Posts by Cassius

Yep that's him! It's worth watching the video because it's fairly well put together - it's just that it's put together as a call to minimalism for the sake of minimalism, or something very similar. If you check out the guy's other videos on his channel you can detect a pattern that has very little to do with Epicurus.

This video encapsulates just about every modern popular notion of Epicurus that exists. Everyone has to make up their own mind about each one, but I've made up my mind and I label virtually every major point of this video "WRONG""

"In Epicureanism desire itself was considered to be a form of pain...." WHAT?????

And of course where does this line of thought end up? MINIMALISM!!!

And one of Epicurus' key thoughts was to "live an analyzed life"????????

OK I finished it. This is seven minutes of the most densely-packed set of errors about Epicurus I have ever seen. From that point of view it serves an excellent purpose. Only by confronting issues and explaining a better alternative can the discussion advance.

What an absolutely awful presentation!

Starting from the very first words (that Epicurus spend his life focused on what makes us happy) to the immediate jump to "pleasure = the absence of pain" and continuing to the very end with the three alleged key ideas.

The ancient definition of pleasure did not mean the presence of enjoyment...." ARGH!

I've now read the full physics . org article and think it is good. I want to track down the full Abbott article to which it refers. But as I read this, the logical conclusion is:

There's no real difference in kind between (1) the most complicated 2019 NASA formulas that calculate the size and movement and composition of the sun and (2) a Roman centurion pointing at the sky and saying 'the sun is a ball of fire that rises and sets on the horizon every day."

Both are simply human expressions / symbolic mental summaries of our own observations and they have no direct connection whatsoever to the reality of the sun and its workings. Unless we are astronauts the Roman centurion's observation were as useful to him as a NASA equation is to most of us. And if we happen to be among those NASA scientists (if there are any) who think that our formulas have some kind of mystical divine connection to some external ultimate reality, then we've actually regressed in 2000 years. If we think our math is the key to the meaning of life we're **less** intelligent than the Roman centurion who considered his description of the sun as all he needed to plan the campaigns of his legion.

Martin would you agree?

Which is opposed to THIS, which is what Epicurus was fighting against:

From the look of this excellent graphic, this article describes the position taken by Epicurus on the issue of Math vs Reality. It ends with something that sounds consistent with Epicurus to me: "For Abbott, these points and many others that he makes in his paper show that mathematics is not a miraculous discovery that fits reality with incomprehensible regularity. In the end, mathematics is a human invention that is useful, limited, and works about as well as expected."

I am posting this not only for discussion of this article but to ask that if you know of other well-stated articles which take a similar position, that you drop us a link so we can compile a list of reference cites. So if you are aware of others, please post here, and we'll work on more material about this issue in the future.

https://phys.org/news/2013-09-m…tive-world.html

Wow that is quite a video! I have never seen that!

Yep. That remark of his rang a bell with me from the moment I read it some years ago.

Wow - great photos! Thank you Joshua!

Outstanding example, Joshua, thank you!!! And you are channeling DeWitt - who makes almost exactly this same point in his book:

"But this involves a logical sleight-of-hand; it employs an argument by analogy, but argument by analogy only works if things really ARE analogous."

There must be books / articles / citations which help explain this point. Over time I would like to try to find some and this will be a good place to post them.

Sedley is suggesting that in attitude toward logic/dialetic we may have another deviation (watering-down) by later Epicureans. The first two areas were (1) thinking that pleasure has to be defended logically (Torquatus in On ends) and (2) coming up with four criteria of truth instead of Epicurus' three (Diogenes Laertius description of the canon). Sedley is suggesting that Epicurus himself didn't just reject logic/dialectic, he SCORNED it, and that later Epicureans (and therefore presumably us) should not make peace with logic/dialectic at all.......

It gets old to keep saying that everything is "important" - but here is another important passage, confirming how BOTH the Platonists and the Aristotelians were against Epicurus' position.

Here is the section from Lucretius to which Sedley refers in that last quote --

It is hard to overstate the importance of this observation on the Epicurean view of "truth," from the same source:

I see that Sedley would dispute Bailey's word "misleading" in the sentence I quoted above "Logic they reject as misleading...." Sedley thinks the better translation is "Logic they reject as redundant..."

[Usener 376 ]

Cicero Academica II.30.97 (Lucullus): "They will not get Epicurus, who despises and laughs at the whole of dialectic, to admit the validity of a proposition of the form "Hermarchus will either be alive tomorrow or not alive," while dialecticians demand that every disjunctive proposition of the form "either x or not-x" is not only valid but even necessary, See how on his guard the man is whom your friends think slow; for "If," he says, "I admit either of the two to be necessary, it will follow that Hermarchus must either be alive tomorrow or not alive; but as a matter of fact in the nature of things no such necessity exists." Therefore let the dialecticians, that is, Antiochus and the Stoics, do battle with this philosopher, for he overthrows the whole of dialectic."

Norman DeWitt page 172 -