Posts by Joshua

ALL CURRENT AND PROSPECTIVE PARTICIPANTS SHOULD READ THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT OF FORUM EDITORIAL POLICY:  "Against Katastematic Supremacy - Pleasure Is A Unified Good, Not A House Divided Against Itself."

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  • Episode 205 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 13 - Addressing Cicero's Contentions On The Nature of Morailty

    Three classes of "meritorious qualities";

    • Dutifulness; "And this same reason has given man a yearning for his fellow men, and an agreement with them based on nature and language and intercourse, so that starting from affection for those of his own household and his own kin, he gradually takes wider range and connects himself by fellowship first with his countrymen, then with the whole human race, and, as Plato wrote to Archytas, bears in mind that he was not born for him-self alone, but for his fatherland and his kindred, so that only a slight part of his existence remains for himself."
    • Truthfulness; "And seeing that nature again has implanted in man a passion for gazing upon the truth, as is seen very clearly when, being free from anxieties, we long to know even what takes place in the sky; so led on by these instincts we love all forms of truth, I mean all things trustworthy, candid and consistent, while we hate things unsound, insincere and deceptive, for instance cheating, perjury, spite, injustice."
    • Indomitability; "Reason again brings with it a rich and splendid spirit, suited to command rather than obedience, regarding all that may happen to man as not only endurable, but even inconsiderable, a certain lofty and exalted spirit, which fears nothing, bows to none, and is ever unconquerable."

    And a fourth quality;

    • Orderliness; "And now that we have marked out these three classes of things moral, there follows a fourth endued with the same loveliness and dependent on the other three; in this is comprised the spirit of orderliness and self-control."

    Bear in mind Cicero's project here; as he stated at the top of page 49, it is his opinion "that if I shew there is something moral, which is essentially desirable by reason of its inherent qualities and for its own sake, all the doctrines of your school are overthrown."

    In his Republic, Cicero gives us a fuller description of this Natural Law, and the foundation of his morality;

    Lucretius' extensive treatment of early human history paints a very different picture; (Ian Johnston translation)

    And finally, Lucretius' response to the claim that the gods will punish those who violate their law;

  • Episode 203 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 11 - Do The Senses Have Jurisdiction To Pronounce On The Supreme Good?

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    At some point you have to make a practical decision to "live," and that point is where we "trust the senses," which amounts to "trusting what Nature gave to us" for survival.

    Yes, but this to me is tantamount to living with rational rather than absolute oughts.

    My answer is very similar to yours; if I started every morning waking up to Hume's Guillotine, the problem of determinism, the claims made of simulation or the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, Pascal's Wager, Last Tuesday-ism, Calvinist double-predestination, or idealism of any other stripe, I'd never get out of bed.

    So, like Thomas Jefferson, I shove all that crap in a corner and

    "recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need."

  • Episode 203 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 11 - Do The Senses Have Jurisdiction To Pronounce On The Supreme Good?

    Quote from Cassius

    And joining the issue of Hume's "is - ought" question to this distinction, it seems to be that we have Epicurus saying that Nature has given us one faculty (feeling / pathe) by which to determine what to choose and what to avoid, and there is no question but that what "is" given (feeling /pathe) clearly "ought" to be followed.

    And the question is not "whether" to follow it, but "how" to follow it successfully.

    It sounds to me like Epicurus would not be very impressed with Hume's supposed problem, or at the very least he would say it has a very direct answer. The issue is not whether to comply with our natural faculties, but how to assess theories that there are considerations that trump our natural faculties (thereby elevating "Nature" over "logic" and "supernatural religion")

    Other views on that?

    "we have Epicurus saying that Nature has given us one faculty (feeling / pathe) by which to determine what to choose and what to avoid,"


    But this is Epicurus' implicit ought, not a description of how things are.

    What Hume is actually asking is how do get from something like this;

    "Some things cause pain."

    To this;

    "We ought to avoid things that cause pain."

    Why should we avoid things that cause pain? You might say, because Nature has given us pain a guide. Okay, why should we follow Nature? Because that is the surest road to the life of happiness. Okay, why should we pursue happiness? Because the happy life is the best of all possible lives. Okay, why do we want to live the best life? Because it's the most pleasant life. Why do we want the most pleasant life? Because it's the best life. Why--

    --because I said so!

