Posts by Joshua

And in case anyone is curious about the other inscription in Jonson's copy, it is also from Ovid;

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explicat ut causas rapidi Lucretius ignis,

casurumque triplex vaticinatur opus,

[...] though Lucretius explains the cause of impetuous fire,

and predicts the triple death of earth, water, air [...]

In addition to Jonson's copy, we also have surviving copies belonging to Niccolo Niccoli, Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, and more.

Photo: English Poet Ben Jonson's Copy of Lucretius with Acid Stain

Today is the anniversary of the traditional date of the death of Lucretius, which, according to the 4th century grammarian Aelius Donatus, occurred on the same day that Virgil assumed the Toga Virilis on his 17th birthday.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas

Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum

Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari

Happy is he who is able to know the causes of things,

And who has trampled beneath his feet all fear,

Inexorable fate, and the din of the devouring underworld

-Publius Vergilius Maro

carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,

exitio terras cum dabit una dies

Then shall perish the verses of sublime Lucretius,

When that day shall consign the world to destruction

-Publius Ovidius Naso

I'm not sure you can say that 6 is a logical deduction of 1 and 2 absent a definition of 'experience', and an explanation of how that word relates to 'feeling'.

If 6 held that "Any non-painful feeling is a pleasure" it would be a deductive conclusion of 1 and 2.

That feelings are discrete does not necessarily mean that experiences are; they could be composites of multiple feelings. I just think the word experience is over-broad for this kind of thing.

"How was your week in Paris?"

"Oh, it was a wonderful experience!"

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I just hope if this technology takes off, the texts actually make it out into the wild.

Yes to this. I'm ashamed to say that it's far too easy to overlook Philodemus relative to the other sources, and I'm pointing my finger squarely at myself here.

Oh, Bill Bryson references John McPhee's work several times, I will definitely look those two up. Thank you!

Welcome! Former Land Surveyor here (crew chief, not licensed). I'm now using CAD and scanning software in a dental lab for 3D printing, which keeps me out of the elements.

Let me know if you have any interesting book recommendations from your field!

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That sounds to me like an echo of the Stoic "if you're not 100% virtuous all the time, you're crap." I seem to remember they say you can still drown an inch below the surface of the water. Maybe people are mapping a Stoic perspective on an Epicurean idea?

This claim about Stoicism comes from Cicero; I didn't look very hard, but I didn't find the same claim in other Stoic texts from the ancient world.

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“For just as a drowning man is no more able to breathe if he be not far from the surface of the water, so that he might at any moment emerge, than if he were actually at the bottom already … similarly a man that has made some progress towards the state of virtue is none the less in misery than he that has made no progress at all.” (De Finibus, IV.48)

I've finally managed to reach a truce with the Evangelical in my life. We just don't discuss it. I'd say there are now fewer than 14 days in a year where I have to hear about this stuff.

Moving back north helped a lot.

Yeah, I do hear that greeting in the Midwest. I probably say it myself from time to time, though I'm not sure. We'll have to ask kochiekoch!

As I listen to the episode, I begin to realize that we were very nearly describing the hedons and dolors of Utilitarianism--units of unmixed pleasure and pain. While in any given moment one can experience both pleasure and pain, a particular feeling is either pleasureable or painful.

I'm not sure this is a useful path to go down, but it's probably worth addressing because I can see this being a source of confusion given the differences between Epicurean philosophy and Utilitarianism.

In coming to terms with Cicero's loathing for pleasure, I thought of another reason beyond the ones that we have already discussed. We could probably make a list;

• Pleasure directly challenges the Virtues for pride of place among human pursuits. The Virtues are orderly feminine personifications, reinforcing social structure, political security, justice in human affairs, and the goodness in the Roman state religion--Pleasure is the "harlot" as Cicero says, the thief in the night, the enemy at the gates, and the frenzied chaotic Bacchanalia set against the quite life of sedate Otium, the useful, healthful, restorative leisure of the learned Roman aristocrat.
• The pursuit of pleasure signifies weakness, swinishness, and moral decay. Those who pursue it are intellectual eunuchs.

