Posts by Cassius

Hello and welcome to the forum @Truthseeker !

This is the place for students of Epicurus to coordinate their studies and work together to promote the philosophy of Epicurus. Please remember that all posting here is subject to our Community Standards / Rules of the Forum our Not Neo-Epicurean, But Epicurean and our Posting Policy statements and associated posts.

Please understand that the leaders of this forum are well aware that many fans of Epicurus may have sincerely-held views of what Epicurus taught that are incompatible with the purposes and standards of this forum. This forum is dedicated exclusively to the study and support of people who are committed to classical Epicurean views. As a result, this forum is not for people who seek to mix and match some Epicurean views with positions that are inherently inconsistent with the core teachings of Epicurus.

All of us who are here have arrived at our respect for Epicurus after long journeys through other philosophies, and we do not demand of others what we were not able to do ourselves. Epicurean philosophy is very different from other viewpoints, and it takes time to understand how deep those differences really are. That's why we have membership levels here at the forum which allow for new participants to discuss and develop their own learning, but it's also why we have standards that will lead in some cases to arguments being limited, and even participants being removed, when the purposes of the community require it. Epicurean philosophy is not inherently democratic, or committed to unlimited free speech, or devoted to any other form of organization other than the pursuit by our community of happy living through the principles of Epicurean philosophy.

One way you can be most assured of your time here being productive is to tell us a little about yourself and personal your background in reading Epicurean texts. It would also be helpful if you could tell us how you found this forum, and any particular areas of interest that you have which would help us make sure that your questions and thoughts are addressed.

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

1. "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt
2. "A Few Days In Athens" by Frances Wright
3. The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.
4. "On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"
5. "Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky
6. The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."
7. Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section
8. Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section
9. The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation
10. A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright
11. Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus
12. Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)

It is by no means essential or required that you have read these texts before participating in the forum, but your understanding of Epicurus will be much enhanced the more of these you have read.

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

Welcome to the forum!

Do you foresee this as primarily printed or online?

but that isnt interlinear right?

You using Libreoffice? I strongly think its a good idea to use the free stuff like that when possible

Yes i can understand as an aid in memorizing!

Also I sent an email to Lee at No dictionaries to see if he would add the rest of the poem to his site.

Quote from Don

multiple connotations

That would appear to be a strength of the nodictionaries format. I wonder if there is some way to use that engine, but I am sure that would be a major headache to figure out.

1 - JJ I gather that it is possible to add text into nodictionaries, and/or the website owner says he will do that upon request, if that proves helpful.

2 - I suspect you are right that google docs is a good option. Would a spreadsheet perhaps work better, or does Brill suggest a format? I would not think "CSV" would be good enough but something like that which is text-based might work.

3 - You've probably seen my recent comments on GITHUB in regard to working with it on the "Epicurus College" materials. I am pretty much getting to the point where it's not quite as intimidating as it used to be to me, but it has great advantages if the material you're working on can be "text-based" instead of binary like Google docs or spreadsheets would be.

The tremendous benefit I see is that it allows VERY fine-grained collaboration, which is apparently what "merging" and "pulling" and similar terms are all about. The benefit is that the master-overseer (you) can get help from others with the others submitting "pull requests" (I think that's the term) with the material that they have typed and/or corrected. You as project leader get to see a "differential" view of each line in text format, so you see EXACTLY what is being proposed for addition or corrected, and then you "merge" the corrections/additions that meet your approval. It might be that such fine-grained supervision might not be necessary, but that's a factor that has stopped me in several efforts at collaboration in the past. It's pretty disconcerting to think that multiple people are editing the document without the main coordinator knowing what they are doing and approving their contributions. Github and similar "git" services were designed to meet those challenges and it seems to work pretty well. Here's a screenshot showing how the review system works, highlighting the original vs changed lines:

It may seem like overkill, and it might be, but the more I get familiar with it the more I see how it's a really good fine-grained collaboration tool for multiple contributors.

Hard to say if it would be worth your time but wanted you to be aware of it.

PERHAPS one approach would be to start with getting all six books into no-dictionaries, generating some kind of rough draft, and then creating markdown (text) files for each book, posting them to github, and then editing them in collaborative fashion as you have time.

Not sure, but I would dearly love to have an interlinear Lucretius. Like you, I've looked and I haven't found one, and don't believe one exists.

Similarly I was looking for an interlinear of the DL bio of Epicurus, or Cicero's "On Ends" and haven't found any of it.

Here is a discussion of how a text-based table looks using the markdown format that would work in a git collaboration system:

https://riptutorial.com/markdown/examp…reating-a-table

Cadmus I think your post is pretty accurate, but I also think that you're in an area that is also personal preference. As in my case, I love "cats" and I love "dogs" but that doesn't imply that I have the same feelings for each of them individually. I'd say the same about "humans" as well, at least in some contexts, but the closer someone gets to saying "I love humanity in general" the more (to me) the statement is so close to being totally in the abstract that I personally think it loses its meaning.

