Posts by Cassius

I see that anyone is invited to participate at the rate of 60 pounds per year --

(1) Even before reading the article I am immediately suspicious of efforts to combine Epicurus and the stoa BUT

(2) I immediately am very pleased to hear about postings on Epicuro.org being translated into English! Great news!

(3) Now after checking out the page it seems to be very general, with not much in the way of detailed comment. And it looks perhaps most focused on the influence of the ancient languages.

Godfrey the argument appears in several locations in DeWitt's book, but primarily starting page 142. When you get a chance to look at this material I'll be very interested in your reaction. To connect your specific comments to a particular page, here is this:

Quote from Elayne

he fact that we are not blank slates.

Yep, that's the issue!

Quote from Elayne

I have decided the best word for me to describe these brain functions is as being like senses. That is what they seem closest to, but instead of being sights and sounds, they are innate intuitions.

I agree, and that's why I equate them as being "faculties" have a similar nature to the 5 senses, and also probably to the feeling of pain and pleasure.

Of course this part of the discussion always reminds me of the jefferson quote in equating a "moral sense" to an arm or a leg:

Moral Philosophy. I think it lost time to attend lectures on this branch. 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. Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

Godfrey:

Quote from Godfrey

but something that bothers me about anticipations as I've previously understood them is that they seem disturbingly close to Platonic ideals.

Yes depending on the interpretation given to them, "close to Platonic ideals" is pretty much the concern that DeWitt had. I cannot recall if you have read DeWitt's version of them -- whose have you read?

Dewitt goes into significant detail, pointing especially to this Diogenes Laertius comment to indicate that other Epicureans ("the Epicureans generally") deviated from Epicurus himself: "Now in The Canon Epicurus affirms that our sensations and preconceptions and our feelings are the standards of truth; the Epicureans generally make perceptions of mental presentations to be also standards. His own statements are also to be found in the Summary addressed to Herodotus and in the Principal Doctrines."

According to DeWitt, "perceptions of mental presentations" must be the result of conscious thought, and that if you form a mental presentation after observation, then what you have is something in your mind that you have created yourself, not an automatic reaction of a faculty given to you by nature.

Of course as usual DeWitt is the minority position - the majority is that you look at enough cows, you form a picture of "cowness" in your mind, and that becomes a standard of truth. DeWitt thinks that is ruled out by the nature of the canon of truth, others say DeWitt is wrong,, and the debate goes on.

There might be a way to reconcile the positions (in my view) by saying that the process of forming pictures is ones mind is so automatic that the pictures themselves become canonical, but DeWitt argues that this blurs the distinction between something that is automatic and something that is the process of conscious reasoning.

With the ultimate hazard, according to DeWitt, being that if you allow that the product of conceptual reasoning can reach canonical status, then your basically a Platonist.

Elli has been very tolerant of me continuing to point out this issue, and that virtually no one in Greece agrees with Dewitt on this So at this point in the discussion I simply think it is important to point out what DeWitt saw, because i largely trust his "instincts" in interpreting Epicurus.

Once concern that DeWitt had, and I share, is that later Epicureans were under tremendous pressure from the Stoics to grant to logic/reason a status that Epicurus refused to give it. In addition to the Diogenes Laertius reference above, there is in On Ends this statement, which seems similar as an indication that some later Epicureans bowed to Stoic/Platonic pressure:

"Strip mankind of sensation, and nothing remains; it follows that Nature herself is the judge of that which is in accordance with or contrary to nature. What does Nature perceive or what does she judge of, beside pleasure and pain, to guide her actions of desire and of avoidance? Some members of our school however would refine upon this doctrine; these say that it is not enough for the judgment of good and evil to rest with the senses; the facts that pleasure is in and for itself desirable and pain in and for itself to be avoided can also be grasped by the intellect and the reason. Accordingly they declare that the perception that the one is to be sought after and the other avoided is a notion naturally implanted in our minds. Others again, with whom I agree, observing that a great many philosophers do advance a vast array of reasons to prove why pleasure should not be counted as a good nor pain as an evil, consider that we had better not be too confident of our case; in their view it requires elaborate and reasoned argument, and abstruse theoretical discussion of the nature of pleasure and pain."

Quote from Elayne

It doesn't change pleasure being pleasure but it could explain some intuitive aversions.

And that is why (I think) DeWitt calls Epicurus an "intuitist" more than once, rather than a strict "empiricist."

We're basically counting up all the reasons why DeWitt (1) has been excommunicated from polite Academic society, or (2) brilliantly followed clues which open up an accurate understanding of Epicurus for the first time in 2000 years --- depending on your perspective!

