Posts by Cassius

Also, in relation to how the atomism arguments fit in relation to the other logic-based issues:

Where the Common Thread Applies

The starting point is the same: Zeno's conclusion — that motion is impossible — is directly contradicted by sensation. We see things move. That is a Canon-level datum, and no formal argument can override it. So in that sense, Epicurus's first move is identical to his handling of the Liar or the Sorites: the argument reaches an absurd conclusion, therefore the argument is wrong.

But Here Epicurus Goes Further

With the Liar Paradox and the Sorites, Epicurus was largely content to dismiss the argument as a verbal or dialectical trap and move on. He didn't feel obligated to locate the precise flaw.

With Zeno's paradoxes he did something more demanding: he identified exactly where the argument goes wrong and replaced it with a positive physical theory. The false premise is infinite divisibility. Magnitude is not infinitely divisible — both atoms and the distances they traverse have genuine minima, smallest parts that cannot be further subdivided even conceptually. This doesn't just block Zeno's conclusion; it gives you a coherent account of how finite traversal of finite distances is physically possible.

The Deeper Point

So the minimal parts doctrine represents the Canon working at its most constructive. The Canon tells you the conclusion is false; reason then has the obligation to find the defective premise and build a correct account in its place. This is Epicurus at his most systematic — not just deflecting bad logic, but doing genuine physics in response to it.

It also shows that his anti-dialectical stance was not laziness or ignorance. When the stakes were high enough — when a logical argument threatened to undermine the entire intelligibility of the physical world — he would engage it fully on its own terrain and win on those terms.

I searched and added a series of other logic-based arguments, and this was suggested as the general common thread uniting the responses:

The Common Thread

What unites Epicurus's responses is a consistent methodological stance: formal logical arguments, no matter how clever, never override the Canon. If an argument leads to a conclusion that contradicts sensation, prolēpsis (common preconceptions), or the evidence of feelings, then the argument is wrong — even if you cannot immediately identify the flaw in its premises. This made Epicurus unusual in antiquity: he was not anti-rational, but he was firmly anti-dialectical in the sense that he refused to grant pure logic jurisdiction over empirical reality.

Infinite Regress Arguments for God as First Cause

While not exclusively Zeno-derived, various thinkers used infinite regress arguments to argue for a divine unmoved mover. Epicurus rejected the premise structure: he held that matter and motion are eternal and self-sufficient, requiring no external initiator. The infinite past of atomic motion is simply given — there is no logical compulsion to terminate a causal chain at a god.

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Logical Fatalism / the Idle Argument (Argos Logos)

Related to the above, the Idle Argument ran: "If it is fated that you recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call a doctor or not; if it is fated that you do not recover, you will not recover whether you call a doctor or not; therefore calling a doctor is pointless." Epicurus attacked this as a practical reductio — the argument destroys the meaningfulness of deliberation and action, which are attested facts of experience. The atomic swerve was in part a physical mechanism designed to block precisely this kind of fatalistic conclusion.

Need references for this!

The Master Argument (Kyrieuon Logos) of Diodorus Cronus

This is perhaps the most philosophically important case. Diodorus constructed an argument that only the actual is possible — i.e., if something did not happen, it was never truly possible. This had direct bearing on Epicurean physics because it threatened atomic swerve (the parenklisis/clinamen): if determinism rules and only what occurs is possible, the swerve has no logical space to exist. Epicurus needed possibility to be real and open to preserve both the swerve and human free will. His counter was not to refute Diodorus's formal logic term by term, but to insist that the Canon and the evidence of human deliberative experience directly attest to real open possibility — and that no formal argument can override what is self-evident to experience.

(Need references for this)

The Liar Paradox ("This statement is false")

The Liar Paradox was a favorite of the Megarians (attributed to Eubulides). Epicurus famously dismissed it as not worth serious engagement — essentially calling it a verbal trick rather than a genuine logical problem. Cicero reports that he was criticized for this dismissiveness, but Epicurus held that the Canon grounds truth in relation to real objects of cognition, and a self-referential sentence with no object in the world simply falls outside the scope of genuine inquiry. His critics (especially the Stoics) thought this showed ignorance of logic; Epicurus would have said it showed wisdom about what logic is actually for.

(Need references for this)

Quote from Don

That said, I'm happy to leave the refutations to those inclined that direction.

RIght - those who are interested, please contribute; those who are not - no worries.

Yes done in general I agree - waste of time, at least for those of us who are familiar with the whole category of logical wordplay without reference back to physical / sense-based evidence.

However, we have a lot of people who come through the forum who aren't familiar with the overall issue, and how it relates not only to the "gods" question but also to the whole Epicurean sense-based canonics. The different forms of "Zeno's Paradoxes" are pretty much in the same category.

I think for that reason alone it would be good to develop a general framework of how all of these are defective in general, and how each one specifically fails to get around the fundamental flaw in the approach.

Just like on Youtube where people search for specific topics, if we set up a thread for each significant argument then the search engines will eventually pick up the threads and reach people with Epicurean arguments who otherwise would never find it.

So in this thread I'll focus the title on "General Responses To Logic-Based Arguments..." and those who are so inclined to address separate ones, please feel free to suggest separate threads. I'll moderate the forum structure to be sure this doesn't get out of hand, but if anyone who is a level 3 or above wants to set up specific threads please go ahead. Anyone else who is newer might want to add their suggestion to this list first.

This was brought up in a recent zoom meeting and I am posting it here for analysis of proper responses. We probably need a section for responses to these "Logical Proofs" arguments if we don't already have one.

