Posts by Joshua

I agree with your interpretation, Eric, and that's also what I get out of the letter I quoted above re: Shelley.

Although as it happens, Shelley was expelled from University College, Oxford, for disseminating a tract he wrote called "They Necessity of Atheism", by which he actually meant Deism.

Edit; we've been talking a lot lately about the Areopagus in Athens and it's relationship with Parrhesia, candor or frank speech. John Milton chose it for the title of his own tract, a defense of free expression called Areopagitica.

epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/3991/

Yes, that's this one. All three have the forest fire as an important motif.

The above translation is from Ian Johnston.

Piero di Cosimo, A Hunting Scene, c. 1500

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

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This picture and its companion (also in The Met's collection) reimagine the early history of humankind and are among the most singular works of the Renaissance. Their inspiration was the fifth book of De Rerum Natura by the Epicurean poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99–55 B.C.). A manuscript of Lucretius’s work was discovered in 1417 and published in Florence in 1471–73. Lucretius believed that the workings of the world can be accounted for by natural rather than divine causes, and he put forward a vision of the history of primitive humanity and the advent of civilization that was much discussed in Renaissance Florence—and beyond.

And so now,

in what remains, my train of argument

has now brought me to this point, where I must

set down an explanation how the world

is a mortal substance and was born,

how a collection of materials

established earth, heaven, sea, stars, sun,

and the moon’s globe, then what living creatures

sprang from earth, as well as those never born

at any time, how the human race began

to employ among themselves various words

by giving names to things, and ways in which

that fear of gods slid into human hearts,

which preserves sacred places on earth’s sphere—

shrines, lakes, groves, altars, images of gods.

...

They could not look toward the common good

and did not know how to make for themselves

any laws or customs. A man would take

whatever prize fortune might throw his way,

with each one trained to look out for himself

and get by on his own. And in the woods,

Venus would join bodies in sexual acts,

for each woman was either overwhelmed

by mutual lust, or by the violent force

and reckless passion of the man, or else

by some reward—acorns, or strawberries,

or fine pears. And trusting in the power

of their hands and feet, which was amazing,

they went after wild beasts in the forest

by throwing rocks and with large, heavy clubs.

They brought down many, but there were a few

they avoided in their hiding places.

...

And just in case, while dealing with these things,

you are perhaps quietly wondering,

it was lighting which first carried fire down

to mortal men on earth—with that all heat

from flames is generated. For we see

many things ignite and burn up when struck

by fire from heaven, once the bolt transmits

its heat. Then, too, when a tree with branches

is lashed by winds, sways back and forth, presses

and rubs the branches of another tree,

the violent force of rubbing brings out fire,

and while trunk and branches chafe each other,

sometimes the flaming heat of fire ignites.

Either of these two could have provided

fire to mortal men. And then sun taught them

to cook their food, using the heat of flames

to soften it, because out in the fields

they would see many objects getting soft

once beaten by sun’s heat and lashing rays.

The Return from the Hunt, also at the Met.

That is a very interesting take, Pacatus! Certainly one I'd not heard before.

What it turned into in my Catholic High School religion class was a nun very eager to share with us the manifold dangers of masturbation...

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I wonder what you think about the next sentence--all is permitted.

You mean the one I was trying to avoid? 😅

Of course it too deserves a response. In a letter of Horace Smith to Cyrus Redding, dated 1822, the author has this to say in reference to the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley;

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Though Shelley is my most particular friend, I regret the imprudence of his early publications on more points than one, but as I know him to possess the most exalted virtues, and find in others who promulgate the most startling theories, most amiable traits, I learn to be liberal towards abstract speculations, which not exercising any baneful influence on their author’s lives, are still less likely to corrupt others. Truth is great, and will prevail—that is my motto, and I would, therefore, leave everything unshackled—what is true will stand, and what is false ought to fall, whatever be the consequences. Ought we not to feel ashamed that Lucretius could publish his book in the teeth of an established religion, while martyrs are groaning in perpetual imprisonment, for expressing a conscientious dissent from Christianity?

If by "all is permitted" we mean something like "leave everything unshackled" in its above usage, then I am fully on board. St. Augustine wrote that the church permitting the spread of heresy was like the state allowing the sale of poison bread. Aquinas in his Summa Theologica preferred the metaphor of counterfeit money, and in either case the result is the same--the punishment for counterfeiting was mutilation or death, and Dante has King Philip IV of France tortured in hell for adulterating the coinage.

By contrast, what I find in Epicurus is a thinker for whom questions of justice and morality are approached with measure and care, as in Vatican Saying 51:

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I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclination as you will, provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by one or more of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm.