Just a followup random thought, but I think the huge underlying issue in the name "canon of truth" is the question of "what is truth?" and that the main issue is that there is no "absolute truth" - nor is everything totally relative to what we would like to process in our minds. The "truth" is to some extent "true to us" but it is not subject to our whim or stoic mind-control -- it is what we are able to determine to be true based on natural faculties that operate automatically and without reasoning -- and as soon as "opinion" or "processing by the mind" enters in, what we are talking about is not "truth" but "opinion" -- which is why DeWitt (and Epicurus too, if you read the section in DL on whether there are three branches or four) excluded any aspect of conceptual processing as part of the "canon of truth." And now we are back to the big issue of what that "fourth branch" is, and whether considering it part of the canon undermines the integrity of the system. That's a subject for long debate But I do think that the issues involved in it relate to your current direction of thinking.

Quote from Elayne

With all the sense-altering plants in the world, that would be a constant danger if humans (and other animals) had to use reasoning every time to decide about them.

I know that my dogs (and even more cats) have no trouble deciding whether to eat something or not. Sometimes they may get it wrong, but whatever they are checking it is not syllogisms.

Quote from Elayne

With all the sense-altering plants in the world, that would be a constant danger if humans (and other animals) had to use reasoning every time to decide about them.

Ok now in talking about anticipations, we've always had disputes due to the absence of texts. You have the (1) Diogenes Laertius implication that anticipations come only after experience and processing of thoughts, and you have (2) the DeWitt / Velleius (On the Nature of the Gods) view that anticipations are given to us by nature and function PRIOR to experience, as if in analogy to a computer operating system that functions in a particular way even before application programs are added to it. For the reasons DeWitt states, and especially because I think that anticipations/feelings/senses all must function on their own and prior to "thinking," in order to be part of the canon of truth, I side with option two, which probably fits closer with the path where you are going. To repeat my standard position, of course conceptual reasoning does exist too - when we see cows, we form concepts of cows - definitely. But DeWitt argues I think, and I agree, that the two are separate processes, one of which is "innate" prior to experience and the other is the result of conceptual processing after experience.

And to expand that out more generally, yes it is true that we have to take the senses, anticipations, and feelings of pain and pleasure as 'given' and as a part of animal nature, but that doesn't mean that they are mystical. They operate according to set principles and properties, it seems, and those are born with us, not the result of the embryo or baby having experiences. Yes they can be trained and tuned over time, after dealing with experiences, but they could never have operated in the first place if they had not been born with their innate raw abilities.

And I agree with you that some kind of "disposition to embrace reality" is probably an anticipation. I think DeWitt says it somewhere in sort of this way - that anticipations are a faculty that allow us to organize (maybe perceive is a better word) complex relationships, just as eyes enable us to "perceive" sight, ears to perceive sound etc. And just as eyes and ears have preset methods of functioning, you would expect feelings (pain and pleasure) and anticipations to also have predisposed methods of functioning.

If I am totally off track to what you are talking about don't hesitate to reel me back in. You know the science far better than i do, about all I can offer is potential ways to organize it given my reading of Epicurus.

Quote from Elayne

We have had several threads lately on FB addressing the principle that pleasure is pleasure-- no higher or lower pleasures.

Elayne I consider this to be a very complicated subject and your discussion of how pleasure works is very helpful. However before I dive in to the medical side of what you are saying, I don't know that we (me included) are totally clear on the philosophical side.

When I read the Epicurean quotes, and when I read what DeWitt thinks they mean, ultimately I think we are headed in the direction of something like:

There are many different types of pleasures, and they differ in intensity and duration and probably other attributes as well, but the reason we call them pleasure is that our feeling of pleasure tells us that they are pleasurable.

I say this because when you say "no higher vs lower" I think that needs to be understood in the sense of "noble vs ignoble" or "worthy vs unworthy" or "virtuous vs unvirtuous." In other words what I am thinking is being said is not that all pleasure is essentially the same in every respect, but more simply that we recognize something as pleasurable simply because our "feelings" tell us it is.

As with the color analogy that I made on the recent graphic, in "the feeling of pleasure" i am thinking that we are talking parallel with saying "the sights that we see" or "the sounds that we hear."

We see birds, trees, airplanes, and houses, through our eyes, which convey the various colors, shapes, sizes, etc. All of these are "sights" but there is really not very much in common between birds, trees, airplanes, and houses. A similar statement could be made about sounds.

So where i am going is that I think the focus here is on the "faculty by which we know them" rather than the individual sensations themselves. We know pleasures because we feel them to be pleasurable, but that doesn't tell us much about the details of the feeling except that they are pleasurable.

I am thinking that the main importance of this is to continue to push away the false notion that there are gods, ideal forms, essences, or any kind of outside absolute standard whatsoever.

So when you say:

Quote from Elayne

. There is still often some contrast made between pleasures which involve altered states,

... that gets us to the question of to what extent all pleasures are similar in nature between themselves, and thus your investigation into the nature of the pathways and how pleasures are processed physically.

Maybe in the end the question is similar - Does all "pleasure" and "pain" end up being a particular type of chemical/electrical reaction? - but I thought I would make this comment first.

FWIW I purchased Gemma here at Amazon and found it to be very good - https://www.amazon.com/Gemma-Dimitris…sr=8-1-fkmrnull

Depending on how sympathetic the person is who is involved, this statement by Paul is true, and it is so very sad. These people gear their whole lives on a fraud which will never come true for them.

