Posts by Cassius

Yes I echo Joshua! Thank you for your posts Oscar and take care. Hope to see you back at some point in the future!

And I am sure you will attack the Festival with everything you have got, and not moderately!

And good luck with the festival and please keep us posted!!!

I agree Michelle! Where do people get these ideas? It seems so few are rigorous about providing cites for their propositions!

I tend to be careful about "moderation" too, because when the goal is fixed on pleasure sometimes we are immoderate, when immoderation is called for, to achieve the goal.

The "golden mean" idea seems much more Aristotle / Plato than Epicurus, and yet people presume that he taught that since the others did. But placing any goal as a goal in itself equal to pleasure would be inconsistent.

Yes that and that is an interestingly different arrangement of that song!

Just goes to show that I cannot even find the time to read my own calendar!

My goal in life is to spend full time on this one day, but unfortunately I am not quite there yet!

Thanks for the reminder and your taking the lead to post this morning!

Every month I tell myself that I am going to be on top of the 20th and have something fascinating to post, and every month I get so busy that I hardly remember until it is here. Maybe we need to come up with a PRE-20th sequence of reminders or events to help us burn the 20th into our minds so clearly it can't be forgotten!

Happy Twentieth!

Poster: 2000 is too much. Fine till 400 CE and born again in 1700s. 1500 year doldrums?

Cassius Amicus:

I understand why you cite those years, but I hesitate to call what happened in the 1700's, or even today, as a rebirth. I think it is probably more accurate to consider that we've never had a time when there did not exist individual Epicureans, but they had little or no organization and contact. The 1429 letter by Cosma Raimondi would be an example of such a person.

The great majority of people since the ancient world have been under the oppression of Christianity and not able to speak publicly about the full Epicurean viewpoint. Many others were under the control of "academia" and not able to reject the Platonic/Aristotelian/Stoic othodoxy. The best they could do, which was ineffective or worse, was to embrace an eclectic mishmash of elements, paint it over with some form of theism, and run from the name of Epicurus. Even today we're not much emerged from those forces. Most of our "friends" on the world stage make no claim to be "Epicureans" but at most to adopt a select few of his positions that happen to suit their taste. And then they rush to distinguish themselves from Epicurus with their own "improvements" to his doctrines. An example here would be the Utilitarians.

So I think a case could be made that the last time Epicurean philosophy, speaking actively and openly and unapologetically and directly in the name of Epicurus, as an open and active major force in society, was sometime before the conversion of the empire by Constantine.

Of course we're just talking very generally here and all sorts of relevant observations could be made about exceptions.

But active and vibrant Epicurean "schools?" With people actively working together to churn out new orthodox Epicurean content, and new polemical works against opposing schools? And working to organize themselves to exist in perpetuity into the future? Not since the fall of the Roman world, and not reborn even yet today.

That should be our goal!

Cassius started a new event:

Event

Online Book Discussion - DeWitt's "Epicurus and His Philosophy" Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism - Skype

Review of Chapter 12 -- The New Hedonism!

Sun, Sep 1st 2019, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Cassius

August 19, 2019 at 1:08 PM

Quote

Review of Chapter 12 -- The New Hedonism!

EC:

After reading from the Cambridge Companion, a couple of general processes stick out to me: first, that the full structure of the philosophy, the sturdy tripod of the Canon, physics and ethics, seems to have been disassembled in favor of one or the other elements, according to personal preference for physics or ethics.

All 3 parts together seem to me, for my own practice of the philosophy, critically important. I would not have become as interested in Epicurus, minus the comprehensive structure. If others are like me, perhaps the loosening of approach would have made it easier for the philosophy to fade. When you have all 3 parts in mind, it is far easier to tell when someone's interpretation has gone off the rails. Also, opponents find it easy to make straw man and ad hominem arguments without the full philosophy in place.

The second process, which could have been made easier by this loosening, is the adulteration of the philosophy by incorporating or accommodating competing philosophies/religions. Where those incorporated elements are incompatible with the original tripod, they could have served to further weaken the philosophy.

This is one of the reasons I think it is so important not to muddy things up by getting our philosophy mixed up with humanist or Buddhist philosophy. The other being that the most direct path to a happy life, a life of pleasures, is to understand and apply the original philosophy without corruption.

Also, it doesn't look as if the decline of the philosophy was owing to a failure of leaders and students to be politically or publicly active, as has been suggested in previous discussions.

Cassius:

I want to emphasize this: "seems to have been disassembled in favor of one or the other elements, according to personal preference for physics or ethics."

We see lots of people who want to focus almost exclusively on the "ethics" as if the physics and the theory of knowledge is unimportant. We also sometimes see people who are taken only with the physics, which they reduce to "the swerve as a precursor to Heisenberg." Amusingly we don't often see people who focus exclusively on the epistemology, presumably because the Academic worship of "reason" and "dialectic" has pushed any alternative view totally into the shadows.

We see this slicing and dicing particularly among the "stoic-minded" because the Epicurean views on the nature of the universe and the proper meaning and path to "knowledge" is particularly incompatible with the fundamental views of Stoicism.

And in the ethics, we see the frequent emphasis on "tranquillity" as the watchword rather than "pleasure," something that would never pass anyone's smell test if "pleasure" were not redefined to equate to "absence of pain" - thereby detaching it from Epicurean physics and Epicurean epistemology.

