Posts by Joshua

We didn't make it that far in our discussion today, but that will be the next part of the text starting with this;

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for you asserted likewise that the form of the Deity is perceptible by the mind, but not by sense; that it is neither solid, nor invariable in number; that it is to be discerned by similitude and transition, and that a constant supply of images is perpetually flowing on from innumerable atoms, on which our minds are intent; so that we from that conclude that divine nature to be happy and everlasting.

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve; Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

The third post from this thread contains the full passage.

Velleius on the labors of the gods

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Your sect, Balbus, frequently ask us how the Gods live, and how they pass their time? Their life is the most happy, and the most abounding with all kinds of blessings, which can be conceived. They do nothing. They are embarrassed with no business; nor do they perform any work. They rejoice in the possession of their own wisdom and virtue. They are satisfied that they shall ever enjoy the fulness of eternal pleasures.

§ 1.52 Such a Deity may properly be called happy; but yours is a most laborious God. For let us suppose the world a Deity — what can be a more uneasy state than, without the least cessation, to be whirled about the axle-tree of heaven with a surprising celerity? But nothing can be happy that is not at ease. Or let us suppose a Deity residing in the world, who directs and governs it, who preserves the courses of the stars, the changes of the seasons, and the vicissitudes and orders of things, surveying the earth and the sea, and accommodating them to the advantage and necessities of man. Truly this Deity is embarrassed with a very troublesome and laborious office. We make a happy life to consist in a tranquillity of mind, a perfect freedom from care, and an exemption from all employment. The philosopher from whom we received all our knowledge has taught us that the world was made by nature; that there was no occasion for a workhouse to frame it in; and that, though you deny the possibility of such a work without divine skill, it is so easy to her, that she has made, does make, and will make innumerable worlds. Here

Ennius, Iphigenia; and Lucretius' response

Quote from Ennius

He who does not know how to use leisure
has more of work than when there is work in work.
For to whom a task has been set, he does the work,
desires it, and delights his own mind and intellect:
in leisure, a mind does not know what it wants.
The same is true (of us); we are neither at home nor in the battlefield;
we go here and there, and wherever there is a movement, we are there too.
The mind wanders unsure, except in that life is lived.

Wikipedia

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Quote from Lucretius

If men, in that same way as on the mind
They feel the load that wearies with its weight,
Could also know the causes whence it comes,
And why so great the heap of ill on heart,
O not in this sort would they live their life,
As now so much we see them, knowing not
What 'tis they want, and seeking ever and ever
A change of place, as if to drop the burden.
The man who sickens of his home goes out,
Forth from his splendid halls, and straight- returns,
Feeling i'faith no better off abroad.
He races, driving his Gallic ponies along,
Down to his villa, madly,- as in haste
To hurry help to a house afire.- At once
He yawns, as soon as foot has touched the threshold,
Or drowsily goes off in sleep and seeks
Forgetfulness, or maybe bustles about
And makes for town again. In such a way
Each human flees himself- a self in sooth,
As happens, he by no means can escape;
And willy-nilly he cleaves to it and loathes,
Sick, sick, and guessing not the cause of ail.
Yet should he see but that, O chiefly then,
Leaving all else, he'd study to divine
The nature of things, since here is in debate
Eternal time and not the single hour,
Mortal's estate in whatsoever remains
After great death.

Persius Digital Library

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Lucretius on Empedocles; "A great man, greatly fallen"

Quote from Lucretius, Book I

As first Empedocles of Acragas,
Whom that three-cornered isle of all the lands
Bore on her coasts, around which flows and flows
In mighty bend and bay the Ionic seas,
Splashing the brine from off their gray-green waves.
Here, billowing onward through the narrow straits,
Swift ocean cuts her boundaries from the shores
Of the Italic mainland. Here the waste
Charybdis; and here Aetna rumbles threats
To gather anew such furies of its flames
As with its force anew to vomit fires,
Belched from its throat, and skyward bear anew
Its lightnings' flash. And though for much she seem
The mighty and the wondrous isle to men,
Most rich in all good things, and fortified
With generous strength of heroes, she hath ne'er
Possessed within her aught of more renown,
Nor aught more holy, wonderful, and dear
Than this true man. Nay, ever so far and pure
The lofty music of his breast divine
Lifts up its voice and tells of glories found,
That scarce he seems of human stock create.
Yet he and those forementioned (known to be
So far beneath him, less than he in all),
Though, as discoverers of much goodly truth,
They gave, as 'twere from out of the heart's own shrine,
Responses holier and soundlier based
Than ever the Pythia pronounced for men
From out the triped and the Delphian laurel,
Have still in matter of first-elements
Made ruin of themselves, and, great men, great
Indeed and heavy there for them the fall:
First, because, banishing the void from things,
They yet assign them motion, and allow
Things soft and loosely textured to exist,
As air, dew, fire, earth, animals, and grains,
Without admixture of void amid their frame.
Next, because, thinking there can be no end
In cutting bodies down to less and less
Nor pause established to their breaking up,
They hold there is no minimum in things;
Albeit we see the boundary point of aught
Is that which to our senses seems its least,
Whereby thou mayst conjecture, that, because
The things thou canst not mark have boundary points,
They surely have their minimums. Then, too,
Since these philosophers ascribe to things
Soft primal germs, which we behold to be
Of birth and body mortal, thus, throughout,
The sum of things must be returned to naught,
And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew-
Thou seest how far each doctrine stands from truth.
And, next, these bodies are among themselves
In many ways poisons and foes to each,
Wherefore their congress will destroy them quite
Or drive asunder as we see in storms
Rains, winds, and lightnings all asunder fly.

Persius Digital Library

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David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom

Amazon

An excerpt of the first ten pages from chapter one is available in PDF form from Cambridge University Press; link to PDF.

Norman Wentworth DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy

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At the outset it must be observed and kept diligently in mind that nowhere in his extant writings does Epicurus call the gods immortal. This might be thought an accident of the tradition were it not for the
fact that other considerations rule out this possibility. If Lucretius does call them immortal repeatedly, this may be set down as an indication that he never really mastered the Epicurean lore of the gods and did not live to make an intensive study of it in preparation for writing about it.

The reasoning behind this doctrine of incorruptibility is readily discerned. From the doctrine that nothing exists except atoms and void it follows that the bodies of the gods must be corporeal. Gods are zoa, "animate beings." They are thus units in the ascending order of Nature, as is man. Being in this order and corporeal, they cannot be deathless. If deathlessness were inherent in their nature, they would be in another class by themselves. Since they do belong in the same class as man, it is a logical necessity to think of their incorruptibility as by some means preserved. Since in the cosmos of Epicurus, unlike that of Plato, this incorruptibility lacked a superior being to guarantee its
continuance, the sole possibility was that the gods preserved it for themselves by their own vigilance. Thus it must be discerned that just as the happiness of man is self-achieved, so the happiness of the gods is self-preserved.

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With tagathon literally being a contraction of the definite article (the) with agathon (good), to deinon simply can't be contracted since there are two vowels together: to deinon.

Do you mean aren't two vowels here, Don? I don't know the rules in Greek. Latin often uses verbal elision when two vowels adjoin; genus omne animantum from Lucretius, for instance. Spoken as omnanimantum.

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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.