Posts by Cassius

Lots of interesting stuff in there, but I have to comment on this:

Quote

As a symbol that oversees the enactment of official papal decrees in the Stanza Della Segnatura, Heraclitus’s ink pot (from which notions of the fleetingness of all authority would pour forth), is a courageously subversive symbol. It denies power by declaiming the futility of any attempt to inscribe oneself indelibly into the world. It and it alone sanctions the fluidity of identity that Raphael ingeniously constructs (and deconstructs) across the surface of his painting. Remove the ink pot from the epicentre of Raphael’s fresco, and the work dissolves into a fiasco of confused and confusing forms. Heraclitus’s profound, if overlooked, ink pot is the very well-spring from which the elastic energy of Raphael’s masterpiece endlessly emanates.

Oh come on, Kelly Grovier! (the author) Do you really expect to be taken seriously when you say something like It's all about the inkpot?

Lots of good points bring made. I woke up thinking about this that has probably already been covered, but how firm is the identificstion of the group to the right of Plato with one or more Stoics? If that group were shown to be clearly stoic, I suspect that Raphael and his contractors would have had a hard time resisting the parallelism of putting one or more Epicureans on Socrates left to mirror them and keep things "even.". Regardless of what anyone knew about what anyone looked like from the bustd, I gather that the church always held Cicero in high regard, and never lost his works, and it would be impossible to know about his "On Ends" and not know that Epicureans were one of the major schools that would leave a major gap if omitted.

All I can say for sure right now is that it is definitely an interesting debate.

As to the Speucippus that's based ONLY on proximity, correct? Or are there likenesses or descriptions of Speucippus that support that?

Great research and thank you!

But I have to say that the speculation that either the descending figure (blue) or the ascending figure (long hair looking away) seem to me to be absolutely and totally fanciful and I see no way in the world that these guys had anything to go on other than sheer speculation.

Do you gather that they had any reasoning other than wanting to put Epicurus in the scene?

I was looking back at Munro's notes as I was posting this week's episode:

Quote

416-431: I will now describe how the various parts of the world were formed: as we said above, it was not by design that atoms framed it; but after many fruitless collisions, they chanced to fall into such motions as produced the world and all that is in it.

I think we can all understand Munro's phrasing, and how most people would relate to it. But I don't think Epicurus/Lucretius would agree with it - especially the word "fruitless." This phrasing gives the impression that for an eternity before us the atoms were working on rearranging themselves all so they could arrive at the beneficent arrangement in which they find themselves in the month of May in the year of our lord 2021. Or at least the year 5000 BC or 10 billion or whatever starting point you'd like to affix as particularly significant. (I think in my case I'll pick 753 BC for the founding of Rome!)

I doubt seriously whether that kind of perspective is consistent with what Epicurus wanted to convey The motion of the atoms has never been any more or less "fruitless" (in the sense of reaching some point of particular importance to Nature) than the motion that's going on today. There's both no starting point and no end point from the Epicurean perspective.

Episode 71 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. In this episode, we will read approximately Latin line 416 -508 of Book V, and we will talk about the formation of the world (which in Epicurean terms is not the whole universe, but our local part of it, from the fundamental elements. As always, please let us know any comments or questions in the thread below:

That makes Bailey sound more reasonable. Hard to say why Sedley and Long are so sure otherwise. I guess it doesn't include no fixed time and no fixed place.

I have the podcast edited so will be posting in next couple of hours at most.

Nate you are the artist among us. What are your current thoughts on this question?

All I read was the abstract but it didn't sound promising. Instead of the common sense easy to understand illustration that "true" means "honest" or "without opinion" combined with DeWitt's comparison to witnesses in court, the abstract seems to want to launch off into typical academic obscurity by referencing terms like "propositional, existential, and factive" meanings of the word true.

Epicurean philosophy is simple and direct enough to be understood by children, and this part of the doctrine is no exception. Spending too much time on articles like this may provide some benefit to "us" who are really into the details, but it is just a shame that people can't be up front and direct rather than hiding important observations in the weeds.

I haven't had time to read this (by Philop Hardie et al.) but since it appears relatively new (2020, and in fact still in draft) I am putting a link here for reference

https://www.academia.edu/40698907/Lucre…card=view-paper

I'm going by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato (now that one might not bear much resemblance due to the age issue)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

Of course it is hard to know whether or how these were identified as being of the people asserted.

Yes I am wanting to be very specific that I am not criticizing you (Don) or Joshua or anyone else personally, including Takis, for their positions on this issue.

I think the whole question presents a very interesting and clear way to discuss many issues of epistemology in a low-impact setting devoid of political or other aspects that would introduce bias or emotion too much into the picture.

You've listed a good set of various possibilities as to the result, and it would be equally interesting to discuss some of the issues that Elli is raising about - "Given the evidence, what are the possibilities for how to process that evidence? How much do we defer to consensus, or authority, or speculation, and when does speculation based on "some" evidence rise to the level of something to be entertained, or believed, and when does it not?"

I see the question of "when do we defer to the consensus of authorities" and "when do we pursue our own judgment that conflicts with those of authorities" as maybe one of the most important and regularly-occurring ones that we could address.

