Posts by Godfrey

Attached are two brief papers on the origins of ancient atomism, discussing how it was a response to Parmenides' theory of Being.

Thanks for the links Cassius. I'm intrigued by these. It just depends on time costs v benefits as to whether I'll dig deeper into them. They're certainly worth knowing about in general, so I'll watch some videos and see how they look.

How would one go about learning to use these? Start with Markup and then move on to Obsidian and/or Logseq? Or is Markup a part of Obsidian and Logseq so that you can just pick one of the two of them to learn and still have the functionality of Markup?

Are these set up for non-techie users or is some knowledge of programming required? The last programming I did was with punch cards

Is Markdown a program similar to Obsidian and Logseq, or is it the basis of these? What type of learning curve is there to these? The last thing I want to do is get bogged down in learning new software, but if they're easy to learn and use then I might be interested. But right now I confess that I'm clueless about this

I've done both the focused sitting and the active version and find both of them relaxing and centering. Most often these days as I'm in the midst of some activity I'll notice tension somewhere in my body, typically my shoulders or lower back, then consciously relax the tension and take a few conscious breaths as I continue to relax the tension.

Ahhhhhh.... With a bit of practice it's very effective.

Good point. What is Markdown?

Are those beignets?

@smoothiekiwi in many ways it's an advantage being exposed to Epicurus at a young age. How you choose to continue your education, or how you choose a job, or a partner, or where to live, or so many other things... these are big picture "choices and avoidances" that will enable you to bring more pleasure into your life for decades to come. As you come to understand the philosophy on a deeper level you will find that following your canonic faculties will be a great aid in making such decisions, as well as the small day to day choices and avoidances that lead to a pleasant life.

Epicurus studied natural philosophy and the art of life; many current subjects that you might study in school have evolved from these and you may find one or more of them pleasurable and enlightening, even worth pursuing further.

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VS27. Whereas other pursuits yield their fruit only to those who have practiced them to perfection, in the love and practice of wisdom knowledge is accompanied by delight; for here enjoying comes along with learning, not afterward.

Funny, I'll be getting off a plane Tuesday night....

Mindfulness meditation is, to me, pertinent to an Epicurean. In a nutshell, you begin by choosing a specific "object" to focus on such as your breathing or perhaps the sounds in your environment. Just notice it/them and notice what thoughts pop up. Don't get hung up on the thoughts, just let them go. You can do it sitting quietly or anywhere except driving a vehicle.

The relevance of this to EP is that it's a way to become more aware of your sensations, feelings and underlying thoughts. To me this is a great way to practice and develop a habit of working with the Canon.

Something I've been doing lately which I'm enjoying, which isn't pure meditation, is to listen to a 5-10 minute guided meditation on the Fitbit app before getting out of bed in the morning. I tend to get amped up to get myself out of bed, which ends up setting an anxious tone for my whole day. Starting off by relaxing with a short guided meditation is pretty effortless and sets a much more pleasant tone for the day.

I've commented elsewhere that I don't follow a "hedonic regimen" for the reason that I think it ends up becoming a chore rather than maximizing pleasure. If anything, I prefer a "hedonic menu". The same applies for meditation. There is a great variety of meditation techniques: you might call these tools to work on your pleasure engine (credit to Joshua ). Use one as long as it feels valuable to you but feel free to switch to another. Or to none at all. We're trying to maximize pleasure but not to become Zen masters

I'm interested but won't be able to make this one.

Cassius in my notes on Gosling and Taylor I skipped over the Plato and Aristotle sections . It will be a few days before I'll be able to look it over but I'll see if I can find something. I did read Philebus quite a while ago but can't remember the details, however Don it's only about fifty pages or so, so it's relatively painless to give it a quick read. As for in depth study: now THAT could be torture!

Yes I was saying that the source is the pathe.

