Posts by Joshua

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  • PD01 - Gratitude and Weakness (Especially In Relation to the Gods)

    I'm posting this as food for thought, and because I don't see it suggested elsewhere:

    Perhaps we're reading it wrong? The usual reading is that the gods are "unaffected by [hypothetical] anger [that they might otherwise feel] and [hypothetical] gratitude [that they might otherwise feel]."

    Could it be credibly inferred that the anger and gratitude that the gods are immune to is our anger and gratitude?

    It doesn't matter whether your words are "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" or "into thy hands I commend my spirit"; the result is the same. The gods, by virtue of being gods, are necessarily deaf to human griefs, as well as human joys.

    Under this new reading, the first Principal Doctrine falls in line with the recurring literary devices that mark the whole series; the Chiasmus, and the Antimetabole. I can summarize a few examples, with the caveat that brevity is the mother of misinterpretation.

    1. Do not trouble about the gods, for the gods do not trouble about you.

    2. When we are, death has not come. When death has come, we are not.

    3 and 4. What is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure.

    5. It is not possible to live pleasantly without living [x], and it is not possible to live [x] without living pleasantly.

    6. Take courage from other men, or at least from men who can give courage.

    11. If suspicion of nature did not trouble us, we should not trouble to study nature.

    I write these merely to isolate the main point--that the literary devices are constantly repeated, and are there for a reason.

    From Wikipedia;

    Quote

    Chiasmus derives its effectiveness from its symmetrical structure. The structural symmetry of the chiasmus imposes the impression upon the reader or listener that the entire argument has been accounted for.[13] In other words, chiasmus creates only two sides of an argument or idea for the listener to consider, and then leads the listener to favor one side of the argument.

    As I say, food for thought. And thanks to my old copy of Walter Harding's edition of Walden for alerting me to these literary devices.

    Quote

    When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.

    -Henry David Thoreau

  • The Early Epicureans v1.0 [video]

    My new video on the Early Epicureans is now on YouTube. Thank you Cassius for doing the legwork on that end!

    I tried to keep this one short, and went with captions instead of a voice-over. You can visit the thread on the process here, and @Nate's map of the Epicurean Communities of the Ancient World here.

    Thank you all for your early feedback and any criticism is more than welcome! I do want to get better (and faster) at the animating and editing process.

    I hope this gives a clearer picture of Epicurus' life, and of the development of the Garden conceptually in the east before it was realized in the west.

  • Epicurean Video Production Thread (Especially Blender and Other Open Source Video Software)

    Ok, as of now a handful of people have gotten the sneak peak of the video I'm working on called "The Early Epicureans". I thought I would take some time to outline the process so far.


    • The Map
      • I started this project by taking a map from 5th Century Greece from the Wikimedia Commons website. The license for the map is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. "Share-alike" means that anything I make with the map has to use the same license--It has to be Creative Commons, and I have to give attribution to the creator of the map. Creator: Fut.Per.
      • Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anci…century_B.C.svg
    • Editing the Map
      • The first editing I did was to upload the map to BeFunky, an online Photo editor. (Need a better alternative to this...) I recolored the map to black and white, and then gave it a warmer tint.
    • Blender: Used for; Animation
      • I installed Blender 3.5, a free, open source 3D computer graphics software used for modeling, animation, rendering, and much more.
      • I imported the map as a texture, allowing me to altar it's surface from a flat plane to a more paper-like texture. The video above shows how to do this.
      • I then animated the in-software camera to follow a path around the map, and rendered this animation in several segments and still frames.
    • OpenShot Video Editor.

    The video will be uploaded to the YouTube channel of Cassius Amicus in the coming few days, as soon as I can figure out the best way to get it to him. The license for the video itself will be Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

  • Epicurean Video Production Thread (Especially Blender and Other Open Source Video Software)

    I'm just learning it as well, Godfrey! I realized yesterday when I installed it that I already had an older version on my computer, so I guess I've tried using it before but just couldn't figure it out.

    There have been significant changes over time, so it can be difficult following tutorials as well. I spent nearly two hours trying to figure out the node system before I realized that the geometry nodes and shader nodes have been split into different panels. There's a million little buttons, toggles, sliders and menus and I don't know what 95% of them do. But this project is relatively simple so I should be able to get something put up this weekend, and then I can continue to expand on it over time.

