Posts by Cassius

I think that again we need to keep in mind how important "images" seem to have been to the Epicureans, and maybe we don't appreciate how they were understanding them.

I also need to reread the DeWitt chapter(s) on the canon. He wrestles with all this and if I recall correctly seems to have had some productive things to say about how the three categories work together.

Quote from JJElbert

something sensed objectively.

I think you are going in the right direction but the word "objectively" is probably a dead end. I think Epicurus is using pain and pleasure as totally subjective and we alone are the judge of it -- if it feels good, it is pleasurable, if it feels bad it is painful. If there were an "objective" standard then we would have something absolute higher than our own pain and pleasure and I think the physics / cosmology rules that out.

And oh yes, "passions" is definitely another word that needs to be considered. And yes that word has been corrupted even more so than pleasure. But passions is probably most directly related to Pathe and so part of the heritage of the words.

Quote from JJElbert

Epicurus believed that both aspects of his philosophy were discoverable through an epistemology of sensation, feeling, and anticipation—an epistemology that was therefore not strictly empirical.

Joshua just posted this sentence recently in another thread. I could find countless numbers where I list the epistemology the same way.

And yet I can't get free of the feeling that in this list - sensation, feeling, and anticipation - we are still spinning around with less precision than we should. Do not the words "sensation" and "feeling" denote almost exactly the same thing to us today in English? At least in terms of touch, we tend to say after we touch something "How does it feel?" Not so with sight, or hearing, or smell, or taste, however.

Do the names of the categories really tell us what the difference between the "five senses" are from the "feelings" of pain and pleasure? I know at times I have deferred to a term like "natural faculties" as the catch-all name to include all three but I have no strong opinion that any formulation I've ever heard really captures the subject well.

Maybe the standard terms of sense / sensation and feeling are indeed the best words to use, but we definitely need a very clear definition attached to them at the start as to what they are intended to convey, and what they include and what they don't.

And of course in this discussion we haven't really touched at all on aticipations, but if indeed this list of three has any parallel at all within it, then anticipations must be a form of "sense" as well -- at least in the manner of speaking so as to reference a "faculty of contact between our minds and the world outside our minds" or a "faculty by which our minds make contact with the world outside our minds" or a "mechanism by which our minds perceive the world outside our minds."

But even then we probably need to include more than just "the world outside our minds" since we are pretty clearly including the pleasure or pain we feel at our own thoughts/memories, which are presumably part of and within our own minds.

Quote from Don

Unfortunately, Latin is not my forte. I'll defer to others on that one.

For my contribution, in poking around on the Perseus Digital Library, it seemed like *maybe* variations on sentiō were used by Lucretius and Cicero (who are cited in the definition). However, I also seemed to be seeing Cicero would just say "pleasure and pain" (voluptas et dolores?) and it gets translated as "feelings of pleasure and pain."

That would not be surprising to me. I get the impression that sensation might be the best umbrella word after all and that the term "five senses" is more of a problem than a help. We might need to dig into how it became thought that that name came to be considered a good term for the "first leg" of the canonical tripod.

The Romans should have had enough understanding of Epicurus to get these terms correct, and I tend to think that their word choices probably deserve more credit than we give them.

Don or Godfrey, both of you may know the ancient languages better than me -- Do either of you know what latin word might have been used by Cicero or Lucretius in discussing pathe? My experience is that the latin words frequently have a more familiar ring to them than the Greek but I am not sure what they used rather than pathe. I know Lucretius used voluptas for pleasure which is an example of having a better (but far from perfect) ring to it in a modern english ear. You're right that "pathetic" probably makes pathe a non-starter. The point Godfrey was referencing is that I do think that using an untranslated word from a foreign language is usually a bad idea. Surely we can express the same meaning in English, even if we have to force-combine or otherwise coin a term.

Thinking back to my original source of all philosophic inspiration, Star Treck Original Series, I remember the episode entitled "the EmPATH" which ranks near the top of my all time LEAST favorite episodes. So I start with a poor impression of the word "pathe" from many angles

Yep that expands the problem! Quite possibly the root of the problem is that the religionists and the Platonists not only won over the ancient schools, they succeeded in removing from the language the proper alternative means of discussing the guides of life that are true, rather than their own words for the discussion of gods and virtue.

Yes the issue is with the word "pathe" which just doesn't work in English conversation. What word does?

in reading the above, I kept looking for a plain and simple statement of what appears to be the fundamental premise about all this in Epicurean theory. Would this be correct?

