Posts by Cassius

Quote from Cleveland Okie

living in stormy political times and refusing to take sides

That phrasing emphasizes to me that "refusing to take sides" is not at all the same thing as "refusing to take risks" or even "refusing to endure pain." It seems that Atticus was very well ready to take personal risks that might include up to death for offending the wrong people - when he thought that the reward was worth the risk.

It's a point worth emphasizing that refusing to engage in political feuds is not the same thing at all as refusing to take risks under the right circumstances.

Not significant but in reading up on Thomas Young I was interested to see if there was a portait of them.

I'm not finding anything other than this link below, which due to the dates does not appear to be our target.

Portrait of Thomas Young

If anyone in the future finds that there is a portrait, please add it to this thread. Thanks.

I've seen this book praised many times here in the past by Eikadistes and Joshua so it's well past time we have thread dedicated to it.

Just in the last week or so have I had time to pick it up, and I have to say I am very impressed so far. This is a subject (usually filed under "Deism") that I started reading into shortly after college, and it had a major impact on my thinking long before I picked up Epicurus. I'm less than a quarter of the way through it but I'm already very impressed by its level of detail, including material on Ethan Allen, whose "Reason The Only Oracle of Man" I read many years ago. But it had not sunk into my consciousness that there was a relationship between him and Thomas Young, a figure that I posted about years ago, but never pursued (that I can recall).

Thread

Thomas Young of Massachusetts

Threadstarter post

This link comes from Wikipedia on Thomas Young:

https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewconten…=english_theses

epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/2813/

(However this sounds like the writer's overlay rather than a cite to Epicurus.)

Another: Reason and Revolution:  The Radicalism of Thomas Young

For me, the real litmus test of whether someone was an "Epicurean Influencer" often comes down to: Did they embrace eternal universe rather than a Deistic clockmaker model? Unless they…

Cassius

June 16, 2022 at 1:49 PM

While strictly speaking "Deism" is considered to be closer to the watchmaker model, where the universe was originally created by a supernatural god, and therefore not compatible with Epicurean physics, it seems that there was a lot of variation among the thoughts of those who were labeled as deists, and some of them may indeed have had almost a full Epicurean viewpoint.

I post this because over time and new people discover this book, I'd like it to have a thread that people can find to add their thoughts. No doubt there are many details about people like Young who are mentioned in the book about whom it would be good to research to look for clues to the development of their thought and Epicurean connections.

Also, while we always need to steer clear of contemporary partisan politics, I think one of the most important implications of studying these figures is the connection between their "activism" and their Epicurean-adjacent worldviews. It seems like almost a whole generation of people, even those who were not as educated as others, understood that this non-supernatural worldview logically leads to greater, not not lesser, interest in and engagement with the world around them. And rather than living in "fear" or being unwilling to experience any pain at all, they went to a lot of effort and personal risk to pursue living as they thought it should be conducted.

It's frustrating to read in Stewart's book about how so many of them from Washington and Franklin and even Jefferson kept their views to themselves, no doubt out of concern for what would happen to them if they were too vocal. Even so it is motivating to read about these figures and consider the extent to which we can add to their work given that our environment -- at least for now -- allows many of us to speak a little more openly than was available to them.

Thanks for posting that Cleveland -- lots of good info in there!

Eikadistes I am not sure whether you saw today's version or not, but I think I now have it fairly stable and I don't intend drastic revisions that would jeopoardize the current functionality.

I have all six books of the Latin, Bailey, Dunster, and Munro all selectable so you can view any combination of them or them all.

When you click in the left column to go to a section, the URL updates so that if you then share the URL, then paste it into another browser, then the page will open to the right section.

I'd like to implement true synchronized scrolling like the other software had, but that's proving to be a problem, and as it is, it's set up so that if you click on the left bar then all of the columns do move the selected line number to the top of the page, where they are even. If you then use the left and right arrows in the center of the header, you can move forward and backward with the section you're looking for moved to the top of the screen where they are aligned.