  • Epicurean Video Production Thread (Especially Blender and Other Open Source Video Software)

    Quote from Cassius Admin Edit

    [Admin Edit from Cassius 050323: I am hijacking Joshua's thread and changing the title to make it more generic and hopefully extend it. I have seen the first draft of Joshua's map video. It is excellent and it is a reminder of how effective and far-reaching that good video can be.

    We need to encourage everyone who is even slightly interested in creative video production to try their hand at this. We can use this and other threads to share information about tools and methods and ask each other questions.


    I entitled the thread with a reference to free and open source software, because I think it is highly desirable that we use tools that are available to others and with which we can better share our expertise. However I know that some of the most powerful options are not publicly offered, so don't let that stop you from posting about what you are using, especially if the cost is relatively low. But thinking ahead to what will be most effective in getting other people going, options which are totally open and low or no cost are probably going to find the widest adoption.


    We have lots of creative people here and it would be great if we could encourage each other to produce work like this. Now for Joshua's post which started this thread:


    I am not proficient in the use of the this software by any means, but I did want to share some progress on a video I'm working on that focuses on the early Epicureans. Just two images: before and after. The first map I pulled from Wikimedia. The second map is zoomed, showing some of my progress in blender, and with a little bit of added texture. Hopefully I can get it to look more like paper. Anyway, once I have the map looking the way I want it to, I can set the 'camera' to follow a track around the map; panning across the Aegean, zooming in on a city or an island, etc.

  • Epicurean Philosophy Vs. Humanism

    The Catholic Church for most of it's history has had 2 main categories for literature--Sacred and Profane. Sacred literature was scriptural or theological, and Profane was everything else. Except for the outliers like St. Jerome, Profane literature was not necessarily regarded as 'bad'. That connotation came later. It just...wasn't sacred.

    There is a similar axis when it comes to outlook, orientation or disposition. It shows up in education--studying Divinity prepared one for life in the church. Studying the humanities prepared one for life outside it.

    Humanism is everything that has, as it's focus, the nature, life, customs, languages, art, history, folk ways, nations, states, governments, and so on, of human beings.

    Divinity has for its object the relationship between man and God. Humanism has for its object the relations between mankind, and between man and himself.

    The monasteries of Europe made ornate, jewel-encrusted illuminated manuscripts to enshrine the words of God. Laborious to produce, written in a hand difficult to read (blackletter, an ugly variant of Carolingian miniscule), and in any case usually chained to the shelf or the lectern, these books were made to glorify God, not enlighten men.

    In the 14th century, a network of secular Italian scholars in Florence, Venice, and in the Papal Curia in Rome--even in the Curia they were not always in Holy Orders--began to stimulate a demand for a new kind of book. The first major innovation was to rifle the collections of monastic libraries for the works of pagan antiquity. The second was to make them readable again, and to that end these scribes gradually developed their own style of handwriting. Like Blackletter, this new hand, which we now call 'humanist miniscule', was derived from Carolingian miniscule. Unlike Blackletter, it was beautiful--it was clear, graceful, and with room to breath. It could be copied quickly, could be read easily. Reading in the monasteries was meant to be a chore, like cooking, cleaning or plowing--now it was becoming pleasureable to read.

    In the monasteries, literary discussions were strictly prohibited. No questions were to be asked, and no doubts entertained.

    But the humanists had their eye on this world, and this world has problems. How should a State function? How should armies be raised, trained and drilled, laws be written or established, clean water be supplied? What about navigation, agriculture, architecture, medicine, trade, economics and astronomy? Above all, how should we live? The ancients had written on every one of those topics.

    That's humanism in a nutshell, and it was best expressed by two poets; "I am human; nothing human is alien to me", wrote Terence in the 2nd century BC. And Alexander Pope echoed the sentiment in the 18th century--"The proper study of Mankind is Man."

    Blackletter

    Carolingian miniscule

  • The Definitive "Chrysippus' Hand Argument" Thread

    Premises;

    1. The hand either feels pleasure, or it feels pain, or it feels neither pleasure nor pain.
    2. If pleasure is the highest good, then the absence of pleasure would feel like a lack of pleasure.
    3. This lack of pleasure would be felt in every member of the body.
    4. My hand does not feel pleasure or pain.
    5. My hand does not feel a lack of pleasure.

