Posts by Cassius

LOL. And that's why I made those remarks about "Don will come in and explain all of this to us!" --- we can count on Don to go right to the heart of the issue!

So that I can add something more than this joke to this thread, let me poke another bear I've poked often in the past. When I was much younger I used to study the works of Ayn Rand, and from that experience I came away with it burned into me that "Here is someone (Rand) who really does in fact worship "reason."

I recall reading that she wanted the word "RATIONAL" on her headstone, even though I don't think she eventually did that.

And of course no one reading Rand can escape her worship of Aristotle as a virtual god of reason.

Then in subsequent years added to that I became familiar with the Stoics and observed that they were doing almost exactly the same thing as Rand in putting "reason" at the center of their analysis.

So this is where I see more of that "context" I've discussed recently with camotero. Some people are brought up steeped in religion, and so they are always interested in how Epicurus jibes with the religions viewpoint. I pretty much check that box personally. And then some get exposed to the Rand-like approach where they are taught to hold reason as essentially the standard of all things -- reason being the essence of what Rand would refer to as "man qua man." And I think if we set our minds to it we could come up with literal gobs of examples of philosophers all across the ages in that same boat, singing hymns of praise to "reason."

So in balancing how Epicurus could say both PD16 praising reason, while still in the rest of his philosophy putting reason in a firm secondary role to his "canon of truth," I think we need to take into account that it's very possible that Epicurus was as fed up with the worship of "reason" as I can get myself today when I let myself think about it too long.

Therefore we aren't talking about Epicurus opposing reason in the form of "common sense" or simple "consistency" or those ordinary senses. All of those I think he fully endorsed. We're talking about Epicurus pointing out the "limits of reason" specifically including those who try to use formal /syllogistic / symbolic logic to convince us to overturn the more day-to-day conclusions that we reach through the ordinary use of our ordinary faculties.

That's why I think Jefferson was exactly right in this quote below (once you take out the deistic tone that Jefferson was probably using to protect himself). I think Epicurus was essentially in tune with the last part I am highlighting from the letter Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.

It's hard for me to read this sentence: "This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense"

..... without thinking of Diogenes Laertius' " For all thoughts have their origin in sensations by means of coincidence and analogy and similarity and combination, reasoning too contributing something."

I realize this applies probably only to ethics, and we're talking more than that, but I do think it's instructive, so here's the full paragraph:

Quote

He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his Nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the [beautiful], truth, &c., as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

Yes Nate it's mainly a question of how you define the target of a list. Saying an occasional good word about Epicurus here and there is probably not enough to consider someone an Epicurean, but again it's all in the context of how you're setting up your chart. There are many people who say a good word about him who I wouldn't dream of calling Epicurean.

To me, I don't generally start considering them Epicurean until they've at least ruled out supernatural gods, ruled out life after death, they specifically talk about pleasure as the goal and distinguish that from virtue, and say at least something in the direction of general materialism. I don't know that with Mandeville we have good documentation except for the pleasure part.

Thanks for the background in your post. We definitely both in the forum and in the podcast the effect of different upbringings. You will probably hear in the podcast Elayne say that she was brought up in a very scientific family with little religious influence. The amount of time someone has been faced with religious doctrines definitely influences how interested they are in discussing those subjects.

Two of your comments concern me though:

Quote from camotero

So, reason, has been a great tool for me at many times, thus I have a bit of trouble putting it in a secondary role

Quote from camotero

And thus, I circle back to reason, to touch on the risks of following pleasure withouth the check of reason.

I think you're probably not yet seeing what I think is the real issue, especially in the second comment. I think what people in your situation (as I understand it) would be better of saying is something like this:

Quote

"So "reason" has been a great tool for me at many times, and I have always been taught and thought that being reasonable was the best anyone can be. Thus I have a bit of trouble dealing with the idea that any part of what most people think of as "reason" can be a problem. I've always understood formal logic, or syllogistic logic, or dialectical logic (whatever you want to call it) to be a good thing, and thus it is surprising to me that Epicurus pointed out many dangers and damaging effects that go along with the misuse of those things.

