Posts by Joshua

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The Egyptians (so much ridiculed) held no beasts to be sacred, except on account of some advantage which they had received from them. The ibis, a very large bird, with strong legs and a horny long beak, destroys a great number of serpents. These birds keep Egypt from pestilential diseases by killing and devouring the flying serpents brought from the deserts of Lybia by the south-west wind, which prevents the mischief that may attend their biting while alive, or any infection when dead.

Cotta's description of the folkloric Wadjet, or flying desert serpent, comes from the Histories of Herodotus, where in Book II around section 75 the historian writes:

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75. There is a region moreover in Arabia, situated nearly over against the city of Buto, to which place I came to inquire about the winged serpents: and when I came thither I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that it is impossible to make report of the number, and there were heaps of spines, some heaps large and others less large and others smaller still than these, and these heaps were many in number. This region in which the spines are scattered upon the ground is of the nature of an entrance from a narrow mountain pass to a great plain, which plain adjoins the plain of Egypt; and the story goes that at the beginning of spring winged serpents from Arabia fly towards Egypt, and the birds called ibises meet them at the entrance to this country and do not suffer the serpents to go by but kill them. On account of this deed it is (say the Arabians) that the ibis has come to be greatly honoured by the Egyptians, and the Egyptians also agree that it is for this reason that they honour these birds.

76. The outward form of the ibis is this:—it is a deep black all over, and has legs like those of a crane and a very curved beak, and in size it is about equal to a rail: this is the appearance of the black kind which fight with the serpents, but of those which most crowd round men's feet (for there are two several kinds of ibises) the head is bare and also the whole of the throat, and it is white in feathering except the head and neck and the extremities of the wings and the rump (in all these parts of which I have spoken it is a deep black), while in legs and in the form of the head it resembles the other. As for the serpent its form is like that of the watersnake; and it has wings not feathered but most nearly resembling the wings of the bat. Let so much suffice as has been said now concerning sacred animals.

This site has a good write-up on the problem.

Well said!

There is an interesting remark by Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve about libraries in antiquity, but I haven't been able to track down a source for the claim.

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At the games in the Colosseum one day, the historian Tacitus had a conversation on literature with a perfect stranger who turned out to have read his works. Culture was no longer located in close-knit circles of friends and acquaintances; Tacitus was encountering his "public" in the form of someone who had bought his book at a stall in the Forum or read it in a library.

In any case, This article (PDF) gives an interesting look into how these texts might have been distributed in antiquity. Just in case Don needs a cheering-up!

I should correct myself around the 8:20 mark. Correlation is not causation!

Interior of the Natural History Museum in London.

This is in reference to a conversation with Cassius about the Richard Dawkins interview in the movie linked to above.

There may still be a photograph of me next to that statue of Darwin, but if so I can give no account of what has become of it.

Here is Tennyson on the same theme. The question is somewhat lacking in definition; what is the context of the pain? And what is meant be nothing?

In the broadest terms, 'nothing' must mean death. This is because there is no neutral or middle ground between pleasure and pain; if you aren't experiencing pain, then you are either experiencing pleasure or not experiencing anything.

In Tennyson's case, we can regard the pain as transactional; 'The pleasure I had in spending time with you is worth the cost of the pain I'm now feeling over your loss.' I would hope (contra Plutarch) that the study of philosophy would help one to manage that grief and reduce that pain. Either way, in this transactional sense, 'nothing' doesn't actually mean nothing; it simply means the loss of something or someone.

So there are actually two questions;

1.) Would Epicurus choose a life of pain over death?

• Accounts differ. Principal doctrine 4 suggests that pain is mostly manageable. As it says elsewhere, 'there is more reason for joy than for vexation.' However, Torquatus complicates things in this passage:

  "It is schooled to encounter pain by recollecting that pains of great severity are ended by death, and slight ones have frequent intervals of respite; while those of medium intensity lie within our own control: we can bear them if they are endurable, or if they are not, we may serenely quit life's theater, when the play has ceased to please us."

2.) Would Epicurus support the view that it is "better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all"?

• Yes! Not because he wants to live with the pain, but because a major focus of his work was in managing and reducing mental pain. The death of his closest friend Metrodorus must have been a hardship to him, but he did not for that reason denounce friendship; it was just the opposite. He praised friendship as an 'immortal good'.

