Posts by Joshua

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If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is "prior to" the existence of rabbits (whatever "prior to" might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.

I don't remember if we discussed this on Sunday, but the question of whether essence is prior to existence or, to put it in Platonic terms, being is prior to becoming, is also related to Aristotle's teleology. Aristotle proposed that everything that begins to exist has four causes; the material cause describes the matter that makes up the thing, the efficient cause describes how it was made, the formal cause describes what shape it was made to take, and the final cause describes why it was made, or what purpose or telos it was made to serve.

With artificial objects it makes sense to speak of final causes, but Lucretius insists that such is not the case with natural objects like the eye. Book 4, line 823;

EpicureanFriends Side-By-Side Lucretius

Multi-column side-by-side Lucretius text comparison tool featuring Munro, Bailey, Dunster, and Condensed editions.

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Epicurus relies on a similar understanding of the relationship between existence and use in his Letter to Herodotus:

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[64] Further, you must grasp that the soul possesses the chief cause of sensation: yet it could not have acquired sensation, unless it were in some way enclosed by the rest of the structure. And [the body] in its turn having afforded the soul this cause of sensation acquires itself too a share in this contingent capacity from the soul. Yet it does not acquire all the capacities which the soul possesses: and therefore when the soul is released from the body, the body no longer has sensation. For it never possessed this power in itself, but used to afford opportunity for it to another existence, brought into being at the same time with itself: and this existence, owing to the power now consummated within itself as a result of motion, used spontaneously to produce for itself the capacity of sensation and then to communicate it to the body as well, in virtue of its contact and correspondence of movement, as I have already said.

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τότε γὰρ ἡδονῆς χρείαν ἔχομεν, ὅταν ἐκ τοῦ μὴ παρεῖναι τὴν ἡδονὴν ἀλγῶμεν· <ὅταν δὲ μὴ ἀλγῶμεν> οὐκέτι τῆς ἡδονῆς δεόμεθα.

For it is then that we have need of pleasure, when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure; (but when we do not feel pain), we no longer need pleasure.

δεόμεθα (δέω) can have the meaning of need, but it can also mean lack, which is more in keeping with Epicurean ethics; when we are not in pain, we no longer lack pleasure because we are already experiencing the fullest possible pleasure (as described in Principle Doctrine 3).

As usual, I invite Bryan, Don, and Eikadistes to review my handling of the Greek.

In the meantime, I recommend reviewing page 61 of Don's Translation with Commentary.

Sage advice for the holidays, Kalosyni, which many of us will no doubt consider applying come...January!

Here is a good start:

Land reform in Athens - Wikipedia

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Already in the 8th century BC, Hesiod referred to land shortage related to the problems of dividing inheritance. In the Odyssey it is mentioned that the worst fate of a man, other than death, is to remain without land and thus have to serve another person. People with no land had to leave Athens and settle in colonies in the west (Sicily and Italy) and east (Asia Minor).

I'll keep looking for information relating to the 4th century when Epicurus was born.

I'll try to remember where I first read about land inheritance in ancient Athens so I can give you a source, but it was a few years ago when I worked in land-surveying so it may take time!

Epicurus' status was clearly low by birth, and that he was derided for this in antiquity is a matter of record. But that he was born in the colonies is a symptom of his low status rather than the cause of it.

The real problem was wealth. Athens was democratic not only in its politics but in its outlook, at least so far as male citizens were concerned, and inheritance was divided equally rather than by primogeniture.

This caused problems, because the largest heritable asset in a family was commonly land, and land only grows by acquisition. Successful landowners could buy more, but unsuccessful ones could only sell what they had, or bequeath it to their heirs; heirs who would each receive an equal portion. If the father had only enough land to support a family, and that land was divided among four sons upon his death, the sons obviously could not each produce enough to support families of their own. Over time, plots got smaller and smaller, and families poorer and poorer.

You see the same problem at work on American Indian reservations today. The solution to this problem in antiquity was to bundle the poorest families onto ships, and send them off to a distant shore to found a colony. The whole project of colonization was the project of thinning out an underclass; not unlike the modern story of the British settlement of Australia as a penal colony.