Set aside Epicurus' final advice here; the point is that in lieu of a stark prohibition, and without any threat of torture or death, he simply leads the coorespondant to examine carefully the consequences of a given course of action, in the particular context in which he finds himself. In another time and place, law and custom might be different. The crime of Onan in the book of Genesis was failing to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law; such a proscription would be unthinkable and grotesque in our age.

Of the 10 commandments, only three are current law; prohibitions against murder, theft, and perjury.

Should literally everything be permitted by law? No, I don't think so. I can't imagine Epicurus did either. But the sope and compass of personal liberty should far exceed the scope of what is forbidden.

The following scene from Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" catches the flavor of what I mean to convey;

Thank you, HsiehKW, that is a very thorough response and I will have to read it again more carefully tomorrow!

In response to your last paragraph, I agree that plants are not cognitive; I cite them merely in a thought experiment, in order to outline the operation of prolepsis as non-cognitive. The inclusion of prolepsis in the Canon seemed to require a process linked to sensation and rooted in physiology, which I tried to take as nearly as I could to its hypothetical extreme.

Your division of prolepsis into two adaptive orders is particularly interesting to me. As I said, I will return for a more careful reading!

Thank you again!

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To me, what really distinguishes DeWitt from other commentators is that he seems to have devoted almost his entire professional writing career to the study and exposition of Epicurean philosophy exclusively.

It's beside your main point, but what I'm finding in my research is that his academic interest in Epicureanism may stem from later in his career than I realized. There is, first, his dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago; a study of the erotic in "The Dido Episode in the Aeneid of Virgil", 1907. He surveys the literature of Greece and Rome in laying the groundwork for his thesis, but one figure is curiously absent: Lucretius.

Excluding the above, his next six publications (1912-1924) are all on Virgil. Then an article on litigation and Cicero, followed by two history textbooks (1927 and 1934) for the curriculum in Canada.

After these, a course correction; at the age of 59, in an essay entitled "Parresiastic Poems of Horace" (1935), he writes on παρρησία (parrhesia, frankness of speech) as an unique virtue of Epicureanism. After this, essays on Epicurean Gratitude and Epicurean Kinetics ('37 and '41). Then a detour with his son through a cooperative translation of Demosthenes (1949), and right back to Epicureanism.

In 1954, Epicurus and his Philosophy and St. Paul and Epicurus are both published; it seems likely enough to me that he spent more than five years on these two texts, and may have worked on them while coordinating the translation of Demosthenes with his son.

One last thing at the very end of his life--an essay on daily life in Rome called "Vesta Unveiled", as part of a collection of essays published in honor of Berthold Ullman, a Classicist who earned his Ph.D at Chicago a year after DeWitt.

So most of the last twenty years of his life were devoted to the study of Epicureanism, most of his early career to Virgil.

Introduction

I have had some success in tracing the early life of prof. Norman Wentworth Dewitt, born September 18, 1876 in the small hamlet of Tweedside, Ontario, on the Niagara Peninsula. An early ancestor was Nicholas de Witt, born 1594 in East Frisia. Nicholas was a Doctor, and in that capacity is alleged to have accompanied Henry Hudson in his exploration of the Hudson River as Ship's Doctor on the Half-Moon.

Nicholas de Witt had a son Tjerck Claeszen de Witt, who emigrated without his father to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, on Manhattan, in what is now New York. There he died in 1700. I am on the point of confirming that his descendants were Loyalists during the American Revolution, and during or after the War they removed themselves to Upper Canada (so named because it lies around the upper reaches of the Saint Lawrence River which empties out of Lake Ontario and runs northeast to the sea).

According to the magisterial genealogy compiled by Vona Smith, née DeWitt, called Tierck Clafsen DeWitt and Descendants of His Son Luycas DeWitt, published 2004, Norman DeWitt's father Hiram was born into the 11th generation of that line in 1830 at Saltfleet, a Township in Hamilton, Ontario.

Hiram DeWitt, his father John, and his brothers John Jr. and Joseph owned contiguous or at least approximate farms in the area of Tweedside, as shown on this undated Township and Concession Map:

https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/Images/Maps/TownshipMaps/wen-m-saltfleet.jpg

Tweedside appears in the southeast corner, and Hiram's farm--Norman DeWitt's boyhood home--was two blocks west of the Post Office and a block and a half west of the Methodist church, both of which fronted on Mud Street.

The Methodist Church in Tweedside was a simple red brick affair, first built in 1874 two years before Norman DeWitt was born, and then rebuilt in 1897. This rebuilt church was still standing in the first decade of the 21st century. I have a here a recommendation from 2002 either to lease the church, to renovate it, or to demolish the dilapidated structure. In any case the church was demolished, though I cannot determine precisely when this happened; the cemetery is still in use.

