Posts by Joshua

The citations from the letters of Cicero to Cassius Longinus were very appropriate to this discussion, so thank you Cassius !

I should note that my identification of Jesus could be Mary, but she is usually portrayed in blue clothes and while she is often depicted in adoration of the Host, she is seldom seen presenting it.

Why does Achilles look like a woman, you ask? Achilles is usually portrayed as an Ephebos, an adolescent youth. In one famous episode he actually disguised himself as a maiden.

But bear in mind that all of this is just guesswork on my part.

I notice that most of the figures in the painting are looking to this seated figure. How we should identify him is an interesting question. Matthew 10:10 reads; Don't take a traveling bag for the road, or an extra shirt, sandals, or a walking stick, for the worker is worthy of his food. This may explain the bag and staff; an encumbrance tying the poor soul to this world? Alternatively, the cloak, staff and purse are the symbols of the philosopher, as on the Boscoreale cup. Originally these were associated with Cynicism, but the meaning expanded to include philosophers generally.

At any rate, the man is surrounded by other figures vying for his attention; Nike the goddess of Victory stands on a globe, offering him the world. Hermes is at his right ear, the god of commerce and trade, offering him security in wealth. Aphrodite is to his left (portrayed here with her girdle), offering pleasure; she gestures towards the bedroom and the richly furnished table. The child Eros is on hand as well, and offers Love.

In the center of the painting stands Jesus Christ, with Chalice and Host. To his right is Hercules, to his left is Achilles. Labor and Duty, perhaps? At the focal point in heaven is the Hebrew name of God, YHWH.

The left of the painting is obscure to me.

I think he misses the subtleties of Epicurus' language:

From the letter to Pythocles; "The size of the sun is to us what it appears to be, and in reality it is either greater or less or the same size."

"Death is nothing to us; for what has disintegrated is without perception, and what is without perception is nothing to us."

It is not principally a question of harm, but of experience. And just like with the size of the sun, a different perspective yields a different perception. The death of a child is a horror to his mother, because the mother still exists as a subject whose experience is modified by predicates. The child? No subject; therefore no predicate.

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So, within that context, while I (personally) identify significantly more with Lucretius' anti-religious attitude, I think that Epicurus' personal expression of pious devotion might have been (in general) closer to the Roman idea of "religio".

I credit the book Long Live Latin for helping me to understand this, and I think it's worth considering; Lucretius had a separate word which he used in Book 5 for his understanding of pious devotion. The Latin word is pietas, which he contrasts with religio. Around line 1200 (Bailey translation);

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Nor is it piety at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone, and to draw near to every altar, no, nor to lie prostrate on the ground with outstretched palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the streaming blood of beasts, nor to link vow to vow, but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.

I'll quote my own words from an old thread;

"Pietas, then, is not a synonym of religio but its true opposite. Religio is a kind of madness born of superstition; it is attended by fear, traffics in well-worn lies, and delights in obscurantism and servility. Pietas is the spirit of understanding born of inquiry; it brings peace, "reveals darkly hidden things", and delights in clarity and the health of the unburdened soul."

My building has a problem with porch pirates, which is the only reason I haven't gotten your book yet, but I'll find a way to get it soon! Several neighbors have doorbell cameras now so I hope the problem will resolve itself.

Einstein on mathematics:

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One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of all other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts. In spite of this, the investigator in another department of science would not need to envy the mathematician if the laws of mathematics referred to objects of our mere imagination, and not to objects of reality. For it cannot occasion surprise that different persons should arrive at the same logical conclusions when they have already agreed upon the fundamental laws (axioms), as well as the methods by which other laws are to be deduced therefrom. But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics, in that it is mathematics which affords the exact sciences a certain measure of security, to which without mathematics they could not attain.

At this point an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things?

In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this:—As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

This entails, among other things, dismissing a lot of what Plato thought was true about mathematics. If Euclid and others like him can derive from the basic axioms of geometry a profound understanding of its higher operations, can the philosopher working by analogy use pure reason to escape the cave of sensory illusion by taking hold of absolute truth? Just as all of math is innately embedded in its axioms, is all knowledge innate and all 'learning' merely rediscovery of what we knew before our souls were imprisoned in our sluggish flesh?

Epicurus is often criticized for his aversion to math. But his real distaste was for the kind of philosophy that used faulty assumptions about math and reason to arrive at conclusions that were divorced from reality.