Epicurus' parents were very probably 'transported' or 'removed' in this way, and on Samos took up whatever work they could find--pedagogy for his father, always a dismal line of work in antiquity, and some kind of low folk magic for his mother, according to the rumors.

There is an interesting epitaph in the Greek Anthology which bears slightly on this question;

Book XI - Convivial and Satirical Epigrams

No. 249 - Lucilius

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"Menophanes bought a field, and from hunger hanged himself on another man's oak. When he was dead they had no earth to throw over him from above, but he was buried for payment in the ground of one of his neighbors. If Epicurus had known of Menophanes' field he would have said that everything is full of fields, not of atoms."

This may at least hint at the problem of land shortages and poverty in Greece at the time.

Ironically, Menophanes deserves some credit because the Standard Model in physics suggests that everything is full of fields! Only kidding.

Aristotle was the private tutor of a whole new generation of rulers (Alexander the Great and Ptolemy I chief among them), and the Academy and the Lyceum attracted the sons of the wealthiest families in Athens. We can expect a certain amount of sneering. I still haven't read Pamela Gordon's book.

This book has a chapter on Lucretius and his use of Latin.

Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides has more background on the events described in today's reading, here presented by Agamemnon in dialogue:

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But after the army was gathered and come together, we still remained at Aulis weather-bound; and Calchas, the seer, bade us in our perplexity sacrifice my own begotten child Iphigenia to Artemis, whose home is in this land, declaring that if we offered her, we should sail and sack the Phrygians' capital, but if we forbore, this was not for us. When I heard this, I commanded Talthybius with loud proclamation to disband the whole host, as I could never bear to slay daughter of mine. Whereupon my brother, bringing every argument to bear, persuaded me at last to face the crime; so I wrote in a folded scroll and sent to my wife, bidding her despatch our daughter to me on the pretence of wedding Achilles, it the same time magnifying his exalted rank and saying that he refused to sail with the Achaeans, unless a bride of our lineage should go to Phthia. Yes, this was the inducement I offered my wife, inventing, as I did, a sham marriage for the maiden. Of all the Achaeans we alone know the real truth, Calchas, Odysseus, Menelaus and myself; but that which I then decided wrongly, I now rightly countermand again in this scroll, which thou, old man, hast found me opening and resealing beneath the shade of night. Up now and away with this missive to Argos, and I will tell thee by word of mouth all that is written herein, the contents of the folded scroll, for thou art loyal to my wife and house.

We learn moments later that Achilles has no knowledge of this sham marriage.

And here is a thread on William Short, in which I recounted the anecdote where he saved a boy from drowning:

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The Long Neglect of William Short

Here's an interesting thought; what do we actually know about this guy?

Judging from Mr. Jefferson's letter in reply, we may infer that William Short, like Jefferson, positively identified himself as an Epicurean. Cassius' recent reading of Frances Wright's other work has me thinking that there might be gems hidden here as well.

He was a talented, capable, brilliant protégé of Thomas Jefferson, and a deft hand at diplomacy. He forsook the dream of a high and polished political career in his…

Joshua

October 5, 2020 at 6:48 PM

Here is that passage from Lorenzo Valla's De Voluptate:

And of course all of this is to forget the other side of the ledger, which Stephen Greenblatt cites here from Lorenzo Valla's De Voluptate:

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At the center of his dialogue, Valla constructs a remarkably vigorous and sustained defense of key Epicurean principles: the wisdom of withdrawing from competitive striving into the tranquil garden of philosophy (“From the shore you shall laugh in safety at the waves, or rather at those who are wave-tossed”), the primacy of bodily pleasure, the advantages of moderation, the perverse unnaturalness of sexual abstinence, the denial of any afterlife. “It is plain,” the Epicurean states, “that there are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments either.” And lest this formulation allow an ambiguity, still setting human souls apart from all other created things, he returns to the point to render it unequivocal:

• According to my Epicurus . . . nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term “living being” he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this I agree. They eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything; finally, they die and we die—both of us completely.