Today only the foundation remains;

Our young scholar will, no doubt, have scaled those steps in his youth.

The land all around is farm country, and nothing else of old Tweedside remains. 4 miles (6km) to the north was the line of the Great Western Railway bisecting the coastal town of Winona along the south shore of Lake Ontario. The journey from Tweedside to Winona would require crossing the Niagara Escarpment, a massive geological landform running in a great arc from New York state to Wisconsin. The road shown on the Saltfleet township map above contains two switchbacks.

40 miles (~60 km) to the east on the Great Western lay Niagara Falls, and the border crossing to the United States by way of the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge--"the first working suspension railway bridge in history". This bridge was, to the credit of John Augustus Roebling, an incredible achievement.

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American engineers regard the Suspension Bridge as a major achievement of efficiency. In a fledgling country where resources—material and financial—were limited, they had to make do with whatever was available. This goal was espoused by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which opined, "That is the best engineering, not which makes the most splendid, or even the most perfect work, but that which makes a work that answers the purpose well, at the least cost." Roebling had built a bridge that rivaled grander bridges of leading European nations at a much lower cost.

An advertisement for the bridge and the falls, dating to 1876, the year DeWitt was born. It's difficult to imagine now looking at a satellite view of Tweedside 40 miles west, but this was an energetic and industrious age for the two countries. Going west from the small town of Winona, the Great Western Railway followed the lake to the port city of Hamilton and the main railyard. From Hamilton, the line forked--west, deeper into the country before crossing the border again at Detroit--or northeast, and on to the great city of Toronto.

Of Norman DeWitt's early education I can give no account. His mother Margaret emigrated from Ireland and was orphaned at the age of 5. She was raised in the family of Tweedsider Thomas MulHolland, and was married to Hiram DeWitt in 1868. However it happened, it strikes me as likely that in the autumn of 1894, at the age of 17, Norman Wentworth Dewitt and his luggage must have boarded a passenger steam train on the Great Western Railway, bound for Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

More to come!

In light of this recent thread I have decided to give another listen to this episode, and am slowly developing a better understanding of what is going on with the word 'cognition'. Dr. Glidden expressly contrasts the cognitive with the physiological. In humans it's difficult to demarcate these two faculties, in part because they are very intertwined.

But taking a lower order of life like the spider plant on my balcony, I can make several observations. Does it experience sensation? I suspect so. My balcony faces northeast, and that is the direction sunlight comes from. Not direct sunlight--my spider plant will never "see" the sun where it sits, but enough filters through by reflection and refraction for the plant to make do.

And here's the thing; when the spider plant sends forth a new shoot, it tends invariable toward the light. In a phenomenon called Heliotropism, some plants will actually track the sun from east to west throughout the day. No brain, no thought or cognition, no language--and yet the plant senses light and heat and responds to stimuli with primitive cellular motor function. The process, from beginning to end, is physiological.

What about prolepsis? In the well-known and charismatic Venus Fly-Trap, it is an electrical impulse passed from the trigger hairs on each of the lobes that 'tells' the midrib of the plant to close the trap. The process again is physiological and noncognitive. Too physiological? Maybe. It could be argued that a merely physical process, like gently tapping the keys on a piano, is too noncognitive to really count as pattern recognition. After all, that last word is "re-cognition".

But if you look at plants on the cellular level, what you will observe is the faculty of these cells to recognize patterns associated with perceived threats and dangers--a faculty that allows the cells to respond to the threat and mitigate the damage.

The threat in this case is microbes, and it is an immune response that the pattern recognition triggers. To quote Wikipedia;

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Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) play a crucial role in the proper function of the innate immune system. PRRs are germline-encoded host sensors, which detect molecules typical for the pathogens. They are proteins expressed, mainly, by cells of the innate immune system, such as dendritic cells, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils and epithelial cells, to identify two classes of molecules: pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), which are associated with microbial pathogens, and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), which are associated with components of host's cells that are released during cell damage or death.

If a molecule with the pattern of a threat bumbs up against a PRR, the host organism's cells will initiate the immune response. But here's the thing; just as it's possible to mimic the pattern of a fly by triggering the hairs of a venus fly-trap, it would be possible for a molecule to trip a PRR by having the pattern of a microbe without actually being one.