Further, I have always considered "reason" to be the ultimate test of truth, and I find it very disconcerting to hear that Epicurus held that the "senses," as well as pleasure and pain and something called "anticipations" (which I don't understand) to be the test of truth, with reason in a secondary role only adding a little. It's hard even to begin to understand what he means, because doesn't everything have to be "reasonable" to make sense? If I understand now what Epicurus was saying, it appears he was saying that reason is a part of the opinion-making process, and since the opinion-making process is always subject to error, it's a bad idea to take an "opinion" as unchallengeable in any situation. It appears to me now that what Epicurus was saying is that at any moment the only data we have that is unchallengeable to us, because we experience it in the moment, come from the five senses, pleasure and pain, and those pesky anticipations. He seems to have been saying that while reasoning is an important part of the opinion-making and conclusion-reaching process, reaching the right result in reasoning is totally dependent on observations of reality that can be verified, and the only things given to us by nature that have direct contact with reality are the three canonical faculties.

After all, Epicurus also said "PD16. In but few things chance hinders a wise man, but the greatest and most important matters, reason has ordained, and throughout the whole period of life does and will ordain."

So the more I study it seems that what Epicurus was concerned about was focusing our attention on the data we get from our natural faculties that we take as "givens," and that those serve as the "ruler" against which we compare our opinions to judge their correctness. We can say that various parts of the opinion-making involve reason, but we never look at "reason alone," and especially the kind of "reason alone" that *can* be used by certain philosophers and other people, as the ultimate thing that we compare our opinions against."

So especially on your second quote, you do use "reason" as a part of evaluating your decisions and deciding what to choose and what to avoid. But the ruler ("the tool of precision" according to DeWitt) is not the standard of truth. (As an exception to illustrate the rule, if you want to invent a new system, a particular object *can* be made to be a standard, if for example you set up a certain bar somewhere as a unit of measurement, like Wikipedia says: "In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889).)" Even in the case of using a particular bar as a standard, you then develop "rulers" against that standard and you use those rulers as your tool in everyday life.

But in general, any measuring device was originally developed against some other standard, against which which the measuring device was created. What we are talking about here is that Epicurus said the ultimate standard of conduct is pleasure and pain, because that's all Nature gave us as stop and go signals. All our tests of what will eventually happen to us are judged against that. "Reason" is best considered as a tool, as a sort of measuring device, just like all of the "virtues." There is no absolute standard of "reason" or "reasonableness" anywhere in a Bureau of Standards in Brussels or anywhere else. And the common danger involved in thinking about "reason" in itself, just like all of the "virtues," is that people start worshiping the virtues in themselves, and consider "virtue to be its own reward."

The same thing is going on with "reason." Reason is by no means its own reward, and it should not be worshiped as a goal or an end in itself, but that is exactly what many people and philosophers seem to do, whether they are up front about it or not.

I do remember Elayne mentioning anhedonia perhaps even once or twice on the podcast

I've now read the two articles posted by Don and they have been very helpful so thank you Don! Now it's time for me to drop back and get some comments from others in here!

Additional Resource: Asmis - Epicurus' Scientific Method (Article on which her later book of the same name was based).

Also: According to the second link Don posted, this is a very important article, and corrects mistakes made by Barnes in Barnes' own article. But I am not sure it is going to be something we can find. Anyway, this is one I'd love to have, since i am almost as much a fan of AA Long as I am of David Sedley.

This formulation here sounds reasonable to me, and I begin to get the strong feeling that Epicurus would have disapproved a lot of these arguments, as per the Elizabeth Asmis note just above. I am getting the feeling that a lot of these arguments are unwise and similar to Torquatus thinking that he needed an elaborate and abstract argument about the nature and role of pleasure. All of this "necessity" and "essentialism" argument does not seem to me consistent with Epicurus' original position, so i suspect the comment highlighted below here is correct:

Well THIS certainly has my "red alert" alarm jumping and on the lookout for deviations by later Epicureans. Maybe i haven't been radical enough in thinking that Epicurus was on the warpath against formal logic:

I'm just a fountain of random points of interest tonight!

THIS is interesting in asserting that the enemy was not the Stoics but the Academics. I don't know that I have a dog in that fight (Stoics vs Academics) because I think it's important to see that they were all generally allied against Epicurus (not just the Stoics).