Episode 61 of the Lucretius Today podcast (well before my time) gives another view onto this aspect of the philosophy.

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When we get to this kind of language, it should be put down, not by some philosopher, but by the censor, for its fault is not a matter of language only but of morality as well.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero

This censor approves! I, the pencil, was silver when I came from the fire, but in your hands I have become golden likewise.

I do find the staying power of this usage to be remarkable. The Scottish adventurer Cunninghame Graham wrote this in a book on his travels;

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Almost all Europeans in Morocco must of necessity be merchants, if not they must be consuls, for there is hardly any other industry open to them to choose. The [christian] missionaries bought and sold nothing, they were not consuls; still they ate and drank, lived in good houses, and though not rich yet passed their lives in what the Jews called luxury. So they [the Jews] agreed to call them followers of Epicurus, for, as they said, "this Epicurus was a devil who did naught but eat and drink." The nickname stuck, and changed into Bikouros by the Moors, who thought it was a title of respect, became the name throughout Morocco for a missionary. One asks as naturally for the house of Epicurus on coming to a town as one asks for the "Checquers" or the "Bells" in rural England. Are you "Bikouros"? says a Moor, and thinks he does you honour by the inquiry; but the recipients of the name are fit to burst when they reflect on their laborious days spent in the surgery, their sowing seed upon the marble quarries of the people's hearts, and that the Jews in their malignity should charge upon them by this cursed name, that they live in Morocco to escape hard work, and pass their time in eating and In in quaffing healths a thousand fathoms deep.

Which is how Bikouros came to be mentioned as a very minor character in one of Frank Herbert's Dune novels.

Here is Lucy Hutchinson's letter to the Earl of Anglesey, denouncing her own translation of Lucretius. And this article at Smithsonian Magazine is good for dispelling America's 'creation myth'.

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In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith.

The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side. And much of the recent conversation about America’s ideal of religious freedom has paid lip service to this comforting tableau.

The Puritans actually left for the New World because they despised the religious toleration that was taking root there, and wanted a new country in which only Puritanism was tolerated. To that end, they hanged Quakers and women accused of witchcraft, banned the celebration of Christmas, and rejected a non-Puritan colonial governor appointed by the British Crown.

Lucy Hutchinson was in England, and worked on her translation during the Interregnum. Her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, was a politician and a judge, and in that role he was one of the 59 signatories to the warrant for the execution of King Charles I. After the Stuart Restoration with the coronation of Charles II, John Hutchinson and many other co-conspirators were exempted from the general amnesty and he died in custody.

The overall impulse of the Puritan movement was similar in its aims to the previous work of a 15th century Dominican Friar named Girolamo Savonarola. The religious moral panic he kicked off in Florence led to the burning of books, art, cosmetics, mirrors, elegant clothing, sculptures, and so on. In his frantic sermons, he condemned atomism by name. He was eventually excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI, charged with heresy and sedition, and hanged in the Piazza della Signoria. Anyone who was in possession of any of his writings was required to hand them over to the church for destruction, or face the same fate.

That is an excellent idea! I can refer you to an old thread in which I compared Friar Laurence's Act 2, Scene 3 monologue from Romeo and Juliet to Book 5 of Lucretius;

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Romeo and Juliet (Passages Parallel to Lucretius)

Romeo and Juliet: Act 2, Scene 3--Friar Laurence	Lucretius, Book 5: Cyril Bailey translation--various passages
The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light; And fleckled darkness, like a drunkard, reels From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheel. Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye, The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry, I must upfill this osier cage of ours With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers.	1. The golden

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Joshua

August 24, 2022 at 5:59 PM

Quote from Cyrano

The truth is I have not read all the works of de Bergerac. Yes, I "would think that he most definitely had something to say about Epicurus at some point." But I'm sorry I cannot help you now. Probably in the future I will, for you are shaming me into a perusal of his writing.

Take heart! I didn't even know the name three days ago...