So this is the version I expect to use for a while, and now most of my effort will probably be devoted to cleaning up final artifacts in the text.

I debated whether I should remove the line breaks from the Latin version, but I gather that knowing where the lines end does carry with it some degree of information, so rather than delete those I'm leaving the lines in poem form -- at least for now.

Today I have made some significant improvements to the operation of the side-by-side Lucretius.

I know there are many rough edges, but if anyone has suggestions or comments please be sure to let me know and I will see what I can do!

Lucretius Side-by-Side

In terms of the creativity of translators, you can pick any passage from Lucretius and compare the various translations, and the variation in details is shocking -- even where the texts are very reliable and there's no questions about lost words or whole phrases.

So as I see it this is a problem where it's important to keep all these issues in mind, but there's no "solution" other than build from the ground up with a basic understanding of the fundamentals, and then consider any translations in the context of what we are confident is true. That way we can separate out what is likely a good translation from one that's got so much discretionary flourish as to mean totally different things.

And to think how many people over the years have gotten wrapped up in controversies over every detail of the King James and other translations of the Bible .

Lucretius Side-by-Side

Well I've run into a situation that the code from github is choking whenever I exceed a certain size limit, so there's no way I can get more than two translations side by side at a time.

I might play further with the github code, but I think in the meantime I'm going to go with pure html (courtesy of Chatgpt) and be satisfied for the moment with this version:

Markdown Side-by-Side

It's not as polished as the other version and has lots of quirks to work out.

Welcome to Episode 274 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we continue our series covering Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations" from an Epicurean viewpoint. This series addresses five of the greatest questions in philosophy, with Cicero speaking for the majority and Epicurus the main opponent:

1. Is Death An Evil? (Cicero says no and Epicurus says no, but for very different reasons)
2. Is Pain An Evil? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
3. Does the Wise Man Experience Grief and Fear? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
4. Does the Wise Man Experience Joy and Desire? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
5. Is Virtue Sufficient For A Happy Life? (Cicero says yes, Epicurus says no)

As we found in Cicero's "On Ends" and "On The Nature of the Gods," Cicero treated Epicurean Philosophy as a major contender in the battle between the philosophies, and in discussing this conflict and explaining Epicurus' answers to these questions, we will deepen our understanding of Epicurus and how he compares to the other major schools.

These week we continue with "Is Death An Evil," and we will pick up where we left off in Section XIIWelcome to Episode 273 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we continue our series covering Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations" from an Epicurean viewpoint. This series addresses five of the greatest questions in philosophy, with Cicero speaking for the majority and Epicurus the main opponent:

1. Is Death An Evil? (Cicero says no and Epicurus says no, but for very different reasons)
2. Is Pain An Evil? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
3. Does the Wise Man Experience Grief and Fear? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
4. Does the Wise Man Experience Joy and Desire? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
5. Is Virtue Sufficient For A Happy Life? (Cicero says yes, Epicurus says no)

As we found in Cicero's "On Ends" and "On The Nature of the Gods," Cicero treated Epicurean Philosophy as a major contender in the battle between the philosophies, and in discussing this conflict and explaining Epicurus' answers to these questions, we will deepen our understanding of Epicurus and how he compares to the other major schools.

These week we turn our attention further to "Is Death An Evil," and we will read beginning in Section XVII where the discussion continues with more about the Pythagorean / Platonic view of the human soul.

Our general discussion guide for Tusculun Disputations is here: https://handbook.epicureanfriends.com/notes/epicurea…html#org0c11d2e

And a side-by-side version with comments is here: https://epicureanfriends.github.io/tusculundisput…glish/section:5

I made a lot of progress today and completed the "coding" I needed for all six books, but when I loaded them into github the site now seems to choke with a 'loading' message.

May have to split them up by book to make it workable but if someone checks the site for the time being that's the reason it's not working.

Until I set up a separate thread I'll continue to post here updates on getting a side-by-side version of Lucretius.