If we grasp this end clearly—“finally, they die and we die—both of us completely”—then our determination should be equally clear: “Therefore, for as long as possible (would that it were longer!) let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life.”

He is speaking here about death, but the real point is that there is nothing which marks humans out as special in comparison to other living beings (animantem in Valla's Latin). It did not require circular reasoning for Lucretius to notice the symptoms of grief and loss in the mother cow whose calf has been selected for sacrifice, and we don't actually need it now to observe in these lower animals the signs of the same feelings of joy, gladness, and pleasure that we feel ourselves.

Phaedrus was a Scholarch of the Garden, a successor in a long line of leaders of the school of Epicurus. Philodemus was also a devoted member of the school, having studied under the Scholarch Zeno of Sidon.

Lucretius is probably the outlier here--a Roman among Greeks, as it were. He held orthodox beliefs about the gods, and was not an atheist, but he was more critical of cultural religious devotions than Epicurus was.

This is fundamentally the difference between a priori and a posteriori claims of knowledge, with Epicurus largely rejecting the former but endorsing his own philosophical interpretations of the latter.

More in response to Kalosyni's original question, I think Epicurus' view of 'reason' is complicated from our point of view by his eccentric approach to vocabulary as described in the Letter to Herodotus:

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First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words, in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning.

[38] For this purpose it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation, if we are really to have a standard to which to refer a problem of investigation or reflection or a mental inference. And besides we must keep all our investigations in accord with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accord with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen.

And we can see this at work in the distinctly Lucretian phrase vera ratio, true reason or true philosophy.

Epicurus rejected reason as a criterion of epistemology, he rejected dialectic as a method of inquiry, and he was suspicious of the cult of formal logic. But in Lucretian terms, true reason is synonymous with Epicurean philosophy, and for Epicurus the outward expression of this true reason is the practical wisdom of φρόνησις, phronesis. The fruits of phronesis, in turn, are good choices and avoidances. This is fundamentally reason in service of the blessed life of pleasure (which again is to be considered according to his eccentric approach to vocabulary).

So far I've discussed the Epicurean view of reason as it relates to Canonics (where DeWitt says it has been "dethroned") and to Ethics, where it is part of practical philosophy. Reason obviously has a place also in the Physics, but I'll have to return to that later.

In fairness to Cicero, he is writing specifically in the context of courage. Livy's mythical story of the Lacus Curtius in the Roman Forum might shed some light on what he meant by the phrase;

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The most popular story (~362 BCE), and also the one Livy deemed most likely, was a myth glorifying the nation: Rome was endangered when a great chasm opened on the Forum. An oracle directed the people to throw into the chasm “that what constituted the greatest strength of the Roman people,” and doing so would make the Roman nation last forever. After various things had been dropped into the ravine without result, a young horseman named Marcus Curtius (again, of the Curtia gens) saved the city by realizing that it was virtus that the Romans held most dear. In full armour on his horse, he jumped into the chasm whereupon the earth closed over him and Rome was saved.

Admin. Note: This post has been copied from thread Their God is Their Belly.

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"earthly things"

I made a passing reference in episode 284 of the podcast (15:43 mark) to the connection between Cicero and Christianity on this point. Here is the passage from Tusculan Disputations, II, XIII:

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For you must either admit that there is no such thing as virtue, or you must despise every kind of pain. Will you allow of such a virtue as prudence, without which no virtue whatever can even be conceived? What then? will that suffer you to labour and take pains to no purpose? Will temperance permit you to do anything to excess? Will it be possible for justice to be maintained by one who through the force of pain discovers secrets, or betrays his confederates, or deserts many duties of life? Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants, greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly things [rerum humanarum despicientiae]? Can you hear yourself called a great man, when you lie groveling, dejected, and deploring your condition, with a lamentable voice; no one would call you even a man, while in such a condition: you must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain must be put out of the question.

