Posts by Cassius

Quote from Don

So, yeah, I found book 1 both intriguing but frustrating in Aristotle's insistence on the subservience of the individual's "good", goal, telos being subservient to the state.

But is that my modern, Western bias or is that coming from a genuine Epicurean perspective

I could see Epicurus holding that for individuals who do in fact find their greatest happiness in being part of a particular group of people, then for those people they are pursuing pleasure by pursuing their collectively defined interests.

But I would also expect Epicurus to hold that for those individuals who do not find their greatest happiness in a particular group of people, or who find their greatest happiness in another or smaller or separate group of people than "the polis," then the interests of the polis would not be their primary concern.

To hold otherwise would be to allow for something else other than the feeling of the person perceiving the feeling to override the guidance of nature. I read Epicurus as being rigorously logical that there can be no possible exception to the general rule that Nature gives humans only feeling (pleasure and pain) for guidance. I do not think Epicurus would admit that polis / states are living brings which have feelings of their own.

States may be the most efficient method of organization of large groups of people for living happily, but they are not strictly necessary for human survival so I bet he would say that they don't count in the same way that "life" is a prerequisite to pleasure. Like "virtue"I would expect Epicurus to see states as a tool and not as an end in themselves.

Going a little further, I think the way we unwind *all sensations are true" gives us a good pattern. Sounds like Epicurus did say something like that, but if we take it at face value and unthinkingly, then we and he both look like fools. The statement has to be considered and understood at a deeper level - at the level in which we see "true" means "honest" in this context, rather than "fully consistent with the actual and verifiable facts."

Same goes with considering pleasure to be the highest or greatest good. If we pursue a particular pleasure recklessly and singlemindedly we can easily get ourselves killed and again look like - or be - a fool. Words have to be evaluated in context, and our human context requires us to be alive in order for pleasure to have any meaning to us. Getting ourselves killed is generally not the best way to maximize our future net pleasure. So considering these words ("pursue pleasure!") outside of our human context can get us into big trouble very fast. The penalty for misunderstanding this might not just be more pain than pleasure - the penalty might well be premature death. (And looked at in that way, this ultimate issue is outside the weighing of net pleasure vs pain. If you get yourself killed instantly driving 200 miles an hour you don't in fact experience more pain than pleasure from that choice, you die instantly. So this too is a point that the mind has to understand and isn't revealed purely through the senses.)

That's what I think Dewitt grasps and is on to, and this is an example of aggressive thinking which I think makes him one of the best interpreters of Epicurus for practical application of the philosophy. Yes pursue pleasure as the end (because virtue and holiness are illusions), but unless you are sure about your choice (dying for a friend might be an example) don't get yourself killed doing it. Life comes first in order that you may have pleasure.

Its kind of hard to accept it, but it may have taken Dewitt to bring down to earth something that should always have been obvious in the teachings of Epicurus. I don't know any other commentator who has raised this point as well as Dewitt or even thought it significant to talk about. Most commentators are content to let Epicurus sound superficially like a spoiled child without going to bat for a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying.

In contrast, I suspect this relationship was in fact obvious to Epicurus' followers in the ancient world before the Great Corruption took over.

Quote from Pacatus

Hmmm. I'll have to give DeWitt a more thorough scrutiny on this. Being alive certainly is an existential requirement for any telos -- albeit that is likely a trivial parsing ...

My take on this is that DeWitt is clearly onto something, but might not be framing it exactly as it should be. Not saying I can do better, but as you note, "being alive" *is* a requirement for any telos, or as I think DeWitt put it in a more memorable way, something like "pleasure has no meaning except to the living."

And I feel sure that Don would agree with that point -- that pleasure has meaning only to the living.

So the issue of clarity seems to me to come in unwinding what it means to use the phrase "the greatest good." The word "good" has multiple meanings or subtleties, just like the word "true" as Dewitt discusses, more successfully I think, in discussing "all sensations are true." And even "greatest" might be open to shades of meaning.

In the end my view of this is that DeWitt is making a very important point, but he's not explaining it as well as he does with "all sensations are true," The issue seems to me is to be that we need to attack the shades of meaning and ambiguities in the word "good" -- which we know that Epicurus was challenging given his other statement against walking around uselessly harping on the meaning of "good."

I give credit to DeWitt for highlighting the issue, even if he doesn't drive it home to an optimum conclusion.

Oh I meant to add this earlier:. One of the reasons this came to mind was probably inspired by the example of "A Few Days In Athens" - I can imagine a similar scenario being sort of a model for an immersion game.

But I doubt it would be a good idea to model the actual garden and thereby have to deal with putting words in Epicurus ' or other actual historical figures' mouths. Frances Wright probably did a reasonably accurate job but even there she probably crossed some lines.

I would think another time and place - such as Herculaneum before the eruption - would probably be more analogous to us - people living well after Epicurus' death trying to learn and apply the philosophy in an Epicurean-,friendly setting without any of the actual characters being hijacked by living people who don't have the authority to speak for them.

