Posts by Cassius

Thank you Don. Direct link

HA! GREAT! It includes what pretty directly seems like a slam at the Stoics! Anyone read that differently?

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Such was the conviction of the ancients, and to produce this result they were aware that it was necessary not only to declaim in the schools of rhetoricians, or to exercise the tongue and the voice in fictitious controversies quite remote from reality, but also to imbue the mind with those studies which treat of good and evil, of honour and dishonour, of right and wrong. All this, indeed, is the subject-matter of the orator's speeches. Equity in the law-court, honour in the council-chamber, are our usual topics of discussion. Still, these often pass into each other, and no one can speak on them with fulness, variety, and elegance but he who has studied human nature, the power of virtue, the depravity of vice, and the conception of those things which can be classed neither among virtues nor vices. These are the sources whence flows the greater ease with which he who knows what anger is, rouses or soothes the anger of a judge, the readier power with which he moves to pity who knows what pity is, and what emotions of the soul excite it. An orator practised in such arts and exercises, whether he has to address the angry, the biassed, the envious, the sorrowful, or the trembling, will understand different mental conditions, apply his skill, adapt his style, and have every instrument of his craft in readiness, or in reserve for every occasion. Some there are whose assent is more secured by an incisive and terse style, in which each inference is rapidly drawn. With such, it will be an advantage to have studied logic. Others are more attracted by a diffuse and smoothly flowing speech, appealing to the common sentiments of humanity. To impress such we must borrow from the Peripatetics commonplaces suited and ready prepared for every discussion. The Academy will give us combativeness, Plato, sublimity, Xenophon, sweetness. Nor will it be unseemly in an orator to adopt even certain exclamations of honest emotion, from Epicurus and Metrodorus, and to use them as occasion requires. It is not a philosopher after the Stoic school whom we are forming, but one who ought to imbibe thoroughly some studies, and to have a taste of all. Accordingly, knowledge of the civil law was included in the training of the ancient orators, and they also imbued their minds with grammar, music, and geometry. In truth, in very many, I may say in all cases, acquaintance with law is desirable, and in several this last-mentioned knowledge is a necessity. (Latin)

This is an interesting comment from that article - i was not aware that Tacitus mentioned Epicurus:

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since Tacitus, in the Dialogue of orators, advises orators to use Plato and Xenophon “and even to borrow certain edifying maxims from Epicurus and Metrodorus“.

For example I don't think I have ever found a good "overview" of how the philosophers were arranged on the panel - and this doesn't seem to tell us either. I bet there's a lot more that we who are particularly interested in Epicurus could gain from making a study of this work.

This is a fascinating topic. I have read about this mosaic but maybe not seen the page you linked. It is a very good one.

I recall reading about this mostly because Bernard Frischer talks about it (somewhere) as a good lead for what the "standard" seated bust of Epicurus must have looked like especially in terms of the placement of his right arm / hand. The controversy seems to be over whether his arm was in an outstretched 'gesturing' position, or folded up against his chest in what might be considered a more "passive" position.

Of course I favor the "gesturing" position (which would indicate teaching and engagement) and this mosaic is good evidence of that being the actual case.

Marco thank you very much for posting this and if you are able to do additional research and actually get there please post more!

We had four participants last night - thanks to all who attended. I don't see any reason not to do this again next Tuesday night at the same time, so let's tentatively plan to do so.

But let's consider this only tentative for the moment as we still have lots of things to figure out.

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How is it the average folk will benefit from this?

This is a great question. The answer is "average folk" probably won't benefit from this. But then again most of us here are not "average folk" in the broadest sense of the word.

Most of us here are fairly highly motivated people who really want to dig into the texts for themselves and determine what parts of it they think are true and which may not be, and for that purpose reading commentators is really not enough. Not that we all have to learn Greek and Latin ( although Don is an inspirational example ). We at least need to take the original materials and organize them for ourselves so that we can make our own decisions as to what they are saying and whether they are "true."

Another aspect of this is pretty well established, that most (if not all) of the time a motivated Epicurean is going to want to "spread the word" about what he or she finds to be true at least to their own circle of friends, if not to the world at large. (We've discussed recently that "the world at large" is not necessarily a good idea, except perhaps in the examples of Epicurus and Lucretius and others writing material of general interest that anyone can pick up if they choose.)