  Principal Doctrine 27: "Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends."

I actually never watched the movie, so...good luck! Religulous came out around the same time, I found that one really entertaining!

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There is no reliable scientific evidence of consciousness after brain death. At the same time, there is plenty of scientific evidence that all aspects of consciousness (sense impressions, emotions, thoughts, memories, etc.) depend completely upon a live and functioning brain, and that different
aspects of consciousness depend upon different neural structures within the brain. Furthermore, general anesthesia or a sharp blow to the head can temporarily extinguish consciousness via their
effects on the brain. These facts strongly support the claim that consciousness ends with brain death.

I would consider shoring this up with the observation that there is a relationship between progressive brain damage and progressive cognitive decline, and that that relationship is, to all appearances, a causal one.

I'll also add that I have a residual distaste for my former practice of mindfulness meditation; I hold on to this distaste on the grounds that escaping the present moment is, after all, the primary function of the imagination. This was especially useful to me during those long pointless hours sitting (as well as standing and kneeling) in a church pew. Looking back now on the boy in the pew, I cannot honestly say that I would wish him to be mentally present for all of that seemingly endless tedium.

"Spherical bastards"

I linked to it above

Lucian's A True Story

Lucian's Alexander the Oracle-Monger;

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In this connexion, Alexander once made himself supremely ridiculous. Coming across Epicurus’s Accepted Maxims, the most admirable of his books, as you know, with its terse presentment of his wise conclusions, he brought it into the middle of the market-place, there burned it on a fig-wood fire for the sins of its author, and cast its ashes into the sea. He issued an oracle on the occasion:

The dotard’s maxims to the flames be given.

The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquillity, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and inordinate desires, of the judgement and candour that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness.

Discovery Institute, Is Richard Dawkins a Raelian?

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Montesquieu; "If the triangles were to make a god they would give him three sides"

Pages 70-72 at Don 's 'Commentary to the Letter to Menoikeus', here. Like rice in Asia, pasta in Italy, wheat bread in France and Britain, and corn tortillas in Latin America, barley bread or porridge was a staple of the ancient Greek diet.

In fact, when the ancient city of Alexandria was first laid out by teams of surveyors following the architect and city planner Dinocrates of Rhodes, they marked out the streets and avenues of the new city's plan with lines of barley flour criss-crossing the sand; Greeks preferred to use ground chalk for this work, but none was available in that part of Egypt. Barley flour could be taken from the baggage train of Alexander's armies, since that was what the soldiers themselves ate. This was not asceticism, just a normal diet for most people at the time.

The Greek word for this, μαζα (maza), seems to me to be connected to the Spanish word for corn flour, masa harina.

This site at UC Davis contains lecture notes on Epicurus' physics as they relate to Parmenides and Zeno.

And this site from the University of Pittsburgh has all of the relevant citations from Aristotle, our main source for Zeno's Paradoxes.

Polyenphysiszodeism.

Innumerable gods who are living beings and have their existence entirely in nature, but stand aloof from human affairs.

I hold a copyright on that term!

Beavers are discussed on this episode of QI starting at around 34:07.

Also make sure you watch the quantum levitation experiment at 35:40!

In this article, Tim O'Keefe argues that the quasi-body and quasi-blood of the gods is evidence for the Idealist view.

Here, Hegel is incomprehensible on the same subject.

And Dewitt, on page 261, is atypically cautious;

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It is not on record whether Epicurus adduced logical grounds for denying flesh and blood to the bodies of the gods. We are informed that he wrote of them as having "a sort of blood and a sort of body, lacking solidity such as characterizes ordinary bodies." It is quite possible that he was rationalizing a tradition, represented by Homer, who also denied blood to the bodies of the gods. Instead of blood there was in their veins a liquid called ichor, which in later Greek signified the straw-colored residue of blood called serum. As for the unsubstantial nature of the divine body, this was only what the general belief of the Greeks assumed to be true. As already mentioned, Epicurus preferred to follow tradition where permissible and was not bent upon introducing new gods, which was an indictable offense, but aimed rather to rationalize existing beliefs and recall his countrymen to true piety.