"Perceptions" and "sensations" are closely related terms describing different aspects of the mechanisms of experience that generate what we call "feeling." There are only two feelings, pleasure and pain, which means that everything we experience is either pleasurable or painful. All of the discussion about highest and best pleasures and their duration and evaluation revolve around the basic observation that all experience is either one or the other, which means that the presence of one means the absence of the other, and thus that the purest/most intense form of experiencing either one is when the other is totally absent. Life is all about feeling, and the state of being without feeling is nothing to us (death).

The reason this sounds sterile is that it is a high level abstract analysis useful for framing the debate with Plato and dialecticians and defeating their arguments. The advice of Epicurus is not to live in this world of words, however, but of feeling, and if we stay in this mode for too long, longer than is necessary to see the perversity of the dialecticians, then we become trapped like flies on flypaper. The point of Epicurean philosophy is to see this dialectical trap and escape from it to the real world of feeling, not linger in the world of dialectics thinking that we've reached some height of "ataraxia" simply because we have succeeded in pointing out that the Emperor Plato and his minions have no clothes.

OK yes it was the "angelos" that made me think of a religious connotation. That is all good to know.

Also in this thread on collaboration / evangelization, it's of course a major issue that every step forward we have to be constantly on the lookout for a particular land mine: modern/partisan politics. It's natural that in wanting to take action with our friends that we're going to find discussions bleeding over into "politics" in which those of us from different backgrounds/locations/etc have different interests. We all want to think that our way of seeing the world is the "right" one, and that everyone who is an Epicurean will agree with us, but it seems to me that that just isn't so, and it is very disappointing to people when they realize that. We all tend to identify with respective groupings that have never been much influenced by Epicurean philosophy, and even if that we different, I think we have to confront that a shared collaboration based solely on "ideas" has serious Platonic problems in theory. We aren't disembodied sets of ideas, we are real people with real backgrounds and real personal interests.

So as we talk about collaboration and evangelization I have come to the view that it's absolutely essential to find a way with that source of conflict. And ironically I don't think the answer lies in "live unknown" because I think that's one of the worst misinterpretations of the doctrines. Again that's what we've tried to prepare people for with the rules that we post here at Epicureanfriends.com, and I think that has to carry over into most any collaboration.

If we didn't already have enough evidence of the stress this can cause in the community, the events of the world in the last couple of months should be sufficient for us never to doubt that again! It's no doubt going to be very tricky to navigate these waters when feelings run so hot, as they should.

But in the end I do think there is enough commonality in the core viewpoints to sustain a "fraternity" of people collaborating on the core ideas. (It always seems right to try to list them when a discussion like this comes up; surely the list is something like (1) no supernatural realm or order, (2) no reward or punishment or life of any kind after death, (3) identification of the goal and guide of life with feeling, primarily pleasure, rather than virtue or piety; (4) the view that it is correct to be confident that we can attain knowledge that is based on"reasoning" tied tightly to the senses, the anticipations, and feelings, rather than to dialectical logic; (5) a common sense view of the universe being totally natural and effectively infinite in size, eternal in time, and in which humans on earth are neither the only life in the universe nor the highest. I was about to stop there but perhaps it must be included that humans possess a degree of agency that assures us that neither fate nor theories of hard determinism make it useless for us to exert ourselves to improve our lives.

Anyway the basic point of this post that I think it's always essential to identify the unifying factors and also inoculate ourselves against the forces that will attempt to divide us.

Note: "Collaboration" is such and obvious and innocent word that I re-titled the thread to include it. "Evangelization" or synonyms probably need emphasis too, but probably more discussion first. Maybe it seems to me that "evangelization" is a term that is most frequently combined with something that clearly sets out the principles being evangelized, and I am not sure the thread title is ready for that.

Also:

In the past we always ran into the reefs when we tried to come up with a statement of principles or other list of priorities that we could use as a point of agreement on what we are promoting. I think over the last year (almost two now) we've done a lot of work on that with the "Not NeoEpicurean" list and assorted articles elaborating on its points.

So I think while there will certainly be lots of adjustment, we're further along now than we've ever been in the past. We don't have a huge number of people yet, but we've been more clear from the beginning that this isn't just another eclectic / neo-Stoic site.

I'm personally another year closer to full retirement and more time to devote to this, plus with the "turmoil" going on in the world there is more opening for new thinking, even though there might also be developing more issues of censorship that could eventually be a problem.