    The problem is unsolvable in Hume's terms, not just for Epicurus but for everyone. There's nothing wrong with that--I actually think we're better off without absolute oughts, which is the same thing as saying that we're better off without absolute morality. If God commands you to sacrifice your firstborn, even allowing a God there is no absolute morality to say that you should follow his whims.

    This is why Euthyphro is my favorite Socratic dialogue. Even assuming the existence of a God, we are still left with only rational oughts. If I was Epicurus' lawyer I would tell him to take that deal. Take the deal that leaves you and everyone else, even God himself if he was real, on the same footing. If I want to live a blessed life, then I should live a life of pleasure, and for all the reasons Epicurus states. But I accept this knowing that it was my choice--and that if even the gods were real, they would choose it for themselves.

  • Demetrius Lacon - Main Biography

    "What would the "two natures" be?"

    You know, Lucretius uses almost that exact phrase;

    Sed neque Centauri fuerunt nec tempore in ullo

    esse queunt duplici natura et corpore bino

    ex alienigenis membris compacta, potestas

    hinc illinc partis ut sat par esse potissit.

    id licet hinc quamvis hebeti cognoscere corde.

    But Centaurs ne'er have been, nor can there be

    Creatures of twofold stock and double frame,

    Compact of members alien in kind,

    Yet formed with equal function, equal force

    In every bodily part- a fact thou mayst,

    However dull thy wits, well learn from this:

    There are interesting parallels here; in the above passage from book 5 Lucretius is concerned with the question of tracing the living thing back to its proper seed. In a separate passage in book 4, the poet uses the Centaur to make a different point;

    nam certe ex vivo Centauri non fit imago,

    nulla fuit quoniam talis natura animata;

    verum ubi equi atque hominis casu convenit imago,

    haerescit facile extemplo, quod diximus ante,

    propter subtilem naturam et tenvia texta.

    cetera de genere hoc eadem ratione creantur.

    quae cum mobiliter summa levitate feruntur,

    ut prius ostendi, facile uno commovet ictu

    quae libet una animum nobis subtilis imago;

    tenvis enim mens est et mire mobilis ipsa.

    For soothly from no living Centaur is

    That phantom gendered, since no breed of beast

    Like him was ever; but, when images

    Of horse and man by chance have come together,

    They easily cohere, as aforesaid,

    At once, through subtle nature and fabric thin.

    In the same fashion others of this ilk

    Created are. And when they're quickly borne

    In their exceeding lightness, easily

    (As earlier I showed) one subtle image,

    Compounded, moves by its one blow the mind,

    Itself so subtle and so strangely quick.

    In the first passage, Centaurs are declared not to exist because no such disparate seeds as those which produce men and horses could conceivably commingle in the way necessary to produce a man-horse. In the second passage he is giving an explanation of how the legend came to be in the first place; it was not seeds of men and horses that mingled and produced the centaur, but images of men and horses that mingled and produced the illusion of the existence of the centaur. These, the same images which we depend upon for knowledge of the gods?

    Edit; I see Bryan and I crossposted with reference to the two passages on centaurs.

  • Empress Pompeia Plotina - Main Biography

    Yes, and Cleopatra has received similar treatment - a seductress, luring illustrious Roman men away from their duty. Per usual, it is the woman to blame in these affairs.

    In the same book in which Boccaccio slandered Leontion, he also heaped abuse on Cleopatra. It was an English poet who finally conceded to show her in better light: Geoffrey Chaucer. He laid the blame for Antony's infidelity at his own feet, and held Cleopatra to have lived and loved more nobly and more faithfully than any man.

    What she really was is of course far more inspiring; a wry wit, a student of international politics, a scholar in the tradition of her earlier ancestors, a capable successor to the middling heirs of those same ancestors, a wartime commander in the field at both land and sea, and a strident negotiator with the ruling power in the Mediterranean. While she conversed with these Roman generals in her native Koine Greek, she was also said, though accounts differ, to be the only Ptolemaic ruler to have gone to the trouble of studying the local Egyptian language.

    When Antony was slain and with him her last hope for her people's freedom and security, she died, a martyr in Chaucer's words, at her own hand.

