to work with texts, not with lists of words.

My real acquaintance with the Greek language happened thanks to two teachers, who later became my closest friends - Olga Leonidovna Levinskaya (now Akhunova) and Nikolai Pavlovich Grintser. The first author whose texts we read together was Plato. It can be said that my love for the ancient Greek language arose precisely thanks to reading Plato. Although I am not a fan of his philosophy, reading him in Greek still gives me great pleasure. At the same time, my linguistic interests were quite strong, so at first I studied texts of grammatical content. My diploma was devoted to Greek grammarians, namely the linguistic thought of the Stoics - philosophers who largely created grammatical terminology.

Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to study with Nikolai Alekseevich Fedorov, who taught Latin brilliantly at the Department of Classical Philology at Moscow State University. But later we worked together on Cicero's text.

In addition to my teachers, I was greatly influenced by my senior colleague and friend Grigory Dashevsky. I met him later, when I was already working at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He taught me to read carefully, to see the author's thought in the smallest details of a work. And he showed me that ancient literature is not some special, completely separate elevated world, no, it tells us about ourselves and about our own lives.

— Do you consider yourself to belong to one of the traditions in classical philology, for example, to the Moscow tradition?

— In a sense, I am a member of the school of Yu. A. Shichalin, because he was Olga Levinskaya’s teacher. Perhaps, ultimately, my teachers’ interest in the subtleties of the meaning of words and particles goes back to him. From them, I also inherited an interest in the logical sequence of narration and text construction. This logic often escapes the attention of students — they spend all their energy on understanding the syntactic connections in a sentence, but do not try to discover what stands above the sentence and between the sentences.

— What interested you in Greek tragedy?

— At first, my perception of Greek tragedy was purely aesthetic. I have always liked dramatic dynamics, tension and relaxation in literature, as well as the architectonics of the whole, when the entire work is built around one main, central point. I began to read Greek tragedy in the original when I became a teacher. The first two works that impressed me most were Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hippolytus. Both of these texts have remarkable dynamics. In Agamemnon, the first part is static and long, permeated with tension from the expectation of disaster, suspense, and then it abruptly changes to an “explosion”, the murder of the king. Euripides’ Hippolytus also has its own dynamics — the rapid spread of news of Phaedra’s illness, similar to the spread of news of Chatsky’s madness in Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit.

At the same time, I felt that these two texts had a thematic integrity - significant words and images were repeated. But I did not immediately grasp the "point" to which these works were reduced; it remained a mystery to me, and I was fascinated by the attempt to resolve it.

At such moments you feel like a spectator of an ancient Greek theatre, watching a production and trying to make ends meet during the performance.

It was a little easier to “reconcile” them with Agamemnon, since many excellent works have been written about it, but comparatively few good works have been written about Euripides’ Hippolytus. So I began to study this text and Euripides in general, and did so for many years. I wanted to understand what the thematic center of this tragedy was. In the end, I think I managed to find it. I set out my understanding of this tragedy in the book Misery and Forgiveness in Euripides.

Read also

"There is not enough cosplay in my life, I would like more." Interview with Azer Babayev - the most stylish comic artist in Russia

"Reminding Scientists of Their Own History": Historian Lauren Graham on Soviet Science, the Lysenko Affair, and the Fate of Russian Scientists

— What can a modern person learn from Greek tragedy?

— First of all, almost every tragedy has universal human meanings. After all, we are the same people as the ancient Greeks were, and our culture comes from theirs. We can see this in the example of "Hippolytus". This tragedy contains a sequence of scenes, very similar to each other, in which a character makes a mistake and is blamed for it. But at the same time, in each scene, Euripides emphasizes the motives that push the characters to make mistakes, and these motives - ignorance, emotions and passions - were supposed to make the audience show indulgence towards the characters. In the last scene, which crowns the development of the theme of condemnation or indulgence, Hippolytus forgives his murderer, his own father. The main moral meaning of this tragedy is that people are very weak and easily make mistakes, and we must always take this into account and treat each other with tolerance. Already in the 5th century BC, such a meaning, very modern and close to us, was extremely relevant.

On the other hand, there is an aspect of tragedy that I discovered much later: when they were staged, they were politically topical. I came to this hypothesis against my will, because as a philologist, not a historian, I was inclined to read the text based only on itself. I wanted to see a work of literature as self-sufficient and autonomous. In the case of Hippolytus, I managed to see in the tragedy a timeless and universal meaning.