But what I would specifically cite is Epicurus' letter to Herodotus that in order to really understand and apply the philosophy you need to sit down and draw up your own outline of the most important headings and how they fit together.

Obsidian and Logseq are to a significant degree "research and outlining" tools. They are free, which is a huge plus. They are based on interchangeable file formats which make it easy for multiple people to collaborate and share documents with each other. And maybe in terms of what they are designed for one of their most important uses is as "writing tools." They are designed not only to help you search and find existing information but also to help you use the old information to generate new documents. And of course that means that they are useful for us not only to find information for our own use but to take that and prepare documents and slideshows and graphics that are useful for explaining the philosophy to others.

So that's the basic idea.

This is a long podcast taking time to edit into final form but I'll occasionally add a note for future listeners. When talking about the potential for Epicurus being arrogant we touched on the issue of Epicurus having his father celebrate the birthday of his mother and brother (if I remember correctly). The point I'd like to drop in here is that while that may sound strange, most arrogant people I know generally ask that their own birthday be celebrated, rather than someone else's. Of course you could say that the strangeness increases the arrogance, but I think everything can be viewed from multiple perspectives and each person has to add the the whole picture for themselves.

If anyone else is interested let me know.

Yes I am thinking there is a strong possibility that the Greek wording focuses on perceptions, as LSJ indicate, and that it is Bailey who makes it into something implying the involvement of concepts and ideas, much as he translates anticipations / prolepsis as "concepts"

This is part of the relevant discussion from Torquatus:

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He judged that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate. He laid the greatest stress on natural science. That branch of knowledge enables us to realize clearly the force of words and the natural conditions of speech and the theory of consistent and contradictory expressions; and when we have learned the constitution of the universe we are relieved of superstition, are emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena, from which ignorance, more than any thing else, terrible panics often arise ; finally, our characters will also be improved when we have learned what it is that nature craves. Then again if we grasp a rm knowledge of phenomena, and uphold that canon, which almost fell from heaven into human ken, that test to which we are to bring all our judgments concerning things, we shall never succumb to any man’s eloquence and abandon our opinions.

[64] Moreover, unless the constitution of the world is thoroughly understood, we shall by no means be able to justify the verdicts of our senses. Further, our mental perceptions all arise from our sensations; and if these are all to be true, as the system of Epicurus proves to us, then only will cognition and perception become possible. Now those who invalidate sensations and say that perception is altogether impossible, cannot even clear the way for this very argument of theirs when they have thrust the senses aside. Moreover, when cognition and knowledge have been invalidated, every principle concerning the conduct of life and the performance of its business becomes invalidated. So from natural science we borrow courage to withstand the fear of death, and rmness to face superstitious dread, and tranquillity of mind, through the removal of ignorance concerning the mysteries of the world, and self-control, arising from the elucidation of the nature of the passions and their different classes, and as I shewed just now, our leader again has established the canon and criterion of knowledge and thus has imparted to us a method for marking off falsehood from truth.

I think this is where I got the idea that the best meaning is "repeated" or "separate" perceptions: this is Hicks in the Loeb edition. "And the reality of separate perceptions guarantees the truth of our senses."

I better wait for Don to weigh in before thinking too much about Bailey's version drives my blood pressure too high!

Yes exactly Kalosyni. That's the ultimate point and probably why that made it into the principal doctrines. If you argue that perceptions are invalid then you have no frame of reference to conclude that anything is certain or even knowable at all.

This is one of those that makes sense to read together to try to figure out the ultimate points. Clearly one basic point is that the perceptions of the senses are the ultimate evidence that any knowledge has to be based on. As to 24 he seems then to be hammering home the point that we know that multiple perceptions can end up pointing in different directions, and so we always have to keep a bright line distinction in our mind that some things we have enough evidence to be certain about, but some we aren't, and we can't confuse the two together.

And that gets back to the references on how we distinguish something as true:

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From DIogenes Laertius: "for all reason is dependent upon sensations; nor can one sensation refute another, for we attend to them all alike. Again, the fact of apperception confirms the truth of the sensations.