Here's my attempt at a somewhat nuanced answer;

The most interesting changes have been in the Physics. The Greek atomists turned out to be substantially correct in a lot of big ways, and charmingly wrong, as everyone was then, in a lot of small ways. They correctly surmised; 1.) that the center of the Earth was not the center of the cosmos, and that in fact the cosmos had no center. 2.) that the laws that govern celestial phenomena are the same as those we experience "down" here. The heavenly orbs actually are bodies, and not gods. They actually are made of common matter, and not a fifth aethereal essence. 3.) matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Their most glaring omission, common to all of the ancients, was their lack of any understanding of gravity as a force. Without gravity, it is difficult to make a convincing account of the cosmos. Some modern day flat-earthers have hit upon a novel solution to this problem--they propose that the disc and its dome move upwards at a constant rate of acceleration, but even this could not have served in an infinite Epicurean cosmos. Most of the explanations of atmospheric and celestial phenomena found in Lucretius have, of course, been superseded by a better and more accurate understanding of their causes. As for the natural gods of Epicurus living in the intermundia, I find simple atheism an apt substitute. The worst possible thing you can do to a god is render it unnecessary--a god with no explanatory power is in itself one assumption too far. Just my opinion.

In canonics or epistemology, a huge and complex revision is worth mentioning. In 5th and 4th century Greece, philosophers were prone to using mathematical principles to 'prove' moral truths. A successor to Pythagoras argued that ten was the number of the celestial spheres, and his logic in this was that 10 is the sum of a point, a line, a surface, and a volume--1+2+3+4. Owing to the perfection of this number, it must be reflected in the heavens...but of course not. The Platonists made the study of geometry a prerequisite to the study of philosophy, and as geometry is a process of rediscovering invisible mathematical facts, so a philosophy of pure reason is a process of 'recollecting' innate knowledge of absolute moral truths--the truths we forgot when we were interred in our bodily prisons. Geometry leads us out of one cave, and philosophy another. In the film Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis quotes Euclid on the transitive property as evidence for regarding slavery as unnatural and immoral. It makes for excellent cinema, but poor moral philosophy. The point in contention was precisely whether a and c really were both equal to b. Those who argued against the proposition had no trouble finding their justification in what they were assured was a higher law than geometry.

Nowadays engineers use mathematics to build not only bridges, an art the Romans had mastered, but also skyscrapers and jet airplanes, and the last people on Earth to endorse the numerology of the Pythagoreans would be working mathematicians. No longer a hindrance to understanding nature, math has become more helpful than nearly anything else available to us.

This is the first of two cases where it could be plausibly argued that Epicurus threw the baby out with the bathwater. The problem was never geometry itself, but the false analogy made by his contemporaries between geometry and moral epistemology.

The second example is part of his ethics. False belief about the gods was a source of great frustration to Epicurus, and one of the many causes of false belief was epic poetry, which he thought was full of lies. It was full of lies, or as we would say 'fictions', and the Epicurean satirist Lucian of Samosata was merciless in his mockery of the form in A True Story. But the solution when it arrived (very late) was more literacy and not less; we consume fiction in books, film, and television by the truckload, but only the genuinely pathological believe everything they read. We are very fortunate that Lucretius did not share his purported distaste for poetry.

I'll think about the question some more! I do think it's helpful to push past the obvious and often trivial scientific errors and into some of the deeper questions. Prof. David Glidden made a comment in passing during our podcast interview that the resurgence of atomism in the renaissance and the enlightenment probably had a role in postponing research into microbiology. I'm ashamed to say I haven't followed up on that, but that is exactly the kind of critique that would hold my interest.

Yes Godfrey , that is really irritating! Mobile and Desktop.

Thank you, Matteng ! I think the best text we have left regarding the Epicurean feeling of compassion for mankind is the Inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda;

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Fr. 30

... time ... and we contrived this in order that, even while [sitting at] home, [we might be able to exhibit] the goods of philosophy, not to all people here [indeed], but to those of them who are civil-spoken; and not least we did [this] for those who are called «foreigners,» though they are not really so. For, while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire earth, and a single home, the world.

Fr. 56

[So we shall not achieve wisdom universally], since not all are capable of it. But if we assume it to be possible, then truly the life of the gods will pass to men. For everything will be full of justice and mutual love, and there will come to be no need of fortifications or laws and all the things which we contrive on account of one another. As for the necessities derived from agriculture, since we shall have no slaves at that time (for indeed [we ourselves shall plough] and dig and tend [the plants] and [divert] rivers and watch over [the crops), we shall] ... such things as ... not ... time ..., and such activities, [in accordance with what is] needful, will interrupt the continuity of the [shared] study of philosophy; for [the] farming operations [will provide what our] nature wants.