And that's largely the reason Epicurean philosophy has been in the doldrums for 2000 years. No doubt Christianity and other forces bear a share of the blame, but so do those who too easily gave in to opposition and reduced the comprehensive theory into unrecognisable fragments.

Allow me Dubitator to hit my repetitive first note and urge you to read Norman Dewitt's take on Epicurus in "Epicurus and His Philosophy." It is a different enough take as to seem almost a different philosophy when presented by Dewitt in full, and as a sweeping response to Plato, rather than in the modern standard " tranquility-focused version sponsored by O'Keefe and the Cambridge books.

And if you have time, the Boris Nikolsky article available in the forum here, as well as the exhaustive review by Gosling and Taylor in "The Greeks on Pleasure," of which this is a part. Both provide ample corroboration of DeWitt's take.

Good grief I almost failed to realize that that was OSCAR with the first response. Good to hear from you Oscar and hope you're doing well.

Two outstanding answers and I agree with them. These animals are not being led by gods or thinking about their duties. They feel emotions toward their offspring just as humans so and the feeling of pain of seeing them threatened, and the feeling of reward of having them safe, are their motivators just like with humans.

Ultimately there is no motivating force in life other than feeling.

Argh -- of course -- I changed it! thanks Joshua!

Let's go ahead and schedule our next online book discussion session -- our next session will be on Chapter 12 - The new Hedonism. Julie has offered to prepare some discussion notes, and she needs time to do that, so let's schedule this for 11 AM eastern time on Sunday morning, September 1. If this is an unworkable time for you please let us know and we will try to coordinate the best time for as many people as possible.

All are welcome, but Godfrey and Joshua , you guys in particular deserve a personal invitation given your regular participation here. We should have five or six people at least so please plan to join us when you can. We're using Skype now so all you need is a working Skype connection on your computer or cell phone.

Welcome Dubitator314 ! When you get a chance please tell us about your background and interest in Epicurus.

What do we know about how and why Epicurean philosophy faded in the ancient world? The general and final answer no doubt has to do with the rise of Christianity and its suppression of competitors, but it seems likely that there were other events that contributed to its decline. For example the Emperor Julian is known to have commented that the works of Epicurus were hard to find in his day, and I believe I have also read that even as early as Caesar Augustus, steps were taken against private associations that might have hindered the spread of Epicurean philosophy.

There are also discrete events in history, such as the the remark of Pompeia Plotina, wife of Trajan in about 120 AD, as to her interest and concern for the welfare of the Epicurean school.

What information do we have which a researcher looking into this topic could use as a place to start?

Note: One Place is the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, especially the first three essays, including this by David Sedley:

Although we have done a good job of keeping day to day politics out of our group discussions, this is a topic that should not be left to guesswork on where we stand. Failure to address this topic probably causes dissonance in the minds of many people who think that their own interpretation of Epicurus leads directly to a certain set of political positions.

And I agree with these people. I think Epicurean philosophy does have direct application to political issues. However - and this is a huge caveat - what I don't think is obvious to most people is that Epicurean philosophy won't lead everyone to the same political conclusion any more than it would lead everyone to choose apple pies over chocolate cake.

Depending on one's circumstances, someone applying Epicurean philosophy can probably reach many different political conclusions, almost without limitation on the spectrum. And since we see how Epicurus firmly stated that there is no such thing as absolute justice, I strongly suspect that I should not hedge with the "almost" in that last sentence. What do PD 7-10 establish other than the many alternate paths that people can choose from to pursue pleasure, with the only test of "legitimacy" being whether that path ultimately proves to be successful for them?

Rather than leave all this unstated, I think it is best to make clear from the beginning of anyone's participation here that we personally in this group, and this Epicureanfriends.com forum, are here to promote Epicurean philosophy first, last, and only. That goal is too important to allow anything to stand in the way, and we can't let argument over political interpretations fragment us into warring segments over politics when we have so much to do to reconstruct the full body of Epicurean philosophy.

As an historical point I am increasingly convinced that there were Epicureans on both sides of the Roman civil war who saw nothing about their philosophies that prevented them from taking opposing sides. Not only did they take opposing side, in the case of Atticus some even tried to split the baby right down the middle. And all of those positions were probably correct applications of Epicurean philosophy in their own cases.

Many of us have very strong political viewpoints and political interpretations of Epicurean philosophy. I think that is perfectly natural, understandable, and I think Epicurus would be the first to endorse the widest possible application of his philosophy. However if we allow advocacy for our own views to supplant our more basic work on reconstructing Epicurean philosophy, that will freeze out or suppress others with other political views, and then our mission of promoting Epicurus goes down the drain, sacrificed for the sake of narrow political objectives.

In contrast to politics, the subject of religion is deeply intertwined with Epicurean positions on the nature of the universe and Epicurean positions on the best way of life. Just as introducing political discussions would invite divisions that distract us from our goal, it should be equally clear that supernatural religion, and argument based on supernatural religion, are totally incompatible with Epicurean philosophy. This should be so obvious to everyone that little more should need to be said.

So this graphic is a step toward keeping our focus on the goal of promoting Epicurean philosophy.

PD 25 If on each occasion, instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other nearer standard when you are making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.

The full text of the graphic is as follows:

LOL that's great!