It's interesting that the correct title of the book may be "On Signs and Sign Inferences"

Ok this is from the second article that Don linked, so there's definitely a revised edition of the De Lacey translation which we need to get our hands on:

Here is something that needs to be researched:

The source is : https://www.academia.edu/4198417/Philod…semiotic_debate

Well thanks for the kind words, but I think a large part of the issue is that Sedley and De Lacey and most of the rest probably have a different goal than I do. They seem to be writing for each other in the Academic world, in which the people writing their books are expected to be familiar with the state of academic writing and be familiar with the arguments. So they end up chasing each other further and further down rabbit holes which are indeed worth exploring, but they aren't writing to try to focus on and to "popularize" the main take-home points of the philosophy to everyday people. Once they describe the details the academics think (and maybe rightly so) that their job is done. They aren't paid and they aren't claiming to be social reformers.

As a secondary factor I think there is a lot of pressure in Academia to toe the establishment line on the value of formal logic and to maintain respect for the core Greek authorities (of whom they don't number Epicurus, except to the extent they can force him into the Stoic mold with "absence of pain" analysis).

In all fairness to them they've built up a lot of good information, but it's long past time for people outside of academia to realize what the issues are and run with them. This issue of the role of "logic" is explosively counter-trend to the majority viewpoint, and is equal if not more serious than the views of religion and pleasure. In many ways a form of "atheism" is standard now in academia, and the academics are very familiar with unconventional views of pleasure as well. But I actually think that this "logic" analysis challenges the what they see as the real keys of their kingdom, so it doesn't get nearly as much notice as it should.

And of course as you're saying in your comments, it IS very dense and complex, so it takes some work to ferret out what's really going on here.

OK back to the topic because I want to compare my views with what others are seeing.

Ok having read to the end of Sedley's article I think he acquits himself well and his whole article is in my view supportive of Epicurus. It's also in my view largely consistent with De Lacey.

I don't think this was the target of the article and so I don't criticize him for it, but it seems to me that Sedley dives deeper and deeper into detail without ever coming back at the end of the article to discuss why the whole issue is significant.

That is OUR task, to clarify and articulate the important lessons to be learned from the fight between Stoic and Epicurean methods of "logic."

And at the moment I am not inclined to think I need to change my assessment that DeLacey has the practical importance of the issue well summarized here:

Thus the Epicureans were at war with those (Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics) who held that inferences from signs ( i.e., true opinions) are not reliable unless they can be stated into formal logically valid syllogisms. In other words, the ability to play games with words to make up a logically consistent assertion is not what establishes truth for us. Rather, its always the ability to judge the contours of truth by our canonical faculties is what establishes truth for us.

So the reverse of the Stoic position is actually the case and seems to be the position the Epicureans took: it is only when an opinion can be confirmed through repeated and reliable observations of the canonical faculties that something is established as true for us.

Not gonna get off on this right now, but we ought to make note that if this assertion is correct it plays into "isonomia" and probably "nature never makes only a single thing of a kind." I haven't looked up this reference in Lucretius:

Page 261 and 262 are very dense where Sedley is asking why the Epicureans seemed to concede a part of the argument.

We'll ask Don to comment particularly on that one!

What's going through my mind too is that these are the 70 BC Roman Epicureans like Torquatus who were willing to deviate from Epicurus, so I wouldn't concede that any concessions made by them were necessarily made by Epicurus himself.

Yes this is really the whole ball of wax. The Platonist /Stoics are playing "word games." They are asserting that by means of incantations -- If this, then that - and similar syllogistic reasoning they can deduce "universals" that they attach a truly mystical significance too, and the Epicureans were fighting all the way against that. Our wishes and our words do not create reality -- reality is reality, and we simply do the best we can to describe it in words. There are no "forms" or "ideas" or "concepts" floating in the air waiting for us to discover them.

At this moment I am rushing to finish David Sedley's article to see if I am going to be forever struck-through-the heart disappointed in him, or whether he basically agrees with DeLacey's point I keep underlining. I am sure there was and is a lot of pressure on him to go with the Stoic/Platonic position.

Yes I am thinking that "On Signs" and "On Methods of Inference" are probably one and the same Herculaneum scroll

Probably a very important summary of the Epicurean position that our opinions should be based on observation and experience and not on "pure logic"