Certainly it seems to me that Epicurus was in almost complete rebellion against the philosophic opinions of his day, so we know that willingness to take an independent stand was important to him, but I think we have a long way to go to describe how he himself dealt with prior consensus and authority, or how we can apply his example ourselves.

Elli: Given the new development about the changes in the two characters you are looking at between draft and final execution, maybe it's time for you (or someone) to update your article?

When you say:

Quote from elli

Μyths and fairytales (Jesus and Saul/Paul) mixed with books and movies (Umberto Eco and Dan Brown) and a totally rejection of the two criteria of truth of the Canon which are our own eyes and our feelings for the examination on the issue: where and who is Epicurus on the fresco by Raphael?

I would say that it would be extremely interesting to see a discussion of that argument. I think it's easy to understand how your would assert that your senses (eyes) bear on the issue, but not so easy to explain how "feelings" play into the assertion. After the evidence of the eyes (which I think is strong), I would think that we are left with little more than a long chain of deductive reasoning based largely on hearsay as to the proper identification of the two figures. I think it would be useful to discuss through this example how an Epicurean DOES used deductive reasoning (tied closely to the senses) just as Epicurus used deductive reasoning throughout his physics.

And the article could also discuss how it becomes very difficult to get out from under a consensus after it is long formed and has assumed the air of an authority, but that an Epicurean will trust his senses and his own reasoning (if he is confident enough of it) against a consensus of other people no matter how large that consensus might be, depending on the evidence.

I tagged you in a note about the article that Don linked to - here is a statement in one of its footnotes that makes the point that I simply cannot /do not accept as true.

It looks like the article contains a lot of good historical information even for someone (like me) who rejects certain of its fundamental premises from the start. The idea that Raphael had no models to work by and guessed at the central figures from descriptions, but that his "guesses" proved so accurate to the busts in so many cases, strikes me as absurd. Hopefully as I read further into the article the writer won't take an extreme position on that.

OK I have read it. He does take the pretty extreme position, but the article is focused on disputing the identity of the figure sitting on the steps in front of Plato and Aristotle, which the write says is Socrates rather than Diogenes the Cynic, as is apparently the consensus today. Some reasonably good arguments in it, but the contention flies in the face of the other Socrates figure being a dead ringer for the bust that is today identified with Socrates. Maybe the identification of the bust of Socrates and his location in the picture is wrong, but since the article is really based on the contention that Raphael had little or no knowledge of the ancient busts, i am very skeptical.

And maybe we can check other translations of Diogenes Laertius and compare. I think we have access to at least one and maybe two more recent editions (but not in public domain). Also we can check Epicurus reader, which seems to bear out Sedley and Long

:

Quote from Don

Can't tell if it addresses Epicurus directly, but the abstract seems to contend that Raphael didn't use portrait sculpture for any of the portraits. Even Socrates was supposedly derived from textual descriptions.

Not questioning you, Don, but the statement on its face. Can such a theory even be seriously entertained? We need that full article because this assertion I want to read in detail.

And yes I think you're correct to observe that even in the course of someone who is extremely anti-Vatican, and anti-Church, and slow to impute "good" motives to any of them, it would be part of the thesis of someone arguing Elli's point that Raphael (at least Raphael, if not his Church supervisors) wanted to be accurate in placing Epicurus in a position more consistent with his central role in Greek philosophy, rather than banish him to the edges or some other unflattering position.

More Sedley from the same article, and this time he says: "contain no hint." More weight to the "Bailey uses the wrong word" possibility:

And just to be sure I am not misquoting Bailey in the "Core Texts" page here, here is a screenshot from "Epicurus, the Extant Remains" - Apparently Sedley thinks that whatever is translated here as "some swerving" is really "no hint of the swerve doctrine."

Well here ya go again - I guess my memory was a little better than I thought. Here's David Sedley - the phrase "does not feature" is not the same as "does not appear" but i tend to think "does not appear" is probably what he means given the "nonetheless amply attested as his" (?) My tendency at this point is to question Bailey's translation.

Here's what I was probably remembering as to there being nothing in the letter to Herodotus (or the other letters) from Epicurus himself. This is from A.A. Long's "Chance and Natural Law in Epicureanism." Maybe the word Bailey translates as "swerve" is something else, or maybe the meaning of this passage from Long isn't exactly saying what it seems at first glance to say. Maybe Long is referring only to a certain aspect (free will) of the swerve?

However I don't think this is the only such reference to the swerve being only in Lucretius:

Quote

And the atoms move continuously for all time, some of them falling straight down, others swerving, and others recoiling from their collisions.

And of the latter, some are borne on, separating to a long distance from one another, while others again recoil and recoil, whenever they chance to be checked by the interlacing with others, or else shut in by atoms interlaced around them.

Maybe I am wrong to think that commentators assert that the swerve is not in Herodotus, because Bailey uses that word in the above excerpt from his translation of it. Or maybe its really a different word, or the point is that Lucretius' version is significantly more detailed.

The letter also says that the universe as a whole is now as it always has been, so maybe the thought that there was ever a "first" swerve leading to the atoms getting entangled is the inconsistent piece, and maybe that was and remained Epicurus' own position.

I would think Epicurus would have held tightly to the view that while we can look narrowly at "local" events as having "firsts" and "lasts," that as to the universe as a whole there is and never has been anything truly new.