One thing I really think is helpful is for us to have skype conversations, and camotero (and others who are reading this and might be interested) I hope you can consider joining us on one of those.

I think that's the area where we need more creative thought. How do we build closer bonds and get and keep motivated around a common goal, while at the same time making sure that our efforts to build numbers don't turn into a 'big tent' strategy that waters down the objective?

1 - My how times have changed. There was a time when I was convinced that Don would never cite anything that DeWitt said about the christian analogy approvingly!

2 - Yes "Evangelism" and synonyms for it are the obvious word choices, although the "collaboration" aspect is also clearly what we are offering.

3 - Yes I started a wiki earlier but have not had time to expand it; I use it mainly for the Lucretius texts: http://www.epicrueanfriends.com/wiki

4 - Yes I do want to comment that after a lot of thought and debate in the past I think "Classical Epicurean" is probably the best tag line. I would never want to give in and admit that what we are talking about is not purely Epicurean, because I see the other versions as adulterations, not this version.

5 - Wait - so WHAT is the root of evangelize? It is greek and not latin? And the greek does not have a religious connotation?

I bet several here will have good suggestions about this, particularly Charles

My first thoughts are

*1* You are on the right track, with Epicurus stands in the materialist camp, and Plato and the Stoics are in the idealist camp, with Plato most firmly there.

*2* Yes Epicurus is on the empiricist side, with important distinctions. I would definitely be sure to consult DeWitt on this (as on point one). The empiricists are said to neglect logic, which DeWitt will argue is not the case with Epicurus.

I agree that it is very useful to compare Epicurus to later figures, but I am obviously partial to Epicurus' mix/flavor on these things, and I don't think you are going to find much that resembles Epicurus' complete picture anywhere else.

Episode 24 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available:

Good thoughts. What word would you suggest as more appropriate than "activism"?

I think most of the issues here revolve around the limited time that those of us who are here have, but there is also an underlying issue of what " activism" should mean. We can write torrents of words here, and definitely gain some pleasure from that, but unless we have "real-life" friends of the type Epicurus was referring to, and nor just "virtual" friends, then the pleasure we gain will not be as full as it could be, nor will the issues of "safety" be addressed.

I think we have something of a chicken and egg situation in that there is no possibility of having real Epicurean friends unless there are real Epicureans, and there can be no real Epicureans unless work is done as we try here to articulate what that means. (Yes I will be frank and say that I do not consider those who focus on the Academic version of Epicurus to be real Epicureans.)

It is definitely taking longer to make progress then I had hoped, but I do think the participants here already have helped build a resource the likes of which have not been available for a very long time. And we have taken steps to identify a core of people who are not content to define their goal in life as a pseudonym for nothingness.

I think most of us here already can articulate that vision in core terms that are sufficient for our day to day use, even while we enjoy pursuing further details.

The trick now is to find a way to get the message and "vision" out further. The Academic world was apparently not the primary receptive audience in the ancient world, nor is it going to be today. It seems to me that Epicurus was always and will always be the best fit for practical common sense people who are averse to Mumbo-Jumbo and unrealistic expectations, so the issue is how to find and connect with those, who aren't necessarily going to be found on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, or hanging out in philosophy interest groups (the last of which is possibly the most toxic of all, as it appeals to eclecticism and skepticism).

Hopefully with the current upheavals going on in society we can identify new alternatives, and hopefully the work we have done so far will be of some help.

Thanks to Michele Pinto for the following:

Free like Epicurus, the second Epicurean festival

The event will take place in Senigallia from 23rd to 25th July 2020. Three days during which writers, youtubers, academic professors, singers-songwriters and artists will perform on stage to spread, to live and to actualize the message of freedom and happiness theorized by Epicurus.

During the Festival, the winners of the award will present their theses to the audience. Announcement of the winners is below.

Full article here: https://www.senigallia.co.uk/2020/06/27/the…-topics/804751/

As part of the festival there will be recognition of winners in the latest Epicurean thesis competition, including presentation by the authors:

Two theses on the current relevance of Epicurean thought in a draw for the NetoIP award.

Friendship, politics and the ability of summarizing philosophical theories in order to make them accessible to everybody are the topics discussed in the two winning theses of the first NetoIP award for the best degree and PhD theses on Epicurus.

Among all the theses presented, the chairman of the jury, Professor Roberto Radice, has decided to reward those presented by graduate Tiziana di Fabio and graduate Vincenzo Damiani.

