Posts by 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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Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity.[1][2] In common parlance, or when contrasted with deism, the term often describes the classical conception of God that is found in monotheism (also referred to as classical theism) — or gods found in polytheistic religions — a belief in God or in gods without the rejection of revelation as is characteristic of deism.

Deity:

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A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred.

I suppose you could argue about definitions, but not without wholly muddying the waters. Epicureanism in non-theistic.

In another thread I made a post in which I compared a timeline of the Late Republic with Horace's literary output, and traced the inferred influence of politics on his Epicureanism;

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RE: Let's Make a List of 1) Major Causes of the Decline of Epicurean Philosophy after Lucretius and 2) The Obstacles to its Revival Through Today

[…]

Horace is devilishly difficult to pin down, unfortunately. But first, a chronology;

[Assassination of Caesar, 44 BC]

[Battle of Philippi, 42 BC]

[Lepidus Exiled, 36 BC]

Satires 1 (c. 35–34 BC)

[Battle of Actium, 31 BC]

Satires 2 (c. 30 BC)

Epodes (30 BC)

[Reign of Augustus Begins, 27 BC, followed by military adventuring. Returns to Rome 24 BC]

Odes 1–3 (c. 23 BC)

Epistles 1 (c. 21 BC)

Carmen Saeculare (17 BC)

Epistles 2 (c. 11 BC)

Odes 4 (c. 11 BC)

Ars Poetica (c. 10–8 BC)

Now then. Between Philippi and…

Joshua

August 21, 2023 at 8:40 PM

Since the post is very relevant to this subforum, I am linking to it here.

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Wasn't Epicurus's mother a purveyor of charms and oracles?

That's the story--that his father was an itinerant teacher and his mother sold charms, both occupations suggesting low birth. Given that;

1. They were unwanted colonizers in disputed territory and
2. Metrodorus wrote a tract "On Noble Birth" defending Epicurus against the derision of his detractors,

The story is probably true enough so far as it goes. As for the VS, I suspect that there is a touch of irony in it. When Alexander the Great went to an oracle at the Oasis of Siwa, the prophets told him that he was not the son of Philip, but the son of a God. How convenient for both parties--it cost the Oracles nothing to say this, and earned them the patronage of the most powerful man on earth. If only the High Priestess at Delphi had thought of it first!

Oracles in the ancient world were flatterers; politically useful, the lent an air of pious gravitas to any worldly endeavor. DeWitt cited Demosthenes to this end;

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It is just and right and important, men of Athens, that we too should exercise care, as you are accustomed, that our relations with the gods shall be piously maintained. Therefore our commission has been duly discharged for you, for we have sacrificed to Zeus the Saviour and to Athena and to Victory, and these sacrifices have been auspicious and salutary for you. We have also sacrificed to Persuasion and to the Mother of the Gods and to Apollo, and here also we had favorable omens. And the sacrifices made to the other gods portended for you security and stability and prosperity and safety. Do you, therefore, accept the blessings which the gods bestow.

In one of my favorite anecdotes, Heraclitus hid a scroll in a temple where it would be discovered and passed off as divine utterance.

For every ten thousand seers, there is but one Lucy Harris to steal the pages from the "prophet", in her case Joseph Smith, and challenge him to reproduce the results.

But now to the point. Whatever else he might be, Epicurus is not a prophet, an Oracle, or even (though he was given the title Soter) a Messiah or heavenly savior. But he was a voice, and he cried out in the metaphorical wilderness of ancient superstition. And those who were 'well disposed', as the inscription in Oenanda puts it, to hear his words may have thought that not everything they were hearing was good news.

He offered pleasure, but it was pleasure only in this world; death, he said, was nothing to be feared, but neither was there hope for a life to come. The universe was infinite and eternal, and if that failed to cheer you up, there was more; neither our world nor our species was morally, physically, or theologically at the center of it. As for the gods, they do exist; and while they do not punish us, neither will they answer our prayers. Supplication is futile; there is no hope for intercession in times of need, and no justice for the victim of the evildoer in the judgment of the afterlife. Logic and dialectic, which had seemed the surest route to knowledge, truth, and virtue, in fact brought us no closer to the end that we sought for. And if divine friendship is the richest and deepest fountain of pleasure, what hope can we have that the fountain will not run dry tomorrow? Seeing that the utter finality of death will not only take our friends from us, but also poison our happiness with an impossible longing to be reunited.

Only a beast unfit to be called a philosopher could teach a way of thinking so unworthy of the human soul. But for the Epicureans themselves, it must have been Lucian of Samosata who best captured their feeling;

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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.

***

But secondly I was still more concerned (a preference which you will be very far from resenting) to strike a blow for Epicurus, that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.

The bible also talks in several places about cracked pots and burst wineskins. Apparently it's a popular metaphor.

Rousseau is sometimes called an Epicurean, and seldom more-so than by his contemporary critics.

Here is a quote from one of the "Fragments to Emile";

This passage was edited according to the footnote, where an earlier edition had the sentence "Every consistent Epicurean is necessarily a Stoic."

I actually don't know anything about this book or these "Fragments", so take it with a grain of salt.