But when I began to study other tragedies in detail, it became clear that some works, although they have obvious structural integrity, their meaning does not become clear if you try to extract it from them alone.

In Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, the main theme is the transition from barbarism to civilization, and this is expressed in the cessation of family feuds and murders in the Atreid clan. The elimination of feuds and the transition from barbarism to civilization is accomplished through the help and intervention of Athena and Apollo. What universal meaning can lie behind this?

I then decided to look at the events that took place when the tragedy was staged, and discovered that it coincided with the end of the civil war in Argos, thanks to the help of Athens. After that, an alliance treaty was concluded between the cities. The assumption that the tragedy was timed to coincide with these events helps clarify the structure, which otherwise remains unclear. Thus, I came to the conclusion that the mythological plots of some tragedies served as political allegories and referred to specific historical events. Tragedies were not staged to be eternal.

Ultimately, we are faced with two ways of reading tragedy today. Either we can try to extract from tragedy a universal human meaning, which always exists in one form or another, but is not always the focus of the author's intention. Or we can relate tragedies to certain events that are happening now. The possibility of allegorical reading and applying the plot of a tragedy to what is happening around us exists, and a modern director could take advantage of this.

— There is a famous legend about the Greek tragedians: Aeschylus fought in the Battle of Marathon, Sophocles participated in it as a young standard-bearer, and Euripides was born in the year of this battle. What was the relationship between the "fathers of tragedy", how did their worldviews differ?

— I would combine Aeschylus and Euripides, despite all their differences. Yes, their styles are very different. Aeschylus thinks through every detail, every word. Euripides has many purely rhetorical passages and reasoning, he often changes register, moving from serious to comic. Nevertheless, both strive for semantic, thematic integrity of their works. Both construct their tragedy so that its parts are organic parts of the artistic whole.

Sophocles, in contrast, strives less for semantic integrity. Rather, he starts from some initial idea that enables the creation of dramatic emotions. In Oedipus Rex, such an idea was “ignorance,” and the entire work was built on the emotional development of this idea. His tragedies hold the viewer not with semantic content, but with emotional tension. This is why Sophocles is so beloved today, and loses less in translation.

— According to Aristotle, “Sophocles said that he represented people as they should be, and Euripides as they really are.” What innovation did Euripides bring to the genre of tragedy, in your opinion?

— Euripides was more concerned with depicting the world he lived in. But his difference from Aeschylus and Sophocles concerns not so much the subject matter of the tragedies as their aesthetics and style. This is evident in the behavior of his characters, their speeches and arguments. Even in metrics, he used an extremely free iambic to more accurately reproduce prose living speech.

The rhetoric in his tragedies is very close to the rhetoric of the sophists of his time.

He often builds even the structure of his tragedies on sophistic models, for example, "Helen". In the first half of the play we see deception, which becomes the cause of endless troubles, but in the middle of the play, deception suddenly becomes good and saving. This is undoubtedly a sophistic topos, presenting the same concept from two opposite sides: first, it is an obvious view (deception is bad and unjust), then a paradoxical one (deception is good and just). This is how the sophists, who were contemporaries of Euripides, built their reasoning. So in addition to classical models like Homer, Euripides drew no less inspiration from the living material of his time.

— Euripides is often accused of atheism, pointing to the unsightly images of the gods in his tragedies. Did he really try to dispel the aura of holiness around the Olympians?

— The immorality of the gods can, of course, be used as an atheistic argument. Sometimes the characters in Euripides' tragedies utter phrases like: "If the gods exist, then why do they allow this?" But these phrases come from the mouths of characters who do not understand the real will of the gods.

I am not sure that we can read Euripides' worldview from his texts. They were intended for a wide audience, and the attitude towards the world expressed in them should not have caused doubts among the audience. It is unlikely that Euripides would stage tragedies with atheistic content. Moreover, if we look at some plays, we will see that in them Euripides shows both divine power and the gods' favor towards people. Take, for example, the tragedy "Ion", at the beginning of which we doubt the morality of Apollo, who committed violence against Creusa and, as it seems to everyone, abandoned the child she gave birth to, but then Apollo is acquitted. In "Iphigenia in Tauris" Orestes constantly doubts whether Apollo's will was fair, who first forced him to kill his mother and then sent him to a distant inhospitable country, but then it turns out that everything happened as it should have been. I don't think an atheist playwright would create such tragedies.

