Posts by Godfrey

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II. Physics (in which I will include relevant biological research, which is ultimately physics)

This is a point that I've been thinking and reading about lately. I'm beginning to understand current biological research as part of the Canon (how we know things), and Physics as dealing perhaps more with non-biological (or non-cognitive?) processes.

I'm coming at this from a design background and with very limited scientific background. To this point I've primarily been reading work by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, an architectural critic interested in neuroscience and embodied cognition. As I approach these fields from an Epicurean viewpoint, it seems that modern biological science is addressing sensations, prolepseis and feelings as an integrated whole and validating and clarifying the Canon similarly to how modern physical science has been validating and clarifying the Physics.

In college I periodically drove back and forth between Los Angeles and Denver. Those were unforgettable trips: I especially enjoyed them at night, when I'd stick my head out the window and breathe in the stars.

Excellent! It's got a nice flow, gathering steam as it goes. And a nice use of language!

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I have occasionally been possessed by the notion to write a longform materialist poem in English. In my vision (forever out of reach)

Regarding "forever out of reach": baby steps! Putting oneself out there creatively takes a ton of courage (in some cases hubris). Maybe you've already been doing this, but sticking to a creative routine for an hour or so, say four days a week, builds momentum and over time leads to surprising results. Also, using a voice recorder on the road can be a way to get your ideas down. It may be possible to digitally transcribe the recording for later editing as well.

This all may be obvious, but I say it to offer encouragement back. There's a sense of your pleasure in your words, and you seem to have a drive (pun intended) to write more, so why not find a way to maximize your pleasure in this activity? I hope I'm not being presumptuous.

I'd enjoy reading more.

Welcome, Joshua!

I, too went from Christianity, to the East, to the Stoics before stumbling upon Epicurus. In some ways it was a very long journey just to get home.

This Morricone music gives me pleasure because it takes me back to the 1970s. Clint Eastwood movies were quite popular then, which led to an interest in the so called (perhaps inappropriately) "spaghetti Westerns" that Eastwood had been in in the 60s. My friends and I would sneak beers into the theater where we would watch his latest movies and have quite a good time.

I haven't seen many of his movies since then, but his latest, "The Mule", is a tale of a life poorly lived and is an interesting bookend to the Sergio Leone movies. I'm curious if the Leone movies are worth another look: I just remember them as really bleak westerns with great music.

Cassius, thanks for your synopsis! I got completely derailed by the untranslated Greek in the piece.

What you say makes perfect sense. I've been under the impression, without recalling the sources offhand, that Epicurus was somehow opposed to poetry and music. This has always seemed peculiar to me; your interpretation makes much more sense with EP as I understand it.

There's an essay by Mark Walker, "A Life Worthy of the Gods: Towards A Neo-Epicurean Moral Psychology" in the pdf which can be downloaded from:

http://collections.crest.ac.uk/15068/

He discusses how EP could be linked with positive psychology, briefly comparing it to how Stoicism is linked to cognitive behavioral psychology. It's an interesting read that might be pertinent here.

Great, thanks!

Can anybody recommend some material on the Greek gods? I'm a little familiar with the stories of anger, chicanery and such. It would be Interesting to have references to peruse that deal with such things as:

- stories of the Greek gods

- Greek gods versus Greek myths: are the myths just stories of the gods?

- the place of the gods in Greek culture, especially during Epicurus's time

It might be helpful to see more specifically what the general thinking was that Epicurus was responding to. If so, maybe this subforum is a good place to gather references.

A good read is Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. Historical fiction about the building of a cathedral and the intrigue and effort involved.

The gods notwithstanding, it's a terrible shame to lose an architectural and artistic treasure of such magnitude. I compare it to a loss on a lesser magnitude of the Glasgow School of Art a few years ago.

A truly pleasurable memory of mine is wandering into Notre Dame as the organist began playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The light, the music reverberating: spectacular and sublime. An incredible achievement of mankind.

Not to defend religion, but many cultural artifacts of the world would not exist without religious fervor of various types. I try to appreciate the artifacts while being cognizant of the pros and cons of the processes of their creation.

My last two posts were #17 and #19. That sounds like #17.

Thanks for posting all this information, it's a great resource!

I was curious while reading the letter to Herodotus if he was discussing rhetoric, or perhaps clear thinking. But it's the placement in the letter that seems to connect it with the canon.

The timing of your reading of Cicero is fortuitous: after reading DeWitt I downloaded a Cicero compilation so I can work my way through On Ends, The Gods and Tusculan Questions. Part of DeWitt's case (as you know) is that Cicero had a better grasp of the ideas than Laertius, even though Laertius was more sympathetic to the philosophy. I'd also never realized that Laertius lived after Cicero.

The pleasure comes at the same time as the learning, so I'm going to take my time with this!

Quote from Cassius

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.