If I eat a delicious apple, I experience that through my sensations. Then the feeling of pleasure arises from these sensations. So in the specific context of post #122 I'm suggesting that the feeling of pleasure, not the apple, is the source. There's the stimulus (the apple), the pathe, and the experience of the pathe: duration, location, intensity.

Quote from Don

When discussions like this come up, I always have the feeling that the ancient Epicureans read this and went "Yep, I totally agree with that and it makes perfect sense

Absolutely!

Looking at it like this I'd say that all three apply: location, duration, intensity.

No, the opposite. The source, the pathe, is the same but our experience of it is different in different parts of the mind/body, over different durations and, depending on how one interprets the Greek, due to varying intensities.

"Fill in the intervals" sounds to me like "accumulate". I interpret "accumulate" as something that happens in the body, but "condense" as something that happens to the pleasure.

Right now I'm thinking that the blunt force meaning is of the PD something like "if you make all of the external, objective aspects of various pleasures equal, then the pleasures will be equal". So this seems to say that pleasure itself, the pathe, is a specific thing (maybe an on/off switch), and the only differences between pleasures are where in the body or mind they occur and for how long. "Condense" would imply an additional difference in intensity, "accumulate" would not.

My mother in her later years used to stretch her birthday celebration over a couple of weeks: with family on the day, but lunches and such with friends as could be arranged. It's the celebrating that counts

Haven't we discussed previously that Epicurus argued against ranking pleasures? Or was he just arguing against pleasure being unlimited? Either way, he must have been familiar with the Platonic/Aristotlean exercise of ranking pleasures.

PDs 9, 10 and 11 look to me to be similar to PDs 19, 20 and 21 in that they could have been originally written as a single paragraph. As one works through the paragraph, one gets a view of EP which begins with pleasure and leads back to astronomical phenomena and death. This "clump" of PDs then is a very concise overview!

Also, it's possible that the convoluted if-then wording is a jab at Platonic dialogue: rather than leading the reader down a primrose path as Plato does, he makes us work to think through what he's saying. Plato poses questions and answers them for us, assuming that we will accept his answers. If we don't accept his answers (as most of us on this forum don't) then his arguments fall apart. The structure of 9-10-11 might be designed to prompt us to reason things out for ourselves.

Finally, if the PDs were intended to be memorized, it would probably take more mental engagement to memorize a statement in this form as opposed to something more rote like "pleasures are different but can't be ranked". Although this in particular doesn't seem very convincing.

Quote from Cassius

Yes those other translations are a reminder that there is *something* in addition to time that Epicurus is considering, bit it does not jump out at me with clarity what that something is. It's almost like he is talking about how much of the body and mind is engaged in that pleasure as it is occurring.

That sounds right. Makridis calls it "space and duration". The word "accumulation" makes more sense to me than "condensed" but I can't comment on the correct Greek. So he seems to be saying that IF for example the pleasure in your belly could accumulate to fill your entire body and mind, or the pleasure of learning could accumulate to fill your entire body and mind, and IF each of these would last for the same amount of time, then there would be no difference between the two. But as Hicks points out, this is not the case.

Is this a convoluted way of saying that pleasures differ from one another, but that you can't rank them? PD 9, 10 and 11 are all structured similarly in setting up "if-then" scenarios, and each one implies that the "if" scenario is not the way things are.

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19.4.27 Ataraxia is achieved by the removal of superstitious fear and false beliefs, the constant memory of the truth, and attention to present experience and perception. Now the mind is free of disturbance and so memory and expectation operate without anxiety. Similarly when physical pain is removed the body operates without pain and that will mean that always some pleasurable and painless perception is occurring, a condition of good cheer.

It's been quite a while since I read TGOP; this is the closest thing I can find in my notes (TGOP is one of those rare books in which I actually took notes; I can't recall if this is a quote or a paraphrase). But, to me, this reinforces the idea that understanding the physics, the canonic, the worldview, becomes something of a pleasure engine.

Having ataraxia in the quote is interesting: is it too "out there" to describe ataraxia as a pleasure engine? That never even occurred to me until reviewing this.