Posts by Joshua

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But I suspect he would have disagreed with Pericles.

Interestingly, there is an epigraph in the Greek Anthology attributed to Menander;

"Hail, you twin born sons of Neocles, the one of whom saved his country from slavery, the other from folly."

The first was Themistocles and the second was Epicurus. Both were Athenian citizens, both had fathers named Neocles, both chose the Ceramicus--part cemetary, part potter's quarter--as their public haunt, and both appealed to the lower classes who had been left behind by the aristocracy (in the case of Themistocles) and their state-sponsored male-only Gymnasia (in the case of Epicurus).

Menander was born within a year of Epicurus, and pre-deceased him by twenty years, but it is anyone's guess as to whether the epigraph is genuine.

I listened to part of this episode on my lunch break and will listen to the whole thing again this evening, but my preliminary response is very positive! Dr. Boeri is a very engaging speaker, and it's a topic we haven't given a whole lot of time to in the past.

Thank you Onenski for your help in organizing and participating!

Plutarch, Moralia, Adversus Colotes

Plutarch - Adversus Colotem

Desiderius Erasmus, The Epicure

The Epicure

Head of Aphrodite with Cross Incised on Forehead and Eyes Gouged Out

Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Matthew Stewart, Nature's God

Göttingen Archaeological Museum

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For often

our body is ill—we see that clearly—

yet we feel pleasure in some other part 150

hidden within. Often the reverse takes place,

as well, when, by contrast, a man whose mind

is sad feel pleasure in his whole body.

In the same way, if a man’s foot pains him, [110]

perhaps at the same time his head may feel

no pain at all.

-Lucretius Book III, tr. Ian Johnstone

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SOCRATES: Then let us begin with the goddess herself, of whom Philebus says that she is called Aphrodite, but that her real name is Pleasure.

PROTARCHUS: Very good.

SOCRATES: The awe which I always feel, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is more than human—it exceeds all other fears. And now I would not sin against Aphrodite by naming her amiss; let her be called what she pleases. But Pleasure I know to be manifold, and with her, as I was just now saying, we must begin, and consider what her nature is. She has one name, and therefore you would imagine that she is one; and yet surely she takes the most varied and even unlike forms. For do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance,—that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom? and how foolish would any one be who affirmed that all these opposite pleasures are severally alike!

PROTARCHUS: Why, Socrates, they are opposed in so far as they spring from opposite sources, but they are not in themselves opposite. For must not pleasure be of all things most absolutely like pleasure,—that is, like itself?

SOCRATES: Yes, my good friend, just as colour is like colour;—in so far as colours are colours, there is no difference between them; and yet we all know that black is not only unlike, but even absolutely opposed to white: or again, as figure is like figure, for all figures are comprehended under one class; and yet particular figures may be absolutely opposed to one another, and there is an infinite diversity of them. And we might find similar examples in many other things; therefore do not rely upon this argument, which would go to prove the unity of the most extreme opposites. And I suspect that we shall find a similar opposition among pleasures.

PROTARCHUS: Very likely; but how will this invalidate the argument?

SOCRATES: Why, I shall reply, that dissimilar as they are, you apply to them a new predicate, for you say that all pleasant things are good; now although no one can argue that pleasure is not pleasure, he may argue, as we are doing, that pleasures are oftener bad than good; but you call them all good, and at the same time are compelled, if you are pressed, to acknowledge that they are unlike. And so you must tell us what is the identical quality existing alike in good and bad pleasures, which makes you designate all of them as good.

PROTARCHUS: What do you mean, Socrates? Do you think that any one who asserts pleasure to be the good, will tolerate the notion that some pleasures are good and others bad?

SOCRATES: And yet you will acknowledge that they are different from one another, and sometimes opposed?

PROTARCHUS: Not in so far as they are pleasures.

-Plato, Philebus

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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.