On the other hand, at times Euripides does subject the gods to moral criticism.

In Hippolytus, the main culprit of all that has happened is Aphrodite. True, the goddess's guilt does not become an argument against her existence. On the contrary, Euripides points out to the viewer that she is incredibly strong and impossible to resist. The combination of strength and cruelty that we find in her image is the opposite of the combination of weakness and at the same time humanity that is characteristic of man. Something similar can be seen in Sophocles. For example, the goddess Athena in the prologue of Ajax is just as powerful, but in the same way her cruelty is contrasted with the humanity of Odysseus.

Read also

Plato and the New Foundations of Justice. Interview with the historian of philosophy Dmitry Bugay - about how to read the greatest philosopher of Antiquity

"A wolf cannot have an owner, but you can come to an agreement with him based on mutual love and respect." Biologists Yana and Alexey Murashov about life with wolves and the Romashka center, where they saved 10 thousand wild animals

— In his tragedies, Euripides reproduces religious cults, rituals and legends in detail. Where did he get such great knowledge of this? Could he have deliberately traveled around the country and studied this material or is there nothing unique in this for an educated person of his century?

- Yes, Euripides often connects the events of his tragedies with contemporary cults. But the cults he mentions are usually Attic. They were understandable to the Athenian public.

What seems to me much more interesting is the unexpected knowledge of the localities of the various regions. Barrett pointed this out in his commentary on Hippolytus. This tragedy describes with astonishing precision the details of the locality in which the events of the play unfold, the city of Troezen. Since I have had the opportunity to study this text for many years, I have visited the places described in the tragedy and have seen with my own eyes the veracity of Euripides' description. But Troezen was located not far from Athens, in northern Argolis, and was connected to Athens by special ties. As for distant lands, Euripides did not strive at all to depict them accurately.

— The playwright's closeness to the circle of philosophers suggests his sympathies for democratic circles. Here we can also recall the criticism of tyranny in the person of the Cyclops in the play of the same name. How did Euripides imagine democracy?

— First of all, it is worth understanding what democracy meant to the Athenians. It was established after the overthrow of the dynasty of the Peisistratids and throughout its history it was opposed to tyranny. Tyranny returned several times, for example during the reign of the "regime of the four hundred" or the "tyranny of the thirty", but such episodes did not last long. It is possible that the cult of Dionysus and the festival of the Great Dionysia, where tragedies were staged, were connected with the idea of democracy. Almost all performances in the theater of Dionysus were supposed to concern democratic freedom and its opposition to tyranny.

Euripides' play "Cyclops" is unique in its genre. It is the only fully preserved satyr drama - almost no similar works have reached us. The satyr drama ended the tetralogy presented by each playwright, it was preceded by three tragedies. Since we know this genre very poorly, it is difficult to say which elements in "Cyclops" are inherent to the genre as a whole.

At least this much can be said about the Cyclops. This play links the dramatic performance with the Dionysian festival - there is a happy ending, the play ends with the victory over the monster thanks to the help of Dionysus and wine. This victory marks the liberation from slavery to the terrible tyrant. The victory over the monster thanks to Dionysus could reflect the democratic idea of the entire Dionysian festival. It is not at all necessary to see in the Cyclops a reflection of some specific political events. This play could reflect the general democratic spirit of the Athenian theater.

As for Euripides' political views, it would be more correct to speak not of any specific views, but rather of his political commitment.

If some of his tragedies are indeed connected with political events, then this means that he participated in the political life of the polis. Moreover, such engagement does not at all imply a specific ideology. The poet could belong to some political circle and express its views and interests, as, for example, in the case of Aeschylus's Oresteia, the production of which was sponsored by Pericles and which obviously reflected the interests of his party. I would associate some of Euripides' tragedies with the political interests of Alcibiades, namely, The Trojan Women and the already mentioned Iphigenia in Tauris. Apparently, Euripides wrote a victory song, the Epinicium, in honor of Alcibiades' victory at the Olympic Games around the same time, so we can assume that he was personally connected with the famous politician.