  • Gaius Velleius - Main Biography

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    I shall not deprive my own grandfather of the honourable mention which I should give to a stranger. Gaius Velleius, chosen to a most honourable position among the three hundred and sixty judges178 by Gnaeus Pompey, prefect of engineers under Pompey, Marcus Brutus, and Tiberius Nero, and a man second to none, on the departure from Naples of Nero, whose partisan he had been on account of his close friendship, finding himself unable to accompany him on account of his age and infirmities, 2 ran himself through with his sword in Campania.

    LacusCurtius • Velleius Paterculus — Book II, Chapters 59‑93

  • So You Want To Learn Ancient Greek Or Latin?

    Quote

    A fun way to practice is just write English words using the Greek letters like a code. It reinforces the system. in 7th grade, high school, through college, I'd take notes in class in Greek letters, and I still run across those notebooks in a drawer once in awhile.

    I can't remember where I saw this (textbook, website, etc), but it was a set of famous speeches in English but in Greek script. The Gettysburg Address for example is rather well known, and if you already know the words you can work out the Greek letters without much trouble.

    I can't find it with Google, but maybe I still have the book.

  • Aulus Gellius

    A mention of Mys.

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    There were not a few other slaves too afterwards who became famous philosophers. among them that Menippus whose works Marcus Varro emulated in those satires which others call "Cynic," but he himself, "Menippean." Besides these, Pompylus, the slave of the Peripatetic Theophrastus, and the slave of the Stoic Zeno who was called Persaeus, and the slave of Epicurus whose name was Mys, were philosophers of repute.

    On the diversity of opinions on pleasure;

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    Diverse views of eminent philosophers as to the nature and character of pleasure; and the words in which the philosopher Hierocles attacked the principles of Epicurus. As to pleasure the philosophers of old expressed varying opinions. Epicurus makes pleasure the highest good, but defines it as σαρκὸς εὐσταθὲς κατάστημα, or "a well-balanced condition of body." Antisthenes the Socratic calls it the greatest evil; for this is the expression he uses: μανείην μᾶλλον ἢ ἡσθείην; that is to say, "may I go mad rather than feel pleasure." Speusippus and all the old Academy declare that pleasure and pain are two evils opposed to each other, but that what lay midway between the two was the good. Zeno thought that pleasure was indifferent, that is neutral, neither good nor evil, that, namely, which he called by the Greek term ἀδιάφορον. Critolaus the Peripatetic declares that pleasure is an evil and gives birth to many other evils: injustice, sloth, forgetfulness, and cowardice. Earlier than all these Plato discoursed in so many and varied ways about pleasure, that all those opinions which I have set forth may seem to have flowed from the founts of his discourses; for he makes use of each one of them according to the suggestion offered by the nature of pleasure itself, which is manifold, and according to the demands made by the character of the topics which he is treating and of the effect that he wishes to produce. But our countryman Taurus, whenever mention was made of Epicurus, always had on his lips and tongue these words of Hierocles the Stoic, a man of righteousness and dignity: "Pleasure an end, a harlot's creed; there is no Providence, not even a harlot's creed."

    And finally, Gellius is at his wit's end with philosophers;

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    But the Stoics maintain that voice is a body, and say that it is air which has been struck. Plato, however, thinks that voice is not corporeal: "for," says he, "not the air which is struck, but the stroke and the blow themselves are voice." Democritus, and following him Epicurus, declare that voice consists of individual particles, and they call it, to use their own words, ῥευμα ἀτόμων, or "a stream of atoms." When I heard of these and other sophistries, the result of a self-satisfied cleverness combined with lack of employment, and saw in these subtleties no real advantage affecting the conduct of life, and no end to the inquiry, I agreed with Ennius' Neoptolemus, who rightly says: Philosophizing there must be, but by the few; Since for all men it's not to be desired.

  • Aulus Gellius

    Aulus Gellius was a 2nd century Roman Grammarian who wrote a book called Attic Nights. That source is a very readable web page, but the English transcription is incomplete. The text can also be found on Perseus and the PDF is available for download at the Internet Archive.

    A reference to Virgil's imitation of Lucretius can be found in the thread here, and a passage on Plutarch's criticism of Epicurus quoted in the 201st episode of the podcast can be found here.

    There is also a reference to "Lucius Piso", that being an ancestor of our Piso.