I should also note that today is one of the "accepted" dates for the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The Spartans were late to join the battle on account of a festival, and since the date of the festival is known in their lunisolar calendar (and we can calculate moon phases across a great stretch of time), a 19th century scholar worked out that same day in the Julian calendar.

The Athenian victory at Marathon had several important consequences;

• It proved that Athens could hold its own as a military power without Spartan aid.
• It proved that the Greek civilization could drive Persia out of Greek territory.
• In light of the above, the Battle of Marathon set the stage for the birth of the Classical period in Athens, which afterward began to draw the luminaries of Greece to itself, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Plato and Socrates. This period culminated in the Age of Pericles, and came to an end with the fallout of the Pelopponesian War.

Exoplanet's surface may be covered in oceans, James Webb Space Telescope finds

The so-called Hycean planet K2–18 b is around twice the size of Earth and orbits in the habitable zone of a star located 120 light-years from our solar system.

www.space.com

The results will be subjected to further testing, but an analysis of the light spectrum of this planet has indicated the presence of dimethyl sulfide, a molecule produced by phytoplankton. There could be a world-ocean under the atmosphere of this planet. Very cool!

https://maa.org/press/periodic…hout%20citation.

I've long remembered this second quote from Albert Einstein, and had it in mind when we recorded this episode. I'm probably simplifying too much, but it seems to be saying an axiomatic mathematical discipline like geometry cannot be a perfect representation of the things in nature. This is a very nuanced and subtle argument, but for ancient thinkers like Pythagoras and his followers, geometry allowed them to deduce a priori that the number of the celestial spheres was 10 because 10 was the perfect number--it is the sum of a point (1), a line (2), a surface (3), and a volume (4).

Epicurus admired Euclid's unadorned literary style, but found no value in the claim that reasoning deductively from geometry could actually give you new information about nature. And while these and other disciplines have their uses, they are not and cannot be Canonic because they are not primary sources of information about the world, they are secondary. Their value as cognitive tools depends on our ability to evaluate their premises and conclusions using the senses, the feelings, and the prolepsis.

Quote from Henry David Thoreau

The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

It's interesting that while Lucretius records that magnets were so named because they came from Magnesia, Pliny the Elder quotes Nicander of Colophon as suggesting that magnets got their name from a shepherd named Magnes, whose iron studded shoes stuck to the ground on Mount Ida.

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats is also good on this point, and he may have had some of these ideas in mind when he wrote it.

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Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

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RE: Episode One Hundred Twenty - Letter to Herodotus 09 - Epicurus' Rejection of Infinite Divisibility

Also: Torquatus section on Mathematics and Geometry (very brief):

[…]

And;

Infinite mathematical detail at the subatomic scale;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal

Joshua

May 1, 2022 at 9:00 AM

This is one episode of the podcast where we discussed Parmenides and Zeno of Elea on the proposition that motion is impossible as expressed by Zeno's Paradox.

At about the 5:41 mark Cassius starts the conversation.

Lucretius on time from Book I;

Then, too, time in itself does not exist.

From things themselves our senses comprehend [460]

what has been accomplished in the past,

what is present now, then what will follow

afterwards. We must concede that no one

has a sense of time in and of itself,

apart from things in motion or at rest.

What’s more, when people claim “the ravishment

of Tyndareus’ daughter” or “the rout 650

of Trojan races in the war” are real,

we must take care they do not compel us

to say perhaps that in and of themselves

these things exist, when time, which cannot now

be summoned back, has carried away

men of that generation, those for whom

events like these were merely accidents.(18)

One could say that whatever things are done

are accidents—in one case of the Trojans, [470]

in another of the place itself. Furthermore, 660

if there was no material stuff in things

and no place or space in which all actions

happen, then Helen’s beauty would never

have lit the fire of love which then blazed through

the Phrygian chest of Paris, igniting

the glorious struggles of that savage war,

nor would the wooden horse have secretly

delivered in the night those sons of Greece

born from its belly and then set on fire

the citadel of Troy. Thus, you can see 670

that each event has no being—does not,

in any fundamental way, exist

the way that corporeal matter does,

nor can we describe it as existing [480]

in the same way as empty space—instead

you can with justice label all events

accidents of the body and the place

where each of them occurs.

Thank you Don, that is very timely advice and well taken! We'll be sure to consult this in the coming weeks (...months) and I'll need to get a copy as well.

I should also use this occasion to recommend The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, which touches on not only Thomas More but Lorenzo Valla, Michael Marullus, Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, Gassendi, Giordano Bruno, and many many others. The controversy surrounding the book is in my opinion frequently absurd, generally overblown, and it comes to us from the kind of people who out of one side of their mouths praise the Medieval period as one of great learning and humanity, and who out of the other side heap accolades on men like Thomas Aquinas (who advocated murdering heretics), and who downplay the sanguinary history of Christianity as it concerns the Inquisition, the Witch-hunts, the Crusades, and much more besides.

I personally prefer the audiobook, expertly read by Edoardo Ballerini and available on Audible--and I can say honestly that I return to it often and always with delight.