So, on the one hand, there is a general democratic idea on which the entire political life of Athens in general and the local theater in particular are based, and on the other hand, there are specific political interests. Both have found their place in the plays of Euripides.

— Euripides is remembered as the last great playwright of Greece. Why did this tradition cease and after his death we no longer encounter authors equal to the Athenian tragedians?

— Unfortunately, we know very little about the tragedies of the fourth century. The reason for this is the peculiarities of the selection of texts, a selection that took place over centuries, but began precisely in this fourth century, when the canon of the great classical tragedians appeared. This canon included Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they began to be staged anew, new tragic poets had to emulate them and compete with them. Their fame did not allow later poets to break through the centuries, and only one or, perhaps, two tragedies of the fourth century have survived to this day. They have survived only because they were attributed to classical poets. This is "Res", attributed to Euripides and enjoyed great popularity in Antiquity. And, perhaps, this is "Prometheus Bound", attributed to Aeschylus, although disputes continue about its attribution. Prometheus is a remarkable tragedy, and if it was really written in the 4th century, it means that the level of tragic poetry at that time was still very high.

— You also wrote commentaries on Cicero’s treatise “On the Limits of Good and Evil.” How did you come to this topic and what did you discover for yourself in the philosophical work of the Roman orator?

— I came to Cicero almost by accident. As I said above, my diploma was devoted to Stoic logic and grammar, and I continued to study this topic further, in graduate school. Just then, N.A. Fedorov was going to publish his translation of Cicero's treatise "On the Limits of Good and Evil" and invited me to comment on this text. As a result, I discovered two philosophical schools, the Stoics and the Epicureans, and I still treat them with great love.

Almost nothing has come down to us from the Stoics themselves, but Cicero expounds the Stoic teaching in his works, proving to be one of the main and earliest sources for the reconstruction of Stoic philosophy. In the dialogue "On the Limits of Good and Evil" he expounds the ideas of other Hellenistic schools.

How accurately and reliably Cicero conveys the teachings of Hellenistic philosophers is a complex, not even historical-philosophical, but philological problem. Philological study of Cicero's treatises made it possible to find out how and for what reasons Cicero distorts the ideas of the Greek schools, to determine what was the "prism" through which he looked at them, and, having removed this "prism", to some extent to see their true meaning.

— From the comments on Cicero's treatise, you came up with an article about different types of pleasure in Epicurus. How adequately did the Roman orator translate his thoughts?

— In the treatise "On the Limits of Good and Evil" Cicero's dependence on academic doxography is obvious. One of the main sources for him, following which he expounded the teachings of the Hellenistic schools, was Antiochus of Ascalon, a philosopher of the Platonic school. In the era preceding Antiochus, the Platonists were skeptics, they denied the possibility of an exact and unambiguous establishment of truth, primarily engaged in discussions with other schools and the refutation of their philosophical systems. An important figure in this skeptical period was Carneades. In order to analyze and criticize the ethical teachings of different philosophical schools, he came up with a way to classify them. His classification was based on the principle of thesis - antithesis - synthesis. Carneades contrasted the teachings of two schools on a particular subject, for example, on the highest good, as a thesis and antithesis. He said, for example, that the Stoics see it only in the soul, and the Epicureans - only in the body.

Applying the dichotomy of soul and body to these schools distorts our understanding of them.

Of course, both the Stoics and the Epicureans used the concept of the soul, but since they were materialists and monists, the very idea of the soul played a completely different role for them than for the Platonists. Carneades wrote that man is a combination of soul and body, and therefore the highest good must be sought in the combination of the good of the soul and the good of the body. This synthesis of thesis and antithesis was presented by the followers of Carneades as a plausible, most probable judgment, while still refraining from asserting the truth.

Read also

"For the Dead Against All Good": Interview with Musician and Metal Race Label Boss Anatoly Metalov

"I've Become More Serious and A Little More Pessimistic." Interview with a Brazilian Philosopher Who's Lived in Russia for Three Years

Antiochus of Ascalon, in a sense, makes a revolution within the academic school, becoming a dogmatist, that is, rejecting a skeptical attitude towards the knowledge of truth. But as dogma he affirms all the same judgments that his predecessors expressed as plausible and used in criticizing their opponents. That is, for Carneades, the judgment that the highest good should be seen in the good of the soul and body together is needed only to refute the insufficient teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans, and Antiochus turns this judgment into a dogma. He traces this dogma back to the "ancients", to Plato, his very first academic students, to Aristotle and the Peripatetics, believing that he is restoring their true teaching.