Tiziana di Fabio, with her thesis titled “Giustizia e philia: Politica e filosofia nell’ Epicureismo greco” (“Justice and Philia: Politics and Philosophy in Greek Epicureanism”) has demonstrated how the famous Epicurean quote “live hidden” was never a total ban towards the devotion to politics, retracing the steps of many philosophers belonging to the Epicurean tradition who had a voice, some even remarkable, in the administration of greek poleis.

Vincenzo Damiani has examined the literary genre known as compendium or epitome, which was extremely important for Epicurus. The need for this format appeared to Epicurus when he realized that philosophy should be made comprehensible and easy to be memorized by every category of people who wish to reach happiness in concrete terms, both those who were near and far from the Athens Garden.

“We chose two theses, professor Radice explains, but all of them were of a very high-level competence, taking into account of all the technical and communicative aspects.”

Both theses will be awarded by Giacomo Di Napoli, CEO of NetolP, during the event “Liberi come Epicuro, secondo festival epicureo” (“Free like Epicurus, the second Epicurean festival”) organized by the online newspaper Vivere Senigallia from 23rd to 25th July 2020. To the winners Di Napoli will hand over a NetolP phone card as well as the 1.500€ prize to be split between them.

“I love to think and to believe that our work," Di Napoli explains, "makes possible what has been written and described in the winning theses. What would the philia be like, what would the friendship described by Tiziana di Fabio in her thesis be like, without a good remote talk? All of us know how important the web is for distant teaching. I’m looking forward to meeting the winners in Senigallia during the Epicurean Festival”.

“It’s really appreciated when a local newspaper like Vivere Senigallia puts itself at the service of the city and decides to organize a festival," Marco Giovanelli, the president of ANSO (Associazione Nazionale Stampa Online – National Association Online Press, sponsor of the initiative) explains. "What we need for a re-start is the capacity to make people discover the world of culture, enterprises and communication”.

“The lesson of Epicurus is valid and contemporary still today," says Michele Pinto, president of the Associazione Culturale il Mondo di Epicuro (Cultural Association the World of Epicurus) and director of Vivere Senigallia. "That’s the reason why we are so thankful to those whom, by unrolling an ancient papyrus or by doing an academic research, are able to give us back the thought of Epicurus which becomes more and more authentic. Our Festival is the continuation of their work, and we enjoy ourselves in bringing up to date and in making more available an ancient treasure of hope and happiness."

The jury, composed of the chairman Prof. Roberto Radice of Università Cattolica di Milano, Ms. Elena Irrera from Università di Bologna, Prof. Francesco Verde from Sapienza Università of Rome, Dr. Enrico Piergiacomi from Università di Trento, and Michele Pinto, the President of the Associazione Culturale “Il Mondo di Epicuro”, has drawn up a ranking of worthy theses, following the four criterions fixed by the competition announcement: originality (max. 30 points), scientific and methodologic strictness (max. 30 points), use of the bibliography (max. 20 points), and ability to actualize Epicurean thought (max. 20points).

Scoring:

Vincenzo Damiani (La Kompendienliteratur nella scuola di Epicuro: Forme, funzioni, contesto) – 100 points.

Tiziana Di Fabio (Giustizia e philia: Politica e filosofia nell’Epicureismo greco) – 100 points.

Claudio Vergara (PHerc. 1670 (Filodemo, La provvidenza?)) – 90 points and honorable mention of the jury (30 – 30 – 20 – 10).

Chiara Martini (Void and Spatiality in Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus) – 85 points (30 – 25 – 15 – 15).

Francesco Paolo De Vita (The Ethical Function of the Epicurean Religious Observance) – 70 points. (20 – 20 – 15 – 15).

NetoIP

NetoIP was born in Ancona in 2009. Today, in 2020, it is still fully active. It is expanding itself with services dedicated to fixed and mobile telephony, with a widespread presence in the regions of Marche, Sicilia, Calabria and Toscana, in high-level quality partnership with Lombardia, Piemonte and Sardegna.Some figures? The company is the owner of 42 jig of dedicated Internet broadband, thanks to the investments and to the new contacts, it has reached the 97% of coverage of the national territory, it has touched 5 thousand clients, it owns 14 employees and 15 collaborators and it is growing fast, thanks also to the new projects of development which will place the company by the side of a partner in the field of energy and by the side of another partner in the sport field, a sector in which, after all, the company is active with important sponsorships: the Cus Ancona 5-a-side football and the Accademia volley Ancona. In order to grow even more in the international market, NetolP looks at the Spanish market, where the company is currently active with the participation in the society NetolP Network SL, based in Tenerife.