  • Virgil's Reference To Lucretius in "The Georgics"

    Aulus Gellius on Virgil's imitation of Lucretius; Here

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    The positive assertion of Julius Hyginus that he had read a manuscript of Virgil from the poet's own household, in which there was written et ora tristia temptantum sensus torquebit amaror and not the usual reading, sensu torquebit amaro. Nearly everyone reads these lines from the Georgics of Virgil in this way: At sapor indicium faciet manifestus et ora Tristia temptantum sensu torquebit amaro. Hyginus, however, on my word no obscure grammarian, in the Commentaries which he wrote on Virgil, declares and insists that it was not this that Virgil left, but what he himself found in a copy which had come from the home and family of the poet: et ora Tristia temptantum sensus torquebit amaror. and this reading has commended itself, not to Hyginus alone, but also to many other learned men, because it seems absurd to say "the taste will distort with its bitter sensation." "Since," they say, "taste itself is a sensation, it cannot have another sensation in itself, but it is exactly as if one should say, 'the sensation will distort with a bitter sensation.' . Moreover, when I had read Hyginus' note to Favorinus, and the strangeness and harshness of the phrase "sensu torquebit amaro" at once displeased him, he said with a laugh, "I am ready to swear by Jupiter and the stone, which is considered the most sacred of oaths, that Virgil never wrote that, but I believe that Hyginus is right. For Virgil was not the first to coin that word arbitrarily, but he found it in the poems of Lucretius and made use of it, not disdaining to follow the authority of a poet who excelled in talent and power of expression." The passage, from the fourth book of Lucretius, reads as follows: dilutaque contra Cum tuimur misceri absinthia, tangit amaror. And in fact we see that Virgil imitated, not only single words of Lucretius, but often almost whole lines and passages.

  • Episode 201 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 09

    I made the point that demanding that desire be pulled up by the roots to prevent profligacy would be like demanding that public roads should be pulled out of their beds to prevent highway robbery. It occurs to me now that Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons has an exchange that bears on this analogy; that the law stands in the way of vengeance is not an argument against the law, it is an argument against vengeance.

    That desire can lead to profligacy is not an argument against desire, it as argument against profligacy. Epicurus' advice to moderate desire is exactly what is needed here, but Cicero makes him out to be a patron of profligates unless he condemns desire full stop. This is nothing other than fundamentalism. Only a lunatic would demand that roads be destroyed if they provide aid and comfort to vagabonds--a sensible person will weigh that risk against going roadless through thick cover, but what is this if not the vagabond's home turf? He will have us denounce the name of desire, of pleasure, and adopt the speech of his "illustrious men"--but are vagabonds and profligates incapable of putting on such airs? And thus I clothe my naked villainy/ With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;/ And seem a saint, when most I play the devil. Will they not crouch behind the form of virtue, even behind the name of the gods themselves? Will Cicero throw away arms if they are carried also by deserters? Medicine, if peddled also by quacks? This is not philosophy, this is not wisdom--this is the petulance of a child threatening to take their ball and go home. Yet Cicero counsels even this.

    Nature has given us pleasure as the dux vitae, the guide of life. To spurn this gift for the virtues held to be noble by the crowd would be to put forth on water not with a star to direct our course, but with mere smoke of public opinion, that falls silent as soon as we are out of earshot from the shore. My pilot in these matters is not so lacking in sense as to succumb to that line. We will cleave to that which announces itself to our natures to be good, and not merely that which announces itself for applause in the forum or the marketplace.

  • Episode 201 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 09

    Show Notes:

    Attic Nights by 2nd century grammarian Aulus Gellius

    On Plutarch "word-chasing" and logic-chopping;

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    Plutarch, in the second book of his essay On Homer, asserts that Epicurus made use of an incomplete, perverted and faulty syllogism, and he quotes Epicurus's own words: "Death is nothing to us, for what is dissolved is without perception, and what is without perception is nothing to us." "Now Epicurus," says Plutarch, "omitted what he ought to have stated as his major premise, that death is a dissolution of body and soul, and then, to prove something else, he goes on to use the very premise that he had omitted, as if it had been stated and conceded. But this syllogism," says Plutarch, "cannot advance, unless that premise be first presented."

    What Plutarch wrote as to the form and sequence of a syllogism is true enough; for if you wish to argue and reason according to the teaching of the schools, you ought to say: "Death is the dissolution of soul and body; but what is dissolved is without perception; and what is without perception is nothing to us." But we cannot suppose that Epicurus, being the man he was, omitted that part of the syllogism through ignorance, or that it was his intention to state a syllogism complete in all its members and limitations, as is done in the schools of the logicians; but since the separation of body and soul by death is self-evident, he of course did not think it necessary to call attention to what was perfectly obvious to everyone. For the same reason, too, he put the conclusion of the syllogism, not at the end, but at the beginning; for who does not see that this also was not due to inadvertence??