That's Bailey and I see he uses the word "apperception" which might in fact might be a terrible word choice. We need Don here but it's my understanding from reading commentators is that "apperception" is a more modern word (see here) and that the better interpretation of this statement is simply that the senses guarantee themselves. In other words you guarantee the truth of the conclusion that the oar is not bent by removing it from the water and looking again, or the truth of the fact that the tower is square and not round by walking closer to the tower and looking at it up close, with the result that the truth of the senses is established by USING them, over and over, and then checking to see if the result is the same or different. For example, YONGE, which says that it is "the reality and evidence of sensation that confirms the certainty of the senses.":

Mensch:

But I would argue it is clear that the bottom line is that the truth of the concepts we form is squarely dependent upon the observations of our senses, and that's why it is nonsensical and circular to argue that anticipations ARE concepts (as Bailey seems to do).

Right. Context is everything. What we might do if we lived in 200BC Athens or Rome is different than our circumstances in 2022. And from virtually every perspective of age, sex, location, education level, financial resources and on and on and on what a person is going to do to consider and implement Epicurean ideas is going to be different.

If I get your question, it is uploaded as an MP3. I will experiment with a larger file size when I upload the next episode

Quote from Don

which while true is often used to characterize a daredevil, no-holds-barred lifestyle.

I wouldn't say that YOLO necessarily has a completely negative connotation, but yes it's often used like "I'm going to get on that "Biggest Rollercoaster West of the Mississippi" no matter what you think - 'You Only Live Once!'"

I think Joshua is correct that the quality issue is probably related to Skype, but it's not clear that that's the whole problem. I don't think any of us are using super-professional equipment so that's probably part of the issue. If you are good with technology and have suggestions, let me know.

(Also, I know that I AM compressing somewhat to reduce the audio file size from the raw skype to the final file uploaded to the podcast provider. I will look into that issue as well.)

Quote from smoothiekiwi

By dedicating myself to the Epicurean lifestyle, that would mean that I couldn't lead deep and meaningful relations with people around me, simply because we would talk "on different pages".

I think you should be careful not to take that too far, in the spirit of the cliche of "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good." Not many of us (maybe none of us?) have very many "classical Epicurean" friends in our personal local lives, but we can't let that stop us from developing deep and meaningful relations with those friends we do have.

Quote from smoothiekiwi

This issue has honestly occupied my mind for some time now, and- just like with Stoicism-, that's a big "red flag" there. I couldn't find a solution to this problem yet, and I think that there isn't any.

The quote above doesn't make it clear but you're still talking about the issue of "how long do you have to live in order to live a full life?" I think it is important NOT to let this issue go, because it's closely related to the issue of how long we should desire to live, and it's clear that Epicurus said not to treat that question lightly. It does have an answer and we can figure out Epicurus' position if we think about it hard enough. If you want to create a separate thread on it, please do. In the meantime I will say that I think you are right to the extent that there is no one single number of years that is a minimum for which we can say "He didn't live XX years so he didnt have a happy or full life."

Quote from smoothiekiwi

I simply don't believe in the fact that I can unfold my human potential at 47. What if I die before that? My life wouldn't be fulfilled, I wouldn't have had a good life because I couldn't reach my potential? That sounds really stupid to me.

Your post contains lots of interesting and good points, and I want to call this one out as especially good. I like the way you think!

And YOLO means "You Only Live Once" (which implies seize the day / make the best of it)

In fact this already works, as you can see from the red circles where I have added those PDFs to my local directory. So now I can do a single search and include Don's and Nate's material at the same time. The limitation on using the PDF format in the list of files is as you see, it's a little harder to read. The program can't re-wrap and format the PDF text the same way it can a markdown file - but still searchable and copy-pastable.

(Oops appears I am jumping the gun and Obsidian is not indexing and searching the PDFs. I see they are talking about that issue and it should be there soon, but for the moment it can just view them. Not sure about Loqseq.)

Simple conversion of Nate's PDF to MD using the Calibre ebook program yields:

Which is not well formatted or hyperlinked but is still fine to work with. The point of a global master search is that you sometime remember a single word of a translation that nobody else chooses to use, and you need to figure out where that came from - a needle in a haystack unless you have a search facility that can go through all your collected files.

It occurs to me now that I have posted about this that it would be desirable to add Nate's book on the Principal Doctrines and Don's book on the letter to Menoeceus into the same local list of searchable files (included in the zip that we eventually distribute). It's easy to use the PDF version so that's probably the way to start, but at some point if the programs you guys are using to generate the PDFs have an "export to Markdown" or "export to txt" ability, I might ask you about that too. No need to worry about that now til you see further what I am suggesting.