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"earthly things"

I made a passing reference in episode 284 of the podcast (15:43 mark) to the connection between Cicero and Christianity on this point. Here is the passage from Tusculan Disputations, II, XIII:

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For you must either admit that there is no such thing as virtue, or you must despise every kind of pain. Will you allow of such a virtue as prudence, without which no virtue whatever can even be conceived? What then? will that suffer you to labour and take pains to no purpose? Will temperance permit you to do anything to excess? Will it be possible for justice to be maintained by one who through the force of pain discovers secrets, or betrays his confederates, or deserts many duties of life? Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants, greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly things [rerum humanarum despicientiae]? Can you hear yourself called a great man, when you lie groveling, dejected, and deploring your condition, with a lamentable voice; no one would call you even a man, while in such a condition: you must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain must be put out of the question.

I recall we examined this thesis when I was in college, but I haven't got anything insightful to say about it just now. However, this two-part division of culture is interesting to me for another reason, and it is one expressed by Matthew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy, in a section on Hebraism and Hellenism. Here he revisits Tertullian's ancient question: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And I only just now noticed that in doing so he makes an allusion to Lucretius;

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To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything; — "my Saviour banished joy" says George Herbert. When the alma Venus, the life-giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by the Pagan world, could not save her followers from self- dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly: "Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience".

Nietzsche it seems will have resented much of what Arnold panegyrized, but I will have to review The Birth of Tragedy before saying too much about the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

It is an outstanding resource!

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These issues of recognizing more than one level of reality are discussed in similar manner in Sedley's "Epicurus' Refutation of Determinism."

Thank you! I knew you had brought this up before, but I could not recall your source. Here is one relevant passage from Sedley;

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Epicurus' response to this is perhaps the least appreciated aspect of his thought. It was to reject reductionist atomism. Almost uniquely among Greek philosophers he arrived at what is nowadays the unreflective assumption of almost anyone with a smattering of science, that there are truths at the microscopic level of elementary particles, and further very different truths at the phenomenal level; that the former must be capable of explaining the latter; but that neither level of description has a monopoly of truth. (The truth that sugar is sweet is not straightforwardly reducible to the truth that it has such and such a molecular structure, even though the latter truth may be required in order to explain the former). By establishing that cognitive scepticism, the direct outcome of reductionist atomism, is self-refuting and untenable in practice, Epicurus justifies his non-reductionist alternative, according to which sensations are true and there are therefore bona fide truths at the phenomenal level accessible through them.

As part of our ongoing preparation for the podcast's return to Lucretius in late 2025/early 2026, I've been thinking about new ways to explain the core concepts efficiently. This is one recent idea I've been turning over in my head to that end.

Middle World

In a TED Talk delivered in 2005, the evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins explored the ways in which humans understand nature at three different levels; first, at the microscopic level of atoms, and of microorganisms for whom surface tension is a more significant force than gravity. Second, the 'Middle World' that exists for us at the human level; a level in which human sense perception, and the human sense of the passage of time are dominant factors in coloring our impression and understanding of nature. Third, at the grandest scale of galaxies, of fathomless space, and of cosmic timescales.

I think a similar model of the human perception, experience, knowledge, and intimation of nature can be useful in the study of Epicurean physics. In the Epicurean view, this Middle World is defined by the limits of what we can perceive with our senses. When we venture into the lower or higher levels of reality, it becomes apparent that a veil has fallen over our eyes, and that the methods by which we attempt to penetrate that veil must necessarily be limited, too. The procedure is to reason from the known to the unknown, as Lucretius does when he suggests that space is boundless [I, line 968]

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Again if for the moment all existing space be held to be bounded, supposing a man runs forward to its outside borders, and stands on the utmost verge and then throws a winged javelin, do you choose that when hurled with vigorous force it shall advance to the point to which it has been sent and fly to a distance, or do you decide that something can get in its way and stop it? For you must admit and adopt one of the two suppositions; either of which shuts you out from all escape and compels you to grant that the universe stretches without end. For whether there is something to get in its way and prevent its coming whither it was sent and placing itself in the point intended, or whether it is carried forward, in either case it has not started from the end. In this way I will go on and, wherever you have placed the outside borders, I will ask what then becomes of the javelin.