But it isn't much, I grant you. The primary ethical mode of the Epicureans seems to be of the "teach a man to fish" variety; Lucretius' whole ethical project was more or less of that nature, whereby he brings good health to mankind through remedies that are philosophical rather than extrinsic.

When Julian the Apostate was trying to revive paganism after an interlude of Christian governance, he actually complained to his high priests that even pagan Romans were going to the Christians for charity rather than to the temples. We might consider this the practical result of 'taking no thought for the morrow', which, take it any way you like, is certainly not advice that Epicurus would condone. Security and self-sufficiency require taking thought for the morrow, and they are both natural goods.

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Natural Goods in Epicureanism

The topic of natural goods briefly came up in last Wednesday's Zoom discussion. So thinking about what are natural goods within Epicureanism, as well as references such as the Principle Doctrines, etc.

It seems that friendship, freedom, and self-sufficiency are all natural goods, and there could be others?

Also, I just found this article (written in 2021) by Alex R. Gilham.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27007901

This article starts out with saying that pleasure is the only intrinsic good, but that…

Kalosyni

June 12, 2022 at 9:06 AM

As for the poll, I use cell phone at work or elsewhere, and laptop at home. Probably the cell slightly more frequently.

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I'm seeing the logo. Using an Android (Pixel 6) and a DuckDuckGo browser. See image.

Cassius was fast with the fixes! The favicon is back up as well.

Ongoing fixes;

• The Home Page contains an out-of-date description of available styles that will need to be updated.
• The forum logo no longer appears at the top of the Home Page on mobile.
• The browser tab icon, called a favicon, no longer shows a stylized bust of Epicurus.
• When you click on a #tag, it changes the style back to light mode. Edit; this only happened once to me. The dark style appears to be stable after that hiccup.

There appears to be better Unicode support on mobile. I have no idea if this is client-side or server-side, it's possible I only noticed it because of the update.

❦

This is an Aldus Leaf, named after the Venetian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius, who printed a handsome edition of Lucretius in December of 1500.

Show Notes;

Thomas More, Utopia

I collected the most pertinent passages (including the passages quoted in this episode) relating to Epicureanism in a thread here.

Cosma Raimondi

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The humanist Cosma Raimondi (1400–1435/1436) was a native of Cremona and the pupil of Gasparino Barzizza (1360–1431). He helped to decipher an important manuscript of Cicero’s rhetorical works and wrote a well-known defense of Epicurus: A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi in Defence of Epicurus against the Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics (1429). Leaving Italy, he moved to Avignon, where he later committed suicide.

The Inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda

Martin Ferguson Smith's translation of the text of the inscription is here.

John Locke, Letter Concerning Religious Toleration

The full English text of this letter which was originally written in Latin is here.

Horace - Epistle VI Book 1: Ad Numicium

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If your lungs or kidneys were attacked by cruel disease,

You’d seek relief from the disease. You wish to live well:

Who does not? If it’s virtue alone achieves it, then

Be resolute, forgo pleasure. But if you consider

Virtue’s only words, a forest wood: then beware

Lest your rival’s first to dock, lest you lose Cibyra’s

Or Bithynia’s trade. Cleared a thousand, and another?

Then add a third pile, round it off with a fourth.

Surely wife and dowry, loyalty and friends, birth

And beauty too are the gifts of Her Highness Cash,

While Venus and Charm grace the moneyed classes.

Don’t be like Cappadocia’s king, rich in slaves

Short of lucre. They say Lucullus was asked

If he could lend the theatre a hundred Greek cloaks.

‘Who could find all those? he answered, ‘but I’ll see,

And send what I’ve got’. Later, a note: ‘It seems at home

I’ve five thousand: take any of them, take the lot’

It’s a poor house where there isn’t much to spare,

Much that evades the master, benefits his slaves.

If wealth alone will make you happy, and keep you so,

Be first to strive for it again, and last to leave off.

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I think the main point to take away from the Empedoclean comparison is that his two universal principles of Love and Strife can be loosely analogized to the Epicurean position that the accretion and dissolution of atomic compounds is an endless process, and that dissolution never gets the upper hand; Venus, representing the generative power of nature, is constantly innovating.

So while our world will eventually be destroyed (as alluded to by Ovid), elsewhere in the cosmos other worlds are continually being formed by the linking of atoms. There will be no 'end times' no ultimately ruinous catastrophe that destroys everything.

"The verses of sublime Lucretius will perish only on that day which consigns the world to destruction."