Posts by Joshua

ALL CURRENT AND PROSPECTIVE PARTICIPANTS SHOULD READ THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT OF FORUM EDITORIAL POLICY:  "Against Katastematic Supremacy - Pleasure Is A Unified Good, Not A House Divided Against Itself."

New Graphics: Are You On Team Epicurus? | Comparison Chart: Epicurus vs. Other Philosophies | Chart Of Key Epicurean Quotations | Accelerating Study Of Canonics Through Philodemus' "On Methods Of Inference" | Note to all users: If you have a problem posting in any forum, please message Cassius  

  • Free And Open Source Software (Use Computer Technology For Happier Living)

    It's been cool to see how far open source software has come since I started using PCs. I used OpenOffice (now defunct) in college and the downgrade from Microsoft Office was pretty undeniable. I use LibreOffice now, a successor to OpenOffice, and I can't even imagine wanting to pay for a software license in that area.

    I have also used (or attempted to use):

    • Linux Mint and Ubuntu (though I'm currently on Windows)
    • TeX family typesetting markup languages (primarily LaTeX)
    • Audacity audio editing
    • OpenShot video editing
    • Blender for animation and 3D modeling

    But probably the area in which open source software most clearly impacts my life is in the modding communities of the Steam games I play.

  • Lucretius Book Study Group (SASA)

    When I search for "text-in-translation" I am finding a few common points across the sources:

    • A translated text is a hybrid text, and is as much the product of the life-world of the translator as it is of the original writer.
    • A text-in-translation analysis will examine the choices made by the translator, and how those choices affect the appreciation of the source text an of the hybrid text.
    • There are three text types:
      • Informative – 'plain' style, topic foregrounded.
      • Expressive – elaborate style, sender foregrounded.
      • Vocative – to induce a receiver's behaviour.
    • Possibly some level of comparing translations.

    While this is the kind of thing we do around here all the time, I have never heard it labeled as a particular discipline or approach to reading translations. I could also be wrong about all of that.

  • 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

Finding Things At EpicureanFriends.com

Here is a list of suggested search strategies:

  • Website Overview page - clickable links arrranged by cards.
  • Forum Main Page - list of forums and subforums arranged by topic. Threads are posted according to relevant topics. The "Uncategorized subforum" contains threads which do not fall into any existing topic (also contains older "unfiled" threads which will soon be moved).
  • Search Tool - icon is located on the top right of every page. Note that the search box asks you what section of the forum you'd like to search. If you don't know, select "Everywhere."
  • Search By Key Tags - curated to show frequently-searched topics.
  • Full Tag List - an alphabetical list of all tags.