Do we consider this a primitive form of prolepsis? Let's review the components:

• Initial sensory contact. Like a human seeing a curvy stick on the forest floor, a venus fly-trap or Pattern Recognition Receptor in the cell registers a sensory impulse.
• The sensory impulse is "identified" (in purely physiological terms) as matching a "known" pattern--like a key sliding into a lock. The stick sends an impulse to our brain, and some twitching neuron somewhere fires--SNAKE!
• The organism responds both to the stimulus and to the pattern recognition. This part is essential--a fructose molecule could bump against a PRR all day long, providing the sensory impulse, but not register as a known pattern. It alone would not trigger the organism's response. The pattern recognition is essential. We jump back from the stick, only to discover cognitively that it's just a stick after all.

I think I would call this a kind of prolepsis.

One further consideration. Does prolepsis lie? Can it be wrong? It depends on what we mean by 'wrong'. I might define prolepsis--sensation->pattern->response--as an "anticipation made noncognitively in advance of more complete information". It's certainly true that the stimulus whose pattern we recognize will very often turn out to be caused by something else. A stick, not a snake. A feather, not a fly. A fructose molecule, not a dangerous microbe.

But was the pattern recognition ITSELF a lie? I think not. A curvy stick does have the same pattern as a snake to the sense of vision. My opinion is that prolepsis is true to the cause because the cause IS the pattern. The stick-ness or snake-ness of the stick or snake is something we grasp cognitively and express and understand using language. But the pattern is the pattern--evaluating whether it's been rightly identified in the light of future evidence or further knowledge is quite beside the point. That process is cognitive--this process is physiological.

So that's where I find myself right now.

Also, we have a few articles by prof. David Glidden as to the relationship between Epicurean canonics or epistemology and cognitive science. We also interviewed Dr. Glidden on the podcast, that episode is Here.

Edit; I apologize, HsiehKW, I see you already linked to one of Dr. Glidden's articles!

I don't have any familiarity with this, perhaps we should make a table for the four 'e's so we have a better sense of what we're looking at. I'll read up more on the subject. At a glance I think I agree with the embodied part, if I understand it rightly. I haven't looked at the other three yet. Happy twentieth!

Are children born in a state of original honesty?

We didn't cover this very deeply, but there are excellent reasons for thinking that it's true. Everyone has experienced those moments when children say things that adults have been educated or conditioned or cultured into believing are tactless, rude, or unmentionable.

"Kids say the darnedest things" is a common phrase in America, but the question seldom asked is "why?"

Kids are honest, I think, because they have not yet been convinced of the perceived (and sometimes appropriate) need to lie.

Anyway, here is a study into the perception of judges to ascertain their views on the reliability of eye witnesses.

Judges Think Children More Honest But Less Reliable Than Adults, Says Queen's Study

Judges perceive child witnesses as being more honest than adults when testifying in court, but recognize that children's limited memory and communication…

www.sciencedaily.com

The conclusion: "Judges Think Children More Honest But Less Reliable Than Adults".

Yes, it definitely dovetails with what DeWitt says about the Summum Bonum as it relates to pleasure and life. For clarity's sake it makes sense to say that pleasure is the highest good, but pleasure is inseparable from life both superficially (in the 'duh' sense) and at a very deep level.

I almost quibbled with the sentence "There is no Truth", except that by capitalizing the word the author makes a very important and, as I think, philosophically sound point; that capital-T "Truth" does not exist in the abstract apart from fact, physical nature, human understanding, etc.

I wouldn't dispense with the list altogether, it's too historically ingrained. But a prose version in parallel is definitely worthwhile.

I'd actually be curious to know what a trained classicist with no knowledge of the text would do with it if you handed them a lump of Greek capital letters with no numbering or paragraphs. But of course the first thing they would likely do is consult earlier scholarship.

Very interesting, thank you Eric!

You can look at the dates for that festival on the calendar at;

Calendar – Hellenion

It will occur in August on our calendar.

This Attic month (Hekatombaion) also includes the annual festival of the Panathenaea, which Don mentioned in his Video on the location of the Garden outside the walls of ancient Athens.

This being the third year of the Olympiad, the Pythian games would have commenced with the first full moon of the New Year, which will be August 1st. However, since the calendar is lunisolar, and the moon cycle changes relative to the solstice, there is some debate as to whether they would push it back another moon to wait out the harvest. Wikipedia says the games would occur in late August, which would coincide with the second full moon this year. Difficult to say--the Athenians would add an extra month every so often to bring the months back in line with the seasons.

There's an old rumor, by the way, that some of the Russian athletes were two weeks late to the 1908 Olympics because they were still using the Julian calendar and most of Europe was using the modern Gregorian calendar.

Both calendars are named after the potentates who instituted them, but of course it was the astronomers of each age who actually designed them--the Gregorian calendar by 16th century Italian astronomer and philosopher named Luigi Lilio, and the Julian calendar by the scholars at the Library and Museum of Alexandria.