Yes that's the eventual goal, but in the meantime and probably always it's good to keep an open eye to all reasonable possibilities. So definitely I am not suggesting that it's time to put any effort into a virtual world model, just that if there are people would in fact peruse those things we should be aware of any opportunities.

I would never have suspected that Martin would be the one of us to have experience with this! My own perspective was pretty much like Don's - been hearing about this forever but not seeing it actually come into being. However I know as I get older that I lose touch with certain things so I wanted to check. I am actually a little surprised that something like it hasn't made more progress.

Don's also right that we have a great need for content creators and until I can find more time myself I am struggling to keep just the podcast and weekly zoom going.

Maybe that was part of why the idea came to mind - projects that attract interest in part through the effort of the participants themselves (second life) is probably a smart thing to keep open to adding.

If anyone is into a particular project like Second Life and wants to brainstorm for a while that's probably the first step.

Sometimes I think my own world is a virtual reality so I don't need another, but the general space probably bears watching. I have lost track over the last ten or more years of what these online games really do, but I presume that they are growing increasingly popular.

Maybe then the main use of the thread - to the extent it continues at all - should be to keep an open dialog on how new technologies and online gaming interactions (not purely discussions like here) might be adapted to community-building.

I probably should have tagged Charles here too as he might be in closest touch with the latest developments. And possibly @Nate for both his age and creativity. And I think Onenski is college or post graduate too.

This question comes to mind partly because of a comment Joshua made recently, and partly because I was wasting time on the internet today watching an interview with a professor who was singing the praises of the free internet multiplayer game "Zero AD."

In my own case probably the very last thing I need to do is to spend more time on the computer away from the outside world, but I gather that online gaming is extremely popular so it's probably worth the question:

Is it possible that setting up an online Epicurean community in one of these role-playing games would be a worthwhile project? I gather that these games are not wholly devoted to war games anymore, and I am wondering if it might be interesting, and attractive to younger people, if we were to set up an explicitly ancient-world Epicurean community (the Villa of the Papyri before Vesuvius) and then conduct learning / teaching events in such an online community. The major gap in my knowledge is whether these communities provide an environment where discussion/teaching/socializing is easy to do, or whether it is all blood and guts.

Joshua please confirm for me that this is the worst idea ever and I'll leave it alone. However it seems to me that the question is probably worth asking, so maybe some others here who have more experience with this kind of thing can suggest whethere there is any potential for a project in that direction or not.

All I have done is looked at the home page of http://play0ad.com and I don't have any idea whether this is feasible or a good idea or not.

Anyone?

Thank you for outlining that Kalosyni!

Maybe no need but I will anyway. I think you're on the track of what quite possibly is the very most important aspect of Epicurus which as always impressed me as not so much the conclusion ("pleasure" as the highest good) but the method of establishing confidence that the conclusion is correct.

We will never be omnipotent or omniscient and therefore to hold "confidence" to that standard or proof is nonsensical. But that's what 2000 years has told us to do.

Aristotle was apparently in the process of breaking free from Plato but did not go nearly far enough. Artificial rules and categories are just as misleading as platonic absolutes. (That's the critique of "essentialism" that Dawkins makes.) Epicurus finished the job, but that aspect has been buried.

There is a lot to be uncovered in the final step from Aristotle to Epicurus (some of it is in Philodemus on Signs) but I am convinced if we uncover and expose to a wider audience the insufficiency if Aristotle then we not only blow a hole in Objectivism (desirable in itself) but we show the way to a common sense method of thinking that also finally kicks the supports out from supernatural religion.

And going through Nichomachean ethics is a good place to start

Thanks for posting that Kalosyni!

I am sorry I am slow in reading the commentary but I will eventually get there. As to the Stoic assent issue, it seems to me that either in DeWitt or one of the commentaries I've read in the past, an analogy is made (by someone, can't remember who) between the "assent" issue and the Epicurean discussion of "phantastic" impressions. I know that DeWitt has a section on this but I don't think that's the only place I have read this.

I seem to also recall that the parallels or similarities are wrapped up in something else that we've not discussed very much, that the Stoics were in a way "materialists" too (perhaps in relation to sensation that is what I am remembering). There's a lot of confusing discussion in the commentaries about thought processes and how the mind "grasps" things, but I don't have any impression as to where Aristotle was on grasping /assent.

Course Correction: We have just learned that Onenski can't attend for the next several Thursdays, so let's stay with Wednesdays for the time being.

Thank you! And yes that Attalus site is excellent!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please consider joining us in this effort.

Happy birthday Joshua and happy birthday to Kalosyni too!

Right. We can use that facility for everything except martins physical book idea - and we might even be able to use it for that.

As to Goodreads perhaps we create an Epicurean section?

I am thinking that Martin is focused on the community-building aspects of person to person physical books, but Martin tell me if otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

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