At present I now have all of book one available in Latin, Dunster, Munro, and Bailey here:

Side By Side viewer

There will be lots of typos during the process of getting a workable version up and I'll correct them in waves as I make progress on each book.

I have been debating whether to separate these into six separate files, out of concern that the file size would slow down the rendering, but at present things are still pretty snappy so I'll go for getting them all in one file, and that will make word searching a lot easier.

Another place I am sure there will be errors is cross-matching the beginning of each english section with the correct section in Latin.

the problem is that the sections (by approximate line number) are pretty arbitrary, and in order to get this done I'm going pretty fast and that makes it harder to be certain that I'm finding the right latin section (since my Latin isn't superb in the first place).

If anyone sees any obvious mismatches please let me know and I'll correct them.

I think Eikadistes' views here are correct, but I also think that Kalosyni's concerns should alert us that there's a regularly-occurring problem that we have to work on ways to address.

Many of the words we're talking about, including "religion," have many shades of meaning, some of which are reconcilable with core Epicurean views and some of which are not.

I suspect that if Kalosyni were to bore in and specifically question what it means to "pray" or "participate in the ceremonies" then we could reconcile most of the apparent contradictions in a way that would be consistent with core Epicurean views against the existence of supernatural forces.

It seems to me that the ground fule for the best way to deal with these ambiguities is a lot like Epicurus said about gods: Believe X, Y, and Z about gods, and never believe anything that it is inconsistent with X, Y, and Z.

It's probably not enough for us today to simply say "Epicurus taught that there are no supernatural forces" and therefore "never accept that Epicurus would teach anything that would imply the existence of supernatural forces." But that's the kind of hard logical chain reasoning approach that I think Epicurus was teaching when he was alive, and that we need to use to understand him now.

So anytime someone suggests an interpretation of any text that implies that the text contradicts Epicurus, the first step to address it should be to focus on looking for a way to interpret the words being used in a way that is consistent with core ideas. Only after that would I entertain the possibility that there might be some disagreement.

So far I personally don't see anything that can't be reconciled by cutting out any supernatural connotation from what's being discussed.

As far as what I gather is behind Kalosyni's attention her post, after we slice out the "supernatural" part of the discussion, which is admittedly a huge part, I do think that there are very important functions that Epicurean community could and should fill that parallel some of the functions assumed by the opposing religions. People live only a short number of years, and it's important to provide continuity. Older people have to preserve information and coordinate activities from which younger people can learn, and everyone at any age needs a support group for all sorts of reasons. Those functions are best filled by finding like-minded friends, and Epicurean philosophy provides a lot of the glue about what "like-minded" means in a social contest.

I haven't re-read the older parts of this thread either, but I seem to recall that that was the drift of the prior discussion. Kalosyni's bringing up the subject again, but not any conclusions from the past, shows how important the issue is and how things need to develop into the direction where some kind of social connection/unity is in place.

Right Don. It depends on how you use the word.

As in the cite quoted by Kalosyni, the word used there is "sacred" and that too is ambiguous.

Epicurean philosophy is flatly natural and anti-supernatural.

But that does not at all mean that it isn't a highly focused system of thought that holds some things as "good" even to the point of "sacred" and other things "bad" to the point of evil. It's just that there's nothing supernatural at either end.

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Quote from Godfrey

Whenever there is a conflict between Cicero and other sources, don't trust Cicero.

In this case I agree Cicero is wrong, but there are a lot of subtleties here that we wouldn't have but for this section of "On The Nature of the Gods" and now also this section XIII of Tusculan Disputations.

If we add this section of "Tusculan Disputations," to "On The nature of the gods" and also add in some of Cicero's argument in "On Ends" that Joshua references in this episode (that Epicurus identified justice with what people think is justice) I think we can get to see that there's a pattern on this particular issue that Cicero either did not understand or intentionally misrepresented Epicurus.