That's kind of the distinction I see in the Stirner quote. the first part I identify with, but "I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too" comes pretty close to total idealism in my book.

But abstractions are pleasurable too, and if an abstraction like that floats someones boat, and they find it pleasurable, then more power to them. I would just make clear that their personal viewpoint doesn't qualify them as some kind of superhuman love machine that deserves some unique amount of praise.

i agree with Don's posts. I think one of the main aspects is that Epicurus would reject the view that there is an ethical imperative of some kind, through religion or simple idealism or any other source, to be "altruistic" or "selfish" either way. He would say that feeling is always contextual and practical and the circumstances will control how you deal with any situation. Appeals to "altruism" or most any "ism" are usually some kind of appeal to universal ethical absolutes, of which Epicurus rejects the existence of any and all of them. Nature provides pleasure and pain as references for what to choose and avoid - Nature does not provide universal ethical absolutes.

The most recent spurt of graphics from Nate has reminded me that between Nate and Elli and the contribution of others, we have a large stock of good quality graphics - more than enough to produce an "Epicurean Message of the Day" sequence. (Not sure whether to call it "message" or "graphic" or "meme" or something else, so we need to think about that word.

I think as a minimum we ought to implement that on these platforms:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Fediverse (primarily Mastodon)
4. Standalone website.

As to item four, I think we ought to produce a standalone website that does nothing other than showing a full-screen view of our graphics, rotated perhaps every two or three minutes. That way people with monitors or televisions not actively being used can just open up the site and leave it "playing" for hours on end.

The graphics are readily accessible but we need to figure out the technology of "bots" or some way to post on the biggest platforms automatically on a daily basis so it's not so hard to keep up with.

I think for each platform we need a separate account "EpicureanMessageOfTheDay" so that people can subscribe to that account easily and automatically without any kind of approval process. In the case of the website all you'd do is open it in your browser and the "slides" would start to rotate automatically.

In all cases, probably nothing more than a graphic and perhaps a short message something like "For further information visit ______________" (probably not EpicureanFriends, but we need an easy to type and remember landing page; probably the Epicurean Philosophy Facebook group.)

As to the website I should be able to add something pretty easily to my existing group of sites, but there too we need to find a web platform (I kind of doubt wordpress is it) that will let us automate just rotating what is essentially a slideshow.

If anyone has any experience or insight on implementing such ideas, please post here.

Good find, not only to show the obtuseness of Adams, but -- Who is De la Harpe?

Great research Joshua thank you! Aside from the merits of the point, which I think you're exactly right on, I guess I should add that even where DeWitt goes full-bore extrapolation, I'd say his extrapolations are never so wild that they deviate from the core of the philosophy. DeWitt may tend to see it in places that not all of us agree it really exists, but I'm not sure I am aware of a single instance where what he claims to be seeing is something other than an Epicurean doctrine. Both "peace and safety" and "sound mind and sound body" are surely points that Epicurus was teaching in some form.

Rather than "Peace and Safety" it is more likely that Epicurus' motto was "Total War Against the Establishment!"

A similar instance is DeWitt's "sound mind in a sound body" which I think is more likely to be accurate and representative, but which might be an embellishment to imply that it was a formulation that the Epicureans used. It's a pretty obvious concept and the more obvious something is the less likely I think the Epicureans would have considered it something unique to them.

Quote from Don

I've personally chalked this one up to Dewitt's penchant for writing embellished historical fiction.

I think I agree as to this "Peace and Safety" watchword business. I think it's a reasonable extrapolation, but it needs to be clearly considered to be that.

In earlier years I tended myself to use that phrase a lot and I think I used it frequently at NewEpicurean.com. However I've consciously stopped doing that in recent years, and I am about ready to deprecate it entirely, especially since it doesn't fit well with the "warrior Epicurean" approach that I think is more accurate. It might also possibly be a phrase that the Christians were using in a deprecating manner, which is an aspect that DeWitt might not have approved of in the way he described it.

All in all I think this is one of the examples that I would most frequently cite as a point of departure between me and DeWitt.

I don't think it's totally harmful, and I can see the strong attraction of wanting to give people who are familiar with Christianity a reason to be interested in Epicurus, but I do think this is overplayed.

I haven't pulled out DeWitt to check the reference before writing this, but I definitely agree with this:

Quote from Don

This might be one of those instances unless someone knows where there is mention of Peace and Safety as a greeting or motto in the Epicurean texts. I'll happily give a mea culpa.

Quote from Nate

cared about it, which I think he did not.