Great exchange! Whether he admitted it or not, no doubt you reminded him of First Corinthians 15:

**Visualizing Principal Doctrine 9 ** "If every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ from one another."

This doctrine is one of the more difficult sayings, because the context is not as clear as many of the others. In my view, the point of this one relates to the material discussed in DeWitt's "Fullness of Pleasure" discussion, and has at least these two major points:

(1) All pleasures share in the same unifying character - they are pleasurable because our feeling of Pleasure tells us so. There is no outside standard or worthiness or nobility or good or bad, and no need for evaluation by logic or reason. We know a thing is pleasurable (or painful) because our Feelings tell us so. This is of course important because we need to eliminate once and for all the viewpoint that there is something floating in the universe, in the nature of a supernatural god, or a Platonic ideal form, or an Aristotelian essence, that defines for us what pleasure is. Pleasure and pain are understood by us through the Feelings, and through the Feelings alone.

(2) In addition to the main point, it seems to me that this doctrine also calls to mind the context that the individual human experience is limited, as illustrated in the analogy of the vessel or jar. Once full, the vessel can hold no more, and one full vessel is essentially the same as any other full vessel. Of course the question will be asked whether all full vessels are the same if they vary in content. Within the context in which we are speaking, that of all pleasure being "good" because it is pleasurable, all full vessels are the same.

Many challenging questions follow from these observations. One of the most challenging would be something like: "So you are saying that the person who spends a lifetime digging worms, because it is pleasurable to him, is to be rated the same as a person who spends his life studying science and making the world a better, healthier place for generations to come?

The point we have to keep coming back to is that there is no supernatural god or ideal forms or "virtue" that answer this question for us. Many people want to think that their god or their morality justifies their view of ranking some lives as "worthy" or "unworthy."

That is the point which has to sink in by stating these issues in extremes, as Epicurus is doing. No god, no set of ideal forms, no single list of "virtue" validate our choice of how to live. In reality, there is only Nature, and Nature gives us only pleasure and pain by which to decide how to live. We can answer whether a life of devoted to science is "better" than a life devoted to digging worms only by looking at the outcome, and calculating which of the two is likely to lead to the most pleasurable life.

--------------------------

More graphics for Principal Doctrine 9 can be found here: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/wcf/gallery/in…e-list/196-pd9/

Excellent points of contrast Daniel! All of these have many uses, especially in distinguishing Epicurus from Stoicism and Aristotelianism -

Quote from Daniel

"...we must also realize that Christians were not the only ones arguing from an intelligent design position. Much of what is said in this chapter of Christianity, insofar as it is based on the natural law, could be said of Stoicism and Aristotelianism as well, but historically Stoicism and Aristotelianism were influential in the long run because they supported the approach of Christianity, and therefore, Christianity took up their arguments and carried them forward..."

I just noticed that the online version of St Paul and Epicurus does not contain the "Verses Newly Explained or Translated" table. If someone is looking for a particular verse, such as when we are putting together this spreadsheet, they will need that table.

Here it is - attached

Soon I have to make a drive that is about ten hours one way, so I wanted to load my telephone with audiobook material that will make the drive more productive. I have listened before to Cicero's "On Ends" that way, and also to the full set of Diogenes Laertius biographies. This time I want to listen to Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations," and I see that there is an edition by C.D. Yonge that combines that with "On Ends."

I plan to listen to that for much of the trip, but the reason for this post is that I see that this book contains a very good summary of the major aspects of the forty or so philosophers mentioned by Cicero. That list covers the majority of those with whom the ancient Epicureans dealt, so if you're looking for a good and relatively short summary of the important ones, this is a fairly quick read.

Since this book was published in 1875 I have pasted a copy on the EpicureanFriends wiki here: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/wiki/doku.php?…ek_philosophers

I should add that although I am no major fan of computer voices, I find that the text-to-voice engine on my android telephone does an acceptable job, and the voice doesn't get in the way of understanding the words.

Going through these Bible verses in St Paul and Epicurus reminds we why the book has good information, but is somewhat narrowly targeted to people who want to compare Epicurus to Christianity. Many of the cites in the table are to rather fine points of Christian theology. The ones I think are most useful are those where it seems clear that in complaining about "elements" and similar things, Paul is directly criticizing Epicurean philosophy. Those are worthwhile finding for future use.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…dit?usp=sharing

Link to the subforum set up for this book - "St. Paul And Epicurus" - By Norman DeWitt

Thanks Oscar. I have noticed that sometimes but not always, but now that you mention it in the absence of a "paste as text" option, I have been copying text into a text editor and then pasting from there.

Rivelle:

(1) Good questions - I have not heard of those books.

(2) I noticed like before in a couple of your posts seem to be in a very dark font that is kind of hard to read on the default dark theme here. Are you changing the text color to black or some other color? Not sure why that is happening. I can probably edit it to make it more readable but you must be using a light theme and probably don't realize it's hard to read on dark.