    In the same book, Plutarch also finds fault a second time with Epicurus for using an inappropriate word and giving it an incorrect meaning. Now Epicurus wrote as follows: "The utmost height of pleasure is the removal of everything that pains." Plutarch declares that he ought not to have said "of everything that pains," but "of everything that is painful"; 3 for it is the removal of pain, he explains, that should be indicated, not of that which causes pain.

    In bringing this charge against Epicurus Plutarch is "word-chasing" with excessive minuteness and almost with frigidity; for far from hunting up such verbal meticulousness and such refinements of diction, Epicurus hunts them down.

    full text

    Aristotle's work On Categories


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Aristotle)

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    The Categories (Greek Κατηγορίαι Katēgoriai; Latin Categoriae or Praedicamenta) is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions".[1] The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters.

    full text

    Cicero continually conflates the feeling of pleasure with things productive of pleasure, but he forgets his Aristotle; the feeling of pleasure is a subject, while "things productive of pleasure" are predicative on the subject of pleasure. He compounds this error by committing it repeatedly and at length.

    While pleasure has manifold causes, it is itself one thing--the feeling of pleasure. It is subject to a variety of different conditions (which we express as predicates); quantity (duration), quality (intensity), location, time reference (i.e. I felt pleasure yesterday or feel pleasure now or anticipate pleasure in the future), and so on. Does Cicero not understand this, or does he pretend that it is beyond comprehension for the effect of argument? I think we know the answer.

    Cicero, Pro Plancio


    Cicero pretends to be scandalized at Epicurus' mention of the pleasures of sex, and insists that he would need to apologize before even naming it, but in a trial defending Gnaeus Plancius who was accused of bribery in an election, Cicero casually dismisses an allegation that Plancius and his friends raped an actress;

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    And would you dim with your sullying insinuations the lustre of that untarnished life ? You hint darkly at acts of immorality, charges which cannot even be suspected, far less substantiated, against him. Not content with inventing charges, you invent names for your charges, and call him " bigamist." You say that he took with him to the province a companion to be the instrument of his base passions ; this statement is not a charge, but a reckless and libellous falsehood. You say that he raped a ballet-girl ; we hear that this crime was once committed at Atina by a band of youths who took advantage of an old privilege allowed at the scenic games, especially in country towns. ** [31] What a tribute to the propriety of my client's youthful days. He is reproached with an act which he was permitted by privilege to commit, and yet even that reproach is found to be baseless. You say that he released a criminal from prison. True, but the release was inadvertent, as you are aware, and was ordered at the request of an excellent young man whose claims upon my client were not to be put by ; and a warrant was subsequently issued for the re-arrest of the prisoner. These, gentlemen, and these alone, are the scandals alleged against my client's life, and it is on these that you are asked to base your doubts of his scrupulous honour and integrity.

    Again, as I said during the recording, I should not have seen the need to mention this case if Cicero had not insinuated that Epicurus was a sexual pervert.

    Cicero, On Ends, Book I


    Cicero attempts to lure Epicurus into absurdity by asking whether absence of pleasure is the most intense pain; he forgets that Torquatus has given us his answer: if you consider the description of the life of pleasure in its most complete form, then the opposite of this life is certainly a life of anguish.

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    Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? One so situated must possess in the first place a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain; he will know that death means complete unconsciousness, and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong, so that its intensity is compensated by brief duration and its continuance by diminishing severity. Let such a man moreover have no dread of any supernatural power; let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away, but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement.

    Suppose on the other hand a person crushed beneath the heaviest load of mental and of bodily anguish to which humanity is liable. Grant him no hope of ultimate relief in view, also give him no pleasure either present or in prospect. Can one describe or imagine a more pitiable state? If then a life full of pain is the thing most to be avoided, it follows that to live in pain is the highest evil; and this position implies that a life of pleasure is the ultimate good. In fact the mind possesses nothing in itself upon which it can rest as final. Every fear, every sorrow can be traced back to pain; there is no other thing besides pain which is of its own nature capable of causing either anxiety or distress.

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