In my article "Pleasure in Epicurus" I suggested that Epicurus's opposition between dynamic and static pleasures, which we find neither in Lucretius nor in Plutarch, has nothing to do with Epicurean teaching. This opposition is quite absurd. It is assumed that for Epicurus the highest form of pleasure was simply the absence of pain - static pleasure. The other type of pleasure, which consisted of movement, or kinetic, he supposedly considered inferior.

At the same time, Cicero does not give a clear definition of kinetic pleasure: in some passages, movement refers to a change in the state of the organism (for example, when we eat or drink), in others - when something affects our organs of perception (say, listening to music). These two types of movement are difficult to connect with each other.

Epicurus did indeed write that the absence of suffering is pleasure, and even the highest pleasure, but he by no means rejected what Cicero called kinetic pleasures.

On the contrary, in some places he even extols them: in his suicide letter he says that when he had terrible pains associated with urolithiasis, memories of meetings and conversations with friends helped him overcome these pains. If we use Cicero's dichotomy, then such pleasure can be called kinetic, and it turns out to be stronger than the absence of "static pleasure".

These inconsistencies led me to turn to other authors who expound the Epicurean doctrine. As a result, I became convinced that the dichotomy of kinetic and static pleasure is found only in Cicero and in two other texts influenced by the same doxographic tradition: Diogenes Laërtius and Athenaeus.

What did Epicurus really mean when he called the absence of suffering the highest pleasure? He did not separate this state from the process of replenishing a deficiency in the body - he did not separate satiety from food. Epicurus simply wanted to say that the extent of our pleasure from food is determined by our satiety, and not by what exactly we eat. We will receive equal pleasure from ordinary bread and from luxurious dishes.

The limit of pleasure is satiety - this was the teaching of Epicurus. He disputed Plato's thesis, according to which we receive pleasure only in the process of, for example, eating, and therefore, if pleasure is a good, then a person striving for pleasure must constantly provoke hunger in himself.

Epicurus saw that satiety is also a part of pleasure, and that pleasure is not limited to the process of replenishment.

However, academic doxography aimed to contrast the Epicureans with another hedonistic school, the Cyrenaics. And the academics applied here the very same classification principle I mentioned: thesis - antithesis. They attributed to the Cyrenaics, who strove for momentary pleasures, a devotion to kinetic pleasure, and called Epicurus an admirer of static pleasure. In the very opposition of movement and rest, of course, a Platonic dichotomy is revealed, which is not at all characteristic of either the Epicureans or the Cyrenaics. In fact, everything was much simpler. Epicurus did not preach insensitivity, not static pleasure in rest. The main thing he wanted to say is that we can experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest joy from the smallest things, therefore pleasure is available to everyone.

— Ancient philosophy as a way of life is becoming increasingly popular today. In your opinion, what is this connected with and what prospects do you see in it?

— I think this popularity is connected with the specificity of Hellenistic philosophical schools. They allow one to get rid of fears, negative emotions and experiences. Later, this role was taken over by religion, and in our time — by psychology and psychoanalysis. Of the psychologists who turn to ancient philosophical ideas, I am close to Viktor Frankl, who reminds me of the Stoics with his reasoning. He opposed himself to Freud, often on exactly the same grounds on which the Stoics can be opposed to the Epicureans.

As for turning to ancient philosophy today, I can tell you a funny story. A few years ago, someone from the international Epicurean community wrote to me, thanking me for my article on pleasure in Epicurus. They told me that my conclusions were just what they needed, because the members of this community wanted to enjoy, and all the historians of philosophy constantly explained to them that Epicurus was not for pleasure, but for the absence of all feelings. After my article, modern Epicureans realized that they can still enjoy with a calm soul, while following the precepts of Epicurus.

— How do you see the future of classical philology in Russia?

— It is hard to watch what is happening now. My professional life coincided with the heyday of classical philology in Moscow and in Russia in general, and now I see how its decline is beginning, everything is collapsing. Classical philology is a science that cannot exist in a single, closed country. It is an international science. In the Soviet years, the pre-revolutionary tradition was partially preserved in St. Petersburg, while in Moscow classical philology in the proper sense of the word practically did not exist, precisely because of the lack of any contacts with the world. It was impossible to get the necessary books, not to mention personal communication with scientists, participation in conferences and everything else.