Proof of the Truthful - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Glad to have you !

ReiWolfWoman tells us:

My background in Epicurus is that I was first exposed to him in an undergrad philosophy class, where we read some of his remaining work and that of Lucretius. Then in an online community where we discuss philosophy and improving quality of life, (as I have some previous exploration in stoicism as well as modern philosophy from childhood onwards). Then I read more of the book attributed to Epicurus and now I'm in the middle of Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean.....

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We have found over the years that there are a number of key texts and references which most all serious students of Epicurus will want to read and evaluate for themselves. Those include the following.

"Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt

The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.

"On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"

"Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky

The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."

Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section

Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section

The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation

A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright

Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus

Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)

"The Greeks on Pleasure" -Gosling & Taylor Sections on Epicurus, especially the section on katastematic and kinetic pleasure which explains why ultimately this distinction was not of great significance to Epicurus.

It is by no means essential or required that you have read these texts before participating in the forum, but your understanding of Epicurus will be much enhanced the more of these you have read. Feel free to join in on one or more of our conversation threads under various topics found throughout the forum, where you can to ask questions or to add in any of your insights as you study the Epicurean philosophy.

And time has also indicated to us that if you can find the time to read one book which will best explain classical Epicurean philosophy, as opposed to most modern "eclectic" interpretations of Epicurus, that book is Norman DeWitt's Epicurus And His Philosophy.

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Welcome to the forum!

As to the work of Steve Patterson outside the video, I can save people some time about where he stands:

Coming Around to Platonism – Steve Patterson

OK i have watched the video and now I have another way of asking my last question:

1. Lamar_44 thinks the Patterson video is "good" and useful.
2. Martin thinks the Patterson video is a "bad" and a waste of time.

What explains the very different reactions to the video between two people who (by virtue of being here at EpicureaFriends) presumably look at basic issues of reality from a somewhat similar perspective?

Maybe that's just another way of asking the same question, or maybe that's more interesting and more useful for forum purposes than the question presented in the video itself.

@Lamar_44 I note Martin's comment and as soon as I have time will watch that myself.

What conclusion do you reach based on that video?

The entire question of imagination and thought experiments definitely has interest for some people. If Zeno wants to imagine infinite divisibility and construct hypotheticals based on it, then in a free world he has a right to do that, and if it gives him pleasure then more power to him.

I see that the video starts out asking whether a series of math statements getting increasingly smaller really "equals" zero, and the obvious answer is that of course it doesn't because you're defining the question in a way that doesn't mean exactly the same thing as zero.

Do such experiments have practical uses? Probably so - math has lots of practical uses.

But if the purpose of thought experiments is to confuse other people and make them doubt practical reality, then that is not just innocent fun and games, but harmful to real people.

Where do you see all this going and what benefits derive from exploring the things that people can imagine without first establishing that what they imagine is real?

LAMAR__44 thank you for your posts in the forum so far. You have asked some good questions that are asked regularly, so I am glad we've had the opportunity to discuss them.

However I note that you have not said much about your own positions or offered much in the way of your own personal agreement or disagreement with Epicurean philosophy.

Can you please elaborate on that?

While asking good questions is helpful, we are not a general philosophy forum, and we do want to make sure our time is being used most productively toward the goals of the site.

Thanks

Presuming first that we are communicating as to "universe" meaning "the all" and not just "our universe" then I'd go back to the very first part of your first post.

Quote from LAMAR__44

Essentially, it argues that the universe could not be eternal, since this would require an infinite past.

I doubt Epicurus would go much past that without stating that "the universe / the all" must be eternal, because it is inconceivable that there was ever a time in which "the all" did not exist. It certainly appear to us that the we exist, and that it makes no sense to consider that there was ever a time that the all did not exist, so I would rule out of hand any supposition (it would require an infinite number of steps to get here and that's not possible) that conflicts with what all appearances tells us does exist.

I'm sure someone here can probably do better than that for an answer but any fundamental logical paradox like that has to be resolved in the end by relying on the apparences (sensations) which in the end are all we have as contact with reality. The mind can image all sorts of constructions that defy reality, but devotion to what nature has given us is why in the end we go with sensations and not with pure logic that ultimately cannot be reconciled with the senses.

Of course "arrangement of atoms" is clearly just a shorthand, and calling something "emergence" is just slapping another label on it. But I am wondering if there are others ways to describe the process that help distinguish it from "randomness"

I think what I am considering is whether it is the best we can do to say that -for example - memory is simply a very precise arrangement of atoms.

Again not implying that it is anything non-natural, but there are many things which clearly CAN be that. I am not sure about memory

Patrikios I wonder if "emergence" is not part of this answer too. I think it's reasonable to say that if we were taking an atomic reductionist point of view that the "atoms" of our current forms could in fact be reunited in exactly their same positions over the course of infinite time and space. In fact I think some here (including Martin and me perhaps) think that that is logically compelled by the infinite universe/eternal time thesis.

And probably that goes far enough to say that that can/will happen, and since we've had an eternity of time and infinity of space already, it already HAS happened an infinite number of times, and yet we don't remember any past lives, and so that settles the question.

But probably as we work on describing what "emergence" really entails, which is more than just identical atoms "arranged" in identical ways, we might be able to add an additional layer of description to the discussion of it. Maybe just additional explanation of what "combination" or 'arrangement" might imply, but still something additional that would give a greater explanatory power to the discussion and explain why simple "rearrangment" through motion might not be enough to reconstitute the memory that you are referring to.