And the same procedure is at work in his investigation of the lower level of reality; for how can we be sure that these infinitesimal seeds of things actually exist? The answer is that while the atom itself is not individually perceptible by our senses, the movements of those atoms leave traces all over our Middle World. Exam the traces, and you will find evidence of the atoms [I, line 311]

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Nay more, as the sun’s year rolls round again and again, the ring on the finger becomes thin beneath by wearing, the fall of dripping water hollows the stone, the bent iron ploughshare secretly grows smaller in the fields, and we see the paved stone streets worn away by the feet of the multitude; again, by the city-gates the brazen statues reveal that their right hands are wearing thin through the touch of those who greet them ever and again as they pass upon their way. All these things then we see grow less, as they are rubbed away: yet what particles leave them at each moment, the envious nature of our sight has shut us out from seeing.

Gradations Within Middle World

If this middle level of reality is bounded by the limits of what

the envious nature of our sight has shut us out from seeing,

it is nevertheless apparent that not everything in Middle World is equally perceptible to us. And while things immediately to hand can be examined closely, thoroughly, and minutely, other things in Middle World are perceptible only at a glance, or at a far remove. Epicurus describes the problem in his Letter to Pythocles;

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Now all goes on without disturbance as far as regards each of those things which may be explained in several ways so as to harmonize with what we perceive, when one admits, as we are bound to do, probable theories about them. But when one accepts one theory and rejects another which harmonizes as well with the phenomenon, it is obvious that he altogether leaves the path of scientific inquiry and has recourse to myth. Now we can obtain indications of what happens above from some of the phenomena on earth: for we can observe how they come to pass, though we cannot observe the phenomena in the sky: for they may be produced in several ways.

Notice the old procedure at work again; even though the phenomena that appear in the sky do exist to our senses, we cannot take them in hand and scrutinize them closely. So we must once again reason from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the unfamiliar. However, Epicurus also adds a second procedure here, which he calls the 'method of manifold causes', and to which he opposes the faulty and unreliable 'method of the single cause'. When we do not know the cause of a given phenomena, like lightning for example, it would be wrong to pretend that we do know it. The method of manifold causes is a tool of Epistemological restraint; we can speculate about one or more possible causes, but we do not assert a thing to be the cause where we do not have knowledge.

In Reality?

Epicurus was not at all the first to notice these varying levels of perception, experience, knowledge, and understanding. But he was innovative in assigning reality as such to all levels. Some of his predecessors and contemporaries rejected sense perception entirely, some complained of the troublesome flux of matter through space and time and thought that such constant change made knowledge impossible, and some held that both time and motion were themselves illusory.

For Socrates, Middle World was a distortion and a lie, and the object of philosophy was to mentally transcend the world of the flickering shadows of the lie and achieve perfect clarity of understanding in the realm of pure being, where only the forms themselves were real and eternal. In a surviving fragment, Democritus seems to have dreamt not of an ascent but of a descent, down to the level of the atoms;

By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; in reality, atoms and void.

Cyril Bailey summarizes the contrasting Epicurean view in his book The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, page 293;

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But this was by no means Epicurus’ view: the compound body to him was not a mere aggregate, but a new entity, an ‘organism’ almost (σύστημα), or, as Lucretius calls it again and again, a concilium. In the organism of the whole the atoms did collectively acquire new properties and characteristics which as detached individuals they could never possess: no number of independent atoms could have colour, but unite them in the new entity of the whole, and it acquired colour. The idea is important and fruitful and we shall meet it again in the Epicurean kinetics and psychology. Moreover this whole is a reality, not a delusion: its reality for sense is as great as the reality of the atoms for thought: it is directly grasped by sense-perception, as the atoms are by ‘mental apprehension’. And this carries with it the reality of its qualities: indeed, it is by the perception of its qualities that a thing’s existence is known. To argue then that no quality which is not possessed by the individual atoms is ‘real’ in the compound, is to misunderstand fundamentally the Epicurean position. There are two worlds, or rather two departments of the same world, the one known by sense, the other by ‘mental apprehension’; both are equally real, and in passing from the one to the other, matter acquires new qualities.