I doubt Cicero could have made this up from nothing, and Cicero's giving us more to work with than we have solely through Diogenes Laertius, but he's either intentionally or negligently making it sound like Epicurus took the position that if enough people believe something then that is proof that it's true.

(This calls to mind DeWitt's statement that he believed Cicero was intentionally malicious because Cicero could not have misrepresented Epicurus so effectively had Cicero not understood Epicurus so well. If I were arguing against that, I might point out that Cicero had no problem stating that he disagreed with Epicurus in highly charged moral judgments, so did Cicero really need to mis-state the Epicurean position on prolepsis? It wouldn't have changed his mind if he decided at some point that he did misunderstand prolepsis, but I can see the possibility of confusion, since Cicero did like the "common consent of mankind" argument that others appear to have been making.)

If we think Epicurus was intelligent - which we do - then Epicurus' argument can't be as superficial as saying that something is true because some number of people believe it. But Cicero has spread this allegation and it seems to have become embedded into what is accepted that Epicurus thought. I saw a Greg Sadler video in which he seemed to be accepting that Epicurus took the position that "the common consent of mankind" was Epicurus' proof that gods exist, and it undermines the credibility of anyone to think that they argued that truth can be decided by majority vote.

So defenders of Epicurus have to be able to articulate how what Cicero wrote is wrong, and be able to articulate what Epicurus was really saying instead.

It does seem like Epicurus was basing his argument for existence of gods on prolepsis, but that's not at all the same thing as saying "gods exist because everyone thinks they do." What follows after that has to be a concise explanation of how prolepses are not opinions, but are somehow an input into formation of opinions.

Episode 273 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. Today's episode is entitled: "Is The Soul Immortal And Death Actually A Good? " as we proceed further into part one of Tusculan Disputations

Thanks for focusing again on the question of which aspects of knowledge of the gods constitute prolepsis and which constitute opinions arising from reasoning.

Below is the Rackham translation of the section from On the Nature of the Gods. It would appear that this goes further than you would go Don?

Quote

XVII You see therefore that the foundation (for such it is) of our inquiry has been well and truly laid. For the belief in the gods has not been established by authority, custom or law, but rests on the unanimous and abiding consensus of mankind; their existence is therefore a necessary inference, since we possess an instinctive or rather an innate concept of them; but a belief which all men by nature share must necessarily be true; therefore it must be admitted that the gods exist. And since this truth is almost universally accepted not only among philosophers but also among the unlearned, we must admit it as also being an accepted truth that we possess a 'preconception,' as I called it above, or 'prior notion,' of the gods. (For we are bound to employ novel terms to denote novel ideas, just as Epicurus himself employed the word prolepsis in a sense in which no one had ever used it before.) We have then a preconception of such a nature that we believe the gods to be blessed and immortal. For nature, which bestowed upon us an idea of the gods themselves, also engraved on our minds the belief that they are eternal and blessed. If this is so, the famous maxim of Epicurus truthfully enunciates that "that which is blessed and eternal can neither know trouble itself nor cause trouble to another, and accordingly cannot feel either anger or favor, since all such things belong only to the weak."

And there is an implication from what follows that those three are the starting point from prolepsis, and the rest of the details beyond that are where the reasoning comes in:

Quote

If we sought to attain nothing else beside piety in worshiping the gods and freedom from superstition, what has been said had sufficed; since the exalted nature of the gods, being both eternal and supremely blessed, would receive man's pious worship (for what is highest commands the reverence that is its due); and furthermore all fear of the divine power or divine anger would have been banished (since it is understood that anger and favor alike are excluded from the nature of a being at once blessed and immortal, and that these being eliminated we are menaced by no fears in regard to the powers above). But the mind strives to strengthen this belief by trying to discover the form of god, the mode of his activity, and the operation of his intelligence.

I'll post more on this as I continue to edit today's episode, but I want to bring out something that anyone who is following along can help us consider on a point that relates both to the existence of "gods" and to the existence of "souls."

