Posts by Joshua

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And Sedley observes that in both lines of argument, Epicurus follows up this "either/or" starting point by arguing that other philosophers are wrong in asserting the existence of anything of any nature that falls outside that "either one or the other" structure.

Not only do I reject the Ethical side of this argument except insofar as it is restricted exclusively to pathos, I also notice that this is exactly the kind of absolutism that Cicero employs himself:

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There is indeed a law, right reason, which is in accordance with nature; existing in all, unchangeable, eternal. Commanding us to do what is right, forbidding us to do what is wrong. It has dominion over good men, but possesses no influence over bad ones. No other law can be substituted for it, no part of it can be taken away, nor can it be abrogated altogether. Neither the people or the senate can absolve from it. It is not one thing at Rome, and another thing at Athens: one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow; but it is eternal and immutable for all nations and for all time.

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For Justice is one; it binds all human society, and is based on one Law, which is right reason applied to command and prohibition. Whoever knows not this Law, whether it has been recorded in writing anywhere or not, is without Justice.

So I say again, it is no good blaming Cicero for this!

As I mentioned in the other thread, Lucretius himself uses Summum Bonum. It's no good blaming Cicero before one addresses this!

How does he respond to Lucretius' use of Summum Bonum in the early lines of Book 6?

Greenblatt was also invited to deliver a lecture connected with his book at the Getty Villa, which I also recommend watching!

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„The Swerve“ I haven‘t read yet. It is a little bit older or ? Is its content still intetresting and has valid ideas/ views about Epicurean Philosophy ? Would you recommend it ? Maybe I would read it next.

I'm not very good about keeping up with the secondary literature, but The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt was my main introduction to Epicureanism and I am always happy to write in his defense.

I first encountered Greenblatt's work as an under-graduate English/History major. He was (is?) the editor of the magisterial Norton Anthology of English Literature in many volumes, and this venerable anthology formed the backbone of the English Literature curriculum. This was a rather impersonal introduction, but we also read his biography of William Shakespeare (Will in the World), which a friend of mine thought was one of the better supplementary texts we studied that semester. So I graduated with at least a sense of Greenblatt's work, and recognized the name a few years later on the front of a paperback while I was looking for something new to read on my upcoming travels.

I have since listened many times to the audiobook narrated by Edoardo Ballerini (a great help with the pronunciation of the Italian names), and always with pleasure.

The Swerve does contain a chapter dedicated to an outline of Epicurean philosophy, which, though I might quibble here and there, I don't find at all objectionable. But that's not really what this book is about. It is a study of the loss, submergence, survival, and rediscovery of the literature, language, and culture of classical antiquity, as seen through the eyes of a group of Italian Humanists of the Quattrocento who were trying to save what was left of the ancient past.

It tells of the lives, livelihoods, rivalries, vanities, and ambitions of men like Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Coluccio Salutati, Niccolò de' Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and many others.

Since several of these figures were prominent and learned scribes of the Papal Curia at the Vatican, the book also dwells on the faith and politics of the 15th century, the executions of Giordano Bruno, Jerome of Prague, and Jan Hus; and the trial of Antipope John XXIII, the schism of the church, as well as the Council of Constance that brought many of these matters to a head.

Since the common thread that runs through all of this is the rediscovery and recirculation of Lucretius' grand Epicurean poem, I certainly think Greenblatt's book is worth reading!

And to be fair, the failure rate for sea journeys in ancient Greece was also abysmal. Protagoras, Zeno of Citium, and Aristippus were all shipwrecked, and a young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates. I'm sure there are many more such stories!

These are very useful! It did occur to me just now, though, that part is generally a higher order of classification than section--book -> part -> chapter -> section -> subsection--but I don't know if it's really worth fixing. As always Cassius thank you for the work you put into this stuff!

Welcome! Love the username, by the way!

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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.

handbook.epicureanfriends.com

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.

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.