Another reason that occurred to me;

• The pleasure-pain diad, which, its adherents claim, is sufficient to contain all human pathos, is offensively reductionist. For Cicero, who sees himself as a dedicated statesman, a skilled rhetorician, a model prose stylist, an adept philosopher, a careful biographer, and a virtuous friend, the reduction of human experience to mere pleasure and pain represents a direct challenge to his own view of himself--he is a polymath; a many-sided man, the prototypical Renaissance man, whose motives are complex. And will you claim that I, Cicero, am driven by desires and impulses no better than those of an animal!?

How do we square these considerations with VS47?

"47. I have anticipated you, Fortune, and entrenched myself against all your secret attacks. And we will not give ourselves up as captives to you or to any other circumstance; but when it is time for us to go, spitting contempt on life and on those who here vainly cling to it, we will leave life crying aloud in a glorious triumph-song that we have lived well."

Good evening!

As many have noticed, the forum was spammed by what was probably a bot at around 11:30 PM Eastern. I have attempted to delete all of the offending material. If anything is still showing up on your end please let me know. Site Administrator Cassius and Coordinator Kalosyni will proceed with a ban when they log on.

Thank you for your patience!

Joshua

I suspect that Paul wrote letters because he was responding to the same social and political pressures that the Epicureans were responding to, whether or not there was any connection between the two traditions--both groups were barred from teaching in the Gymnasia, the Agora, and the Roman Forum. So they found recourse in one of the only options left to them. This was a stroke of great luck for us, as Zeno's whole output from the Stoa is lost except in fragments while Epicurus' letters survive.

In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a similar phenomenon developed called the Republic of Letters, a complex web of private correspondence for the transmission of ideas. Ironically, the term was first used by Francesco Barbaro in a letter to Poggio Bracciolini, and in the very same year--1417--that saw the rediscovery of Lucretius by the latter. In one surviving letter, a friend of Poggio pleads with him to be more guarded in his writing--a letter stops being private if it falls into the wrong hands, after all.

Poggio's letter written in admiration of Jerome of Prague, a heretic murdered by the Church at the Council of Constance, is here.

Having listened to that portion now, I can say that I don't know how you managed to edit it in such a way that I nearly made sense in what I was saying!

^ This is right. Bear in mind it won't show up correctly in preview, and after you post it you'll have to refresh your browser before it shows correctly.

I should caution the listener that my thoughts on 'meaning' are tentative at best, so take everything I say there, and regarding Thomas Carlyle, with a grain of salt. It does strike me as a conversation worth having, though!

I should note that the words 'kinetic' and 'katastematic' made a rare appearance on this week's podcast episode, along side a few quotes from John Stuart Mill. Most notably his claim that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

Thank you Godfrey, that one is worth saving. There are points in it that I might have emphasized differently, but it's not bad so far as it goes. It would take a reading knowledge of five languages to go through the author's sources, with a heavy reliance on Italian and German. Scholarship that lies, unfortunately, beyond the reach of most of us!

Unfortunately the subject of the gods is the one about which we have the greatest lack of source material. DeWitt (the Great Hypothesizer?) suggested that Lucretius' "lost" seventh book dealt with the gods at length. Epicurus wrote a scroll on the same, which really is lost, and we have two books from Philodemus on the Epicurean gods.

Diogenes Laertius does not record that Metrodorus wrote on the question specifically, but he did write a response to Plato's Euthyphro, a dialogue in which Socrates attempts to understand the meaning of Piety.

Lucretius, meanwhile, does give us in Book V a definition of Pietas which he contrasts with the Religio of Agamemnon in Book I;

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O unhappy race of men,

when they ascribed such actions to the gods

and added to them bitter rage! What sorrows

they then made for themselves, what wounds for us,

what weeping for our children yet to come!

There is no piety in being seen

time and again turning towards a stone

with one’s head covered and approaching close

to every altar, and hurling oneself

prostrate on the ground, stretching out one’s palms

before gods’ shrines, or spreading lots of blood

from four-footed beasts on altars, or piling

sacred pledges onto sacred pledges,

but rather in being able to perceive

all things with one’s mind at peace.

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