As usual I may or may not be plagiarizing this from DeWitt, but I do think that he would have cared about it to the extent that some people might equate immense size with an attribute of being a god (in the supernatural/non-Epicurean sense). I think I remember reading DeWitt say that, or maybe it was someone else, or maybe I am just dreaming it. There should be no necessary relationship between size and being a supernatural god, but I can see the possibility of enough connection that it might have been on Epicurus' mind as a reason to denounce the conclusions of those who were arguing that their geometric calculations were somehow divine.

(Note - I may be reading it into that passage from Lucian criticizing the mathematicians, which wasn't directly on point, but I think would be related. Let's see if i can find it reasonably quickly. Ok it's here:

from Lucian’s Dialog “Icaromenippus, An Aerial Expedition:”

“Menippus. Ah, but keep your laughter till you have heard something of their pretentious mystifications. To begin with, their feet are on the ground; they are no taller than the rest of us ‘men that walk the earth’; they are no sharper-sighted than their neighbors, some of them purblind, indeed, with age or indolence. And yet they say they can distinguish the limits of the sky, they measure the sun’s circumference, take their walks in the supra-lunar regions, and specify the sizes and shapes of the stars as though they had fallen from them. Often one of them could not tell you correctly the number of miles from Megara to Athens, but has no hesitation about the distance in feet from the sun to the moon. How high the atmosphere is, how deep the sea, how far it is round the earth— they have the figures for all that. Moreover, they have only to draw some circles, arrange a few triangles and squares, add certain complicated spheres, and lo, they have the cubic contents of Heaven.

Then, how reasonable and modest of them, dealing with subjects so debatable, to issue their views without a hint of uncertainty; thus it must be and it shall be; contra gentes they will have it so. They will tell you on oath the sun is a molten mass, the moon inhabited, and the stars water-drinkers, moisture being drawn up by the sun’s rope and bucket and equitably distributed among them.”

What are you guys thinking about this way of asking the question. I think I see your answer, but can this be answered clearly yes or no?

"Does Epicurus' answer allow for the possibility of the Sun being larger than the earth?"

Great research.

So if this is Aristarchus' model as to the sizes:

What do we think about whether Epicurus was disputing this, or whether is "it is the size it appears to be" can be reconciled with this, which would indicate that the sun is larger than the earth?

It could not have been lost on Epicurus that as formula in words like "it is the size it appears to be" will strike some people as too ambiguous to be useful. So is that phrasing in itself an indication that Epicurus knew very well that the sun was not the size of an orange or any everyday object like people accuse him of believing? Almost certainly he knew that a very large size was a reasonable possibility, and it doesn't appear that he wanted to eliminate that possibility, along the lines of our continuing observation that only one among several alternate possibilities can't be arbitrarily selected as the sole answer.

Maybe that's an easier way to ask the question.

"Does Epicurus' answer allow for the possibility of the Sun being larger than the earth?"

I wonder if the Antikythera mechanism, or other Greek diagrams of the solar system (if they exist) would not give us insight into their way of looking at this. Perhaps the diagrams showing the sun to be large, and yet no so large as to swallow up the earth many thousands of times over, would help us get a more balanced picture of the situation.

https://scitechdaily.com/2000-year-old-…first-computer/

It seems clear that he thought it was important to limit the distance on the grounds that (1) light sources don't shrink as much as other objects at a distance and (2) things that we see sharply don't tend to be as far away as objects that seem to us to be blurry.

But on the other hand we see the sun and moon on the horizon as further away or at least comparable in size to the mountain ranges, and we know the mountains to be huge.

I am thinking that part of the answer here lies, as in other areas, in comparing Epicurus to what he was arguing against. I don't have a reference but I seem to have picked up over the years that the people Epicurus was arguing against (Pythagoreans?) had calculated the sun to be huge as part of their program of seeing the sun (and maybe moon and stars) as gods, and so they were using their calculations of the size being hugely bigger than the earth itself as part of their program of deeming the sun to be a god. (Not sure what they thought about the size of the moon. Did they have that right?)

So maybe it would be clearly to us what Epicurus was saying if we knew that he thought it was possible and acceptable that the sun be bigger than the mountains, just so long as he didn't have to admit that the sun was many times larger than the earth itself.

That probably takes us back to the issue of what the model really was. Our world is clearly not the center of the universe, but was the earth the center of our world? If so, then we might have the perspective there that would allow us to see that Epicurus could admit that the sun was pretty large just so long as the calculating didn't have it swallowing up the whole "world." And we could probably come up with a picture or diagram that would make the position a lot more clear, and a lot less ridiculous-looking, than presuming he meant the sun was the size of a basketball.

In fact, a diagram of our "world" in Epicurean terms would be highly helpful for many uses.