    Conclusion;

    1. Pleasure is not the highest good.

    Against premises 1, 2, and 4:

    (Principle Doctrine 3) "The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together."

    Torquatus grants premise 3:

    "The inference is shrewd enough as against the Cyrenaics, but does not touch Epicurus. For if the only pleasure were that which, as it were, tickles the senses, if I may say so, and attended by sweetness overflows them and insinuates itself into them, neither the hand nor any other member would be able to rest satisfied with the absence of pain apart from a joyous activity of pleasure."

    The wisdom of granting this premise is, in my view, questionable. Premise 5 relies upon it for relevance, and I think it has problems. For example; I can feel pain from teeth, but unlike other organs the teeth do not register actively pleasureable sensations. Should the teeth, not equipped with the ability to register pleasure, feel the lack of pleasure? I don't see how.

    Against premise 5;

    Premise 5 relies on the previous premises 1-4 for relevance. Given the challenges presented above, premise 5 is inadmissible.

  • LANDOR, Walter Savage: Epicurus, Leontion and Ternissa.

    I just glanced over the thread here and didn't see it, maybe I haven't come across this before. It's worth noting that this is the same Landor that Frost mentions in his poem "Lucretius versus the Lake Poets".

  • Themista of Lampsacus

    Quote

    ANONYMOUS: I, THE pencil, was silver when I came from the fire, but in thy hands I have become golden likewise. So, charming Leontion, hath Athena well gifted thee with supremacy in art, and Cypris with supremacy in beauty.

    Book 16 of the Planudean Anthology.

  • Themista of Lampsacus

    I wonder if she died some time before Epicurus. Their practice of memorializing the dead through books of praise would explain Cicero's complaint. Then there is that connection between the names Leontion and Leontius. Perhaps Leontion was the daughter of Themista and Leontius. Impossible to say at this distance.

    I seem to recall finding mention of Leontion in the Greek Anthology, I'll have to check when I get home.

  • Themista of Lampsacus

    Quote

    In the school of Epicurus I never heard one mention of Lycurgus, Solon, Miltiades, Themistocles, Epaminondas, who are always on the lips of the other philosophers. And now that we Romans too have begun to treat of these themes, what a marvellous roll of great men will our friend Atticus supply to us from his store-houses of learning! Would it not be better to talk of these than to devote those bulky volumes to Themista? Let us leave that sort of thing to the Greeks. True we owe to them philosophy and all the liberal sciences; yet there are topics not permitted to us, that are allowable for them. Battle rages between the Stoics and the Peripatetics. One school declares that nothing is good but Moral Worth, the other that, while it assigns the greatest, and by far the greatest, value to Morality, yet still some bodily and external things are good. Here is an honourable quarrel, fought out in high debate! For the whole dispute turns on the true worth of virtue. But when one argues with your [Epicurean] friends, one has to listen to a great deal about even the grosser forms of pleasure! Epicurus is always harping upon them!

    Cicero, De Finibus, book 2

  • Venus de Milo

    Livioandronico2013 - Own work

    CC BY-SA 4.0

    Tomorrow, Saturday April 8th, is the 203rd anniversary of the rediscovery of the Venus de Milo in 1820. As Don pointed out recently, April was the month dedicated to Venus/Aphrodite by the Romans.

    Creatress, mother of the Roman line,

    Dear Venus, joy of earth and joy of heaven,

    All things that live below that heraldry

    Of star and planet, whose processional

    Moves ever slow and solemn over us,

    All things conceived, all things that face the light

    In their bright visit, the grain-bearing fields,

    The marinered oceans, where the wind and cloud

    Are quiet in your presence – all proclaim

    Your gift, without which they are nothingness.

    For you that sweet artificer, the earth,

    Submits her flowers, and for you the deep

    Of ocean smiles, and the calm heaven shines

    With shoreless light.

    -Trans. Rolfe Humphries

Finding Things At EpicureanFriends.com

What's the best strategy for finding things on EpicureanFriends.com? Here's a suggested search strategy:

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