Our science could not exist without live communication with colleagues.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the country gradually began to open up to the world, contacts with Western scholars appeared, the Internet emerged, making articles and books available, and in this atmosphere a new generation of classical philologists grew up. Now I work in France and I can say that the Moscow school of classical philology is not inferior to the French one. For now, it continues to exist, but we do not know how long this political nightmare will last, and there is less and less hope that Russian classical philology will maintain its high level.

— For a long time you headed the department of ancient literature at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but recently you left. What are you doing now and what are your plans for the future?

— My last project at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences was commentary on Aristophanes. If in the case of tragedy the unit in which the author's thought is reflected is the tragedy as a whole, then comedy is constructed in a completely different way. Its integrity is rather external, the author's attention is directed to each specific joke. Comedy has, of course, a single plot, but this does not exclude the significance of each individual joke. This can be compared to a circus performance in which there is a general plot, but at the same time each individual act is important in itself. Aristophanes' comedies are a collection of such acts. Commentary addressed to each joke therefore turns out to be an ideal way of interpreting comedy.

When I left Russia, the first country I visited was Armenia, where I spent six months. I was hired by the Matenadaran, an institute that preserves and studies ancient Armenian manuscripts, and I had to choose a topic in which I could, on the one hand, use my knowledge as a classical philologist, and on the other, study Armenian monuments. Together with my Armenian colleagues, we began publishing medieval Armenian translations of Greek philosophers made in the 5th–8th centuries. There are quite a few of these translations, and they are contained in many manuscripts, many of which have never been critically published. Our work involves comparing different manuscripts, preparing a critical edition of the Armenian text, and comparing the Armenian text with the Greek original. Quite often, knowledge of the Armenian translation allows us to correct the Greek text. In addition, we also deal with such issues as the principles of translating words and grammatical constructions.

I find this work very interesting. Imagine, I have always worked with an author who has been interpreted and republished many times, and now I am working with completely new and unstudied material. In addition, I like working on many specific individual problems. Each phrase is a task that needs to be solved.

— Have you already learned Armenian?

— I don’t speak modern Armenian, but I have learned to read Grabar, the classical Armenian language, which is different from modern Armenian. In its grammatical structure, it is similar to Greek, but a little simpler. But it is lexically complex, since the words in it are not similar to the vocabulary of European languages and do not evoke any associations. I learn Armenian from ancient translations of Philo of Alexandria. He is a Jewish author who wrote in Greek, and I read him with a parallel text in ancient Armenian.

Ha! It certainly sounds likely that Elli and I were the people referenced "from the international Epicurean community! Thank you very much for finding the article!

Quote

As for turning to ancient philosophy today, I can tell you a funny story. A few years ago, someone from the international Epicurean community wrote to me, thanking me for my article on pleasure in Epicurus. They told me that my conclusions were just what they needed, because the members of this community wanted to enjoy, and all the historians of philosophy constantly explained to them that Epicurus was not for pleasure, but for the absence of all feelings. After my article, modern Epicureans realized that they can still enjoy with a calm soul, while following the precepts of Epicurus.

May I ask one question? Why, at the beginning, is there a shift in name:

Boris Nikolsky is a Doctor of Philology and a classical philologist. Boris Mikhailovich's main research interest is ancient Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, whom he has been studying for many years.

Is that an artifact of the translation software? I ask because it does seem to me in the past that I have observed (maybe in different variations of the way Vladimir Putin is sometimes referenced) that there are naming conventions in Russian that seem very unusual to me.

Oh one more question: You don't see a photo of him anywhere do you? If so I'll add that to our material.

Thank you for restating that Raphael - that avoids a lot of ambiguity.

Nkulinka it's more trivia than anything else, but one of my favorite articles on Epicurus is by a Russian, Boris Nikolsky. Probably ten years ago now Elli and I spoke to him briefly by skype, but I don't know since then if he still lives in Russia or not.

File

Nikolsky - Epicurus On Pleasure

One of the most important articles on this site: Boris Nikolsky details one theory about the history of the "Kinetic / Katestematic" distinction.

Cassius

January 13, 2018 at 6:54 PM