Welcome Eugenios!
Posts by Martin
Listen to the latest Lucretius Today Podcast! Episode 225 is now available. Cicero Argues That A Commitment To Virtue Is A Bar to Pleasure.
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If the same thought pattern shows up with only minor variation among the vast majority of members of a population, that should qualify as a universal.
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The quotes from Mortimer Adler seem to be consistent with Epicurus' philosophy. In particular, he makes clear that the universals are (although commonly found among humans) not absolute:
"To say that the objects of conceptual thought are always universals is not to assert that these universals exist as such in reality, independent of the human mind that apprehends them."
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The official numbers are way behind. According to a private chain of information, 90,000 people are hospitalized with related symptoms in Wuhan, and new hospitals are built there in record speed.
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I just caught what feels like a common cold, so nothing to worry about except that my voice might be affected on Sunday.
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Welcome A_Gardener!
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Of course, I cannot tell how accurate his translations are, but I found some of them closer to how I understand Epicurus' philosophy and accept it as my own than any other of the readily available translations.
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Welcome here, too, Mike!
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Welcome Happy-Go-Lucky!
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Welcome Egghead!
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Welcome Darius!
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Nice to hear from you, Oscar!
DeWitt's book "Epicurus & his Philosophy" is the most adequate to Epicurus' philosophy, detailed and comprehensive among the secondary literature I have read so far. Except for the exaggerated connections he makes to Christianism, he is usually convincing.
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Welcome JLR!
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"Without Muhammad, Muslims would perform Salah to Mecca five times a day."
should be
Without Muhammad, Muslims would not perform Salah to Mecca five times a day."
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In this case, the frame of reference should be the usage in statistics. Basic statistics is part of the school curriculum in math and should thereby be a part of common understanding. It is not required that everybody still knows how to do the calculations after graduation but the understanding should remain.
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Except for "suspiciously out of place", the slang usage listed above is close enough to "random" in science and technology to not cause contradictions or misundestandings when applying Epicurus' / Popper's view on how communication works.
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I see no point in a generalization like that. We need to go into specifics when applying these adjectives.
E.g., in the described behaviour of animals, "undirected" is distinct from "random".
In popular publications on non-linear physics for laymen, too, "chaotic" has the meaning of "undirected" as above.
When our pleasure depends on a whimsical king, "subject to fortune" sounds adequate.
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I agree that the "key is in the definitions of these words".
Quantum uncertainty / the swerve is random in the sense of how "random" is used across specialized disciplines in science and technology.
I avoid "chaotic" because its usage is more controversial but those who use it do so casually as synonym for "random" or in non-linear physics as synonym for "undirected" as visualized in the excerpt.
For me, "not random, but undirected" is not a good high-level summary of the Epicurean position in physics.
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Welcome Obscure!