Cicero's first arguments to the student that death is not an evil because we are not there mirrors pretty closely Epicurus' argument, but Cicero does not cite Epicurus as his authority for the argument.

Today, especially as we get into section XIII of part one, we're going to see Cicero make an argument that we should believe that the soul can survive the death of the body because that's what most all the great men of the past have thought. As he gets into this in Section XIII, he's going to include some material that arguably is very close to Velleius' argument based on prolepsis for the existence of gods as beings blessed and imperishable.

Quote

Examine the sepulchres of those which are shown in Greece; recollect, for you have been initiated, what lessons are taught in the mysteries; then will you perceive how extensive this doctrine is. But they who were not acquainted with natural philosophy, (for it did not begin to be in vogue till many years later,) had no higher belief than what natural reason could give them; they were not acquainted with the principles and causes of things; they were often induced by certain visions, and those generally in the night, to think that those men, who had departed from this life, were still alive. And this may further be brought as an irrefragable argument for us to believe that there are gods,—that there never was any nation so barbarous, nor any people in the world so savage, as to be without some notion of gods: many have wrong notions of the gods, for that is the nature and ordinary consequence of bad customs, yet all allow that there is a certain divine nature and energy. Nor does this proceed from the conversation of men, or the agreement of philosophers; it is not an opinion established by institutions or by laws; but, no doubt, in every case the consent of all nations is to be looked on as a law of nature. Who is there, then, that does not lament the loss of his friends, principally from imagining them deprived of the conveniences of life? Take away this opinion, and you remove with it all grief; for no one is afflicted merely on account of a loss sustained by himself. Perhaps we may be sorry, and grieve a little; but that bitter lamentation, and those mournful tears, have their origin in our apprehensions that he whom we loved is deprived of all the advantages of life, and is sensible of his loss. And we are led to this opinion by nature, without any arguments or any instruction.

Again he does not attribute this argument to Epicurus either, but if you compare the text in Book one of on the nature of the gods, around section XVII, with the argument here in XIII of TD. there are some pretty striking parallels.

The main reason I point this out is that I have a germ of a thought that what we are seeing here is Cicero's misinterpretation of the Epicurean argument from prolepsis, first in the case of the existence of gods, which we know Epicurus did consider to be related to prolepsis, and next on the existence of souls, which I don't know that we do see Epicurus say is related to prolepsis.

Epicurus of course did not say that souls can survive death, but he does seem to say that souls do exist, so the question arises whether Epicurus could have considered that there is a prolepsis in regard to the existence souls in the first place. (Asked another way, does Epicurus say both that we have prolepses that incline us to believe that gods are blessed and imperishable, and also that we have prolepses to believe that we have souls? (The potential prolepsis I am asking about is not "that souls survive death," but that "we should consider that we have souls even though just like gods we cannot see or touch them.")

The two sections I am comparing are:

Tusculan Disputations XIII

On the Nature of the Gods XVII and thereabouts (sorry this link doesn't take you directly to the paragraph - I'll fix that in the future)

Key to this analysis is that I think most of us agree that the faculty of prolepses leads toward formation of opinions, but that a prolepsis is not itself an opinion. Cicero doesn't seem to accept this, and he seems to think that an Epicurean prolepsis is a fully formed opinion, and since all men have the opinion that gods exist and that souls survive death, that makes it true. I also think most of us agree that Epicurus would say that it doesn't matter how many people think a thing to be so, that's not sufficient evidence of its truth - we should require sound reasoning based on observations from the senses, prolepsis, and feelings, and these are not subject to majority vote.

So:

Is this section XIII of Tusculan Disputations an Epicurean argument meant to mirror Velleius section XVII in On The Nature of the Gods? If it's an Epicurean argument, was Cicero extending it to the existence of souls on his own, without precedent from Epicurean texts, or is it likely that the Epicureans reasoned this way in regard to souls as well as gods?

Great insights and thanks for posting them! All these will be of use in the future.