Cassius, I've been reading up and feel much more informed on the prolepsis issues now. DeWitt presents a concrete and comprehensive case for his view, although when I read the letter to Herodotus I tend to interpret it more in line with the "mainstream" view. Apparently my "multiple modalities" questions are the 3 v 4 faculties problem, and I've got nothing to add to that. I've got to live with these ideas for longer; for the time being my head is spinning!

The one thing that I'm now convinced of is that Platonic ideals are incorporeal and eternal, and the Epicurean canon is firmly biologically based. So even if innate ideas/ anticipations/ preconceptions/ prolepseis are considered universal to mankind, they aren't Platonic as long as they remain in the body/mind.

The discussion on The Anticipations thread is excellent, BTW.

Good cite! Time for a deep dive into this intriguing topic.

Cassius, I frankly can't remember if I've read DeWitt's take on the anticipations or not, but I'm going to read (or re-read) it in the next few days. When I was putting together an outline I was getting hung up on the anticipations and it was suggested that I return to them later, as I recall. Which I'm doing now

Your description of DeWitt's theory is in line with my anticipations and seems to align with Asmis as well, as I understand her paper.

Now thinking out loud (digitally speaking): what if we compare justice and cows? They're two common examples that are used, along with the round/square tower.

Justice: I think we all agree that there is an innate sense of justice, perhaps an intuition. However each individual's sense of justice evolves over time, or I propose that it should in a properly functioning adult. An adult's sense of justice should be substantially more complex and possibly different than a two year old's. How does this happen? Through a continuous process of adjustment based on input from the senses and the feelings and adjustment of the initial concept. As an aside, it's possible that the end point of a person's concept of justice, after various permutations, will be the same as it was when they were two, but with more nuance. (Regarding familiar/unfamiliar, those, too change based on sensory input. Unfamiliar becomes familiar... likewise safety/danger....)

Cows: I can't imagine that we're born with a sense of what a cow is. (Didn't someone say to Plato, "when I see a horse I don't see horseness, I see a horse"?) We see a cow or a picture of a cow, or we hear "moo" or someone describes a cow to us. Then when we encounter a creature that might be a cow, we compare the information from our senses to what we have learned about a cow. If they match, perhaps we have a feeling of pleasure and our idea of a cow is reinforced.

I'll call justice and cows two different "modalities", for lack of a better word. But they each get measured through the canon in a similar fashion.

Call justice an inner intuition, call a cow an external presentation. If a person regards all anticipations as inner intuitions, then a cow must be an example of "cowness". Likewise if everything is a external presentation, there is no innate sense of justice but only a learned concept. So as I now understand it, there are probably multiple modalities of anticipations, similar to multiple modalities of the senses. At the very least "inner" and "outer".

Is it the case that the arguments using cows and such were all presented to promote one point of view and the arguments using justice were all presented to promote another viewpoint? I'm not clear enough on who said what to parse that.

From my reading of the paper "Epicurus' Scientific Method" I'm understanding a different take on the canon where the anticipations, senses and feelings are not separate, but interconnected. You have a preconception, which is verified by the senses. From there action is guided by pleasure/pain.

This doesn't mean that anticipations/senses/feelings are never separate, but to me it describes the canon as a measuring process involving all three components. To follow this reasoning, the anticipations almost equate to hypotheses. I think that that's going too far, but something that bothers me about anticipations as I've previously understood them is that they seem disturbingly close to Platonic ideals.

I like that interpretation of PD 23! I've understood it as a poke at the Skeptics, but this is a very practical reading of it.

On the last point regarding the condemnation of suicide, it seems like he's confusing the Epicureans with the Stoics.

Epicurus' VS 38 He is a little man in all respects who has many good reasons for quitting life.

The Isonomia book that Rivelle linked to in the "Epicurus, Ionia and India" thread discusses the Athenians v the Ionians in terms of idealism v materialism. Apparently the intelligent design v natural selection debate has been around since at least 500 BC! I found the parts of the book dealing with philosophy to be a very interesting read.

This is all new to me and extremely interesting. Epicurus' Scientific Method seems hard to find, but there's an earlier paper by Asmis which looks like her student work which led to the book and can be downloaded at

https://orb.binghamton.edu/sagp/157/

The beginning of her paper discusses Epicurus' Canon and seems to me to be a useful presentation of the subject. I've had particular difficulty grasping the Anticipations, largely I think because I haven't properly connected the Sensations, Feelings and Anticipations. She describes very clearly how the three are interdependent and used to measure each other in the process of inquiry. I find this quite illuminating, at least if I'm understanding it correctly

Another daily practice is reading. At the very least, after breakfast I'll read and chew on one of the Principal Doctrines or Vatican Sayings. Typically I'll read more than just that: currently I'm working through the Melville translation of Lucretius which is quite fun. I first read a prose version as an overview, but having done that the poetry is quite enjoyable.