In this thread for Episode 226 I laid out my alternative to the Ontological argument. That is a work in progress, but in its current state it should be enough to call into question the validity of producing a being into nature a priori.

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(NOTE: No mention of "planet" other than the one on which the beings - human beings in this case - stand)

The planets are stars in this analysis--they are the "wandering stars" spoken of in the Letter to Pythocles;

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That some of the stars should wander in their course, if indeed it is the case that their movements are such, while others do not move in this manner, may be due to the reason that from the first as they moved in their circles they were so constrained by necessity that some of them move along the same regular orbit, and others along one which is associated with certain irregularities: or it may be that among the regions to which they are carried in some places there are regular tracts of air which urge them on successively in the same direction and provide flame for them regularly, while in other places the tracts are irregular, so that the aberrations which we observe result.

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τινὰ τῶν ἄστρων πλανᾶσθαι, εἰ οὕτω ταῖς κινήσεσι χρώμενα συμβαίνει, τινὰ δὲ ὁμαλῶς κινεῖσθαι, 177 [113] ἐνδέχεται μὲν καὶ παρὰ τὸ κύκλῳ κινούμενα ἐξ ἀρχῆς οὕτω κατηναγκάσθαι, ὥστε τὰ μὲν κατὰ τὴν αὐτὴν δίνην φέρεσθαι ὁμαλῆ οὖσαν, τὰ δὲ κατά τιν᾽ ἄλλην τισὶν ἀνωμαλίαις χρωμένην.

ἄστρων πλανᾶσθαι, astron planasthai, wandering stars. Planet means 'wanderer'.

The rules of pig-Latin;

Pig Latin

I'd like to develop a thesis that I'm working toward, and that I briefly mentioned on Sunday because it only then occurred to me;

Quote from Letter To Menoeceus, Yonge Translation

First believe that God is a living being immortal and blessed, according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind; and so believing, thou shalt not affirm of him aught that is foreign to his immortality or that agrees not with blessedness, but shalt believe about him whatever may uphold both his blessedness and his immortality. For verily there are gods, and the knowledge of them is manifest; but they are not such as the multitude believe, seeing that men do not steadfastly maintain the notions they form respecting them. Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly impious.

It's always struck me as odd that Epicurus' first use of god (θεὸν) is singular, and in subsequent usage he employs the plural. Some of the translators (as Yonge here) actually translate this as God, giving entirely the wrong impression.

I was struck by the similarity between this passage in Epicurus, and the opening words of Torquatus in De Finibus;

Quote from Cicero, On Ends, Reid Translation

The problem before us then is, what is the climax and standard of things good, and this in the opinion of all philosophers must needs be such that we are bound to test all things by it, but the standard itself by nothing. Epicurus places this standard in pleasure, which he lays down to be the supreme good, while pain is the supreme evil; and he founds his proof of this on the following considerations.

Notice that Torquatus in this passage is not saying that pleasure is the good because that is the "opinion of all philosophers"; Torquatus is relying on the "opinion of all philosophers" in order to establish a barebones definition of the good as such. What makes something the good? Something is the good because we test all things by it, but the good itself by nothing.

In the Letter to Menoeceus Epicurus seems to be doing the same thing. Before we can even discuss the gods, we need a working definition of what a god really is. Notice how this interpretation of the passage perfectly explains the use of the singular.

Person A: I have three pet marmots at home that I need to go take care of, but after that I'm good for whatever.

Person B: ...What the hell is a marmot?

No one would ever follow up the initial statement with the question, "what are three marmots?" When we ask for a definition, we ask in the singular. When Epicurus speaks on the gods, he first offers a definition, and his definition is also in the singular. And like Torquatus, who relies on the opinion of all philosophers when defining the good, Epicurus invokes the common opinion of mankind when defining a god.

He does not use the common opinion of mankind to justify his own belief that the gods exist. He thinks the gods exist because of images that impinge, because of prolepsis, because of the principle of isonomia, and perhaps other considerations as well. But he thinks that the gods are blessed and incorruptible because this is the definition of a god; if a god is neither blessed nor incorruptible, it isn't a god.

I have very little facility with the Greek, but I've never seen this interpretation set forth and I find that it solves two thorny problems at one go.