ANSO

ANSO was set up in 2003 by a group of editors pioneers of online information. Today ANSO involves 155 headlines and 80 publishers. It reaches 22.000.000 readers each month, the readers visualize 90 million pages. The newspapers ANSO publish 2.900 articles each day. Today ANSO is a bastion in the defense for the liberty of the press in Italy and Europe.

I need to think about your last paragraph but I agree with the second, that this is a common sense interpretation. The elephant in the room is that it is not just common sense but it means that ordinary people living ordinary lives (possibly, even like us) are in fact living and achieving the Epicurean goal, which is relatively easy to achieve.

And there is a passage in AFewDays InAthens which makes pretty much that point, if I can find it.

Quote from Don

The fact that they are both negative (a- "not, no" as in apolitical, atheist, etc.) has struck me as odd; but, as descriptors of pleasure, I think I can see where Epicurus is coming from

It has always seemed to me that "part" of the reason it makes sense to use the negative is that given the premise that everything that is not painful is pleasurable (and the reverse) if you end up talking about specific pleasures, you end up appearing to take sides on what amounts to a ranking of pleasures, which is also a problem. If you talk about cake and pies and ice cream you get labeled as a foodie. If you talk about exploring mountaintops or bicycling or sex or wine or any other particular pleasure, you end up implying that the pleasure which you choose to highlight is among those that "everyone" should choose. If you end up praising the pleasure of painting, or of singing, or of literature, you end up implying that the best life involves those pursuits, when in fact your key and essential premise is that pleasure really is pleasure and totally subjective according to context. Therefore it is essential that you emphasize that there is NOT a ranking or a preferred set of pleasures.

I don't think that's the full explanation by any means. I would expect in the texts that are lost there are lots of discussions of specific pleasures. But I think that this is related to the issue of Epicurus ejecting "logic" from the canon - the commentators make it appear that Epicurus was throwing out all logic and all "culture" when in fact Epicurus was among the most acute logicians and culture-erectors of them all (a point I think DeWitt makes). He doesn't throw out logic and culture, but uses them himself, in his own way, in the service of what he has concluded is the ultimate end (pleasure). His opponents are so adamantly opposed to his conclusion that they caricature him as being opposed to ALL logic and ALL culture, when in fact he was opposed to THEIR logic and THEIR culture, and erecting his own. But they succeeded in erasing the texts where Epicurus presented the positive elements of his program, and what's left can be made to look like something it was not.

All of which is to say that the "negative" approach may be in part an intensely "logical" approach, driven by the underlying premise that it is essential to drive home that all pleasure is desirable. The "negative" wording allows that premise to be driven home without suggesting that some pleasures are higher or better than others (which, if admitted, would logically mean that there is a standard other than pleasure itself by which to judge pleasure).

Yes I think you are documenting how Gosling & Taylor are ultimately not with Epicurus themselves, but insist on following the party line. I think you are exactly right as to where it would lead.

My main thought I guess is that G&T had enough intellectual honesty / perception to publish what ought to be obvious to most anyone - that the mainstream view of Epicurus is nonsense. But they don't have enough "courage" (or something, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush) to adopt Epicurus' views themselves. The pull of the consensus Academy / Reason / Humanist position (and who knows what else) is too strong for them to break free entirely. Quite possibly they realized that even writing what they did would set them back in their profession -- I see this book cited or mentioned VERY infrequently, even though it seems to be head and shoulders the most thorough and best-researched on the topic.

I think what I am reading there is their attempt to square Epicurus with Aristotle and I agree that it fails. But if what is disturbing to you is 18.3.19 then I think I might have a different take. I have never considered ataraxia and aponia to be statements of the ultimate end, but simply adverbs that go along with successfully have overcome disturbances and pain while in the process of pursuing the pleasures that make like worth living. So if your concern is that he is demeaning aponia and ataraxia then I think that doesn't bother me as much, for that reason. If "pleasure" is the goal then a series of particular pleasures from day to day is what is being pursued, with ataraxia and aponia being derivative descriptions that are really only useful from the point of view of semantics and debating with Platonists when that is necessary (which hopefully isn't often).

Is that the part that you find disturbing? I am afraid I got distracted this afternoon so I may have lost the train of thought.