Posts by Joshua

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There remain the epithets "imposter" and "prostitute." For these it is the most plausible explanation that Epicurus discovered his teacher to be living a double life, preaching virtue, as all philosophers did, and at the same time practicing vice. Cicero informs us that most philosophers condoned the practice of homosexuality, and for once he agreed emphatically with Epicurus in condemning it as against Plato. The latter, as is well known, had essayed in his Symposium to sublimate this passion into a passion for knowledge. Epicurus also wrote a Symposium, in which he retorted: "Intercourse never was the cause of any good and it is fortunate if it does no harm." In the case of Nausiphanes there is another item of evidence from the pen of Epicurus: "As for my own opinion, I presume that the high-steppers (Platonists) will think me really a pupil of the 'lung-fish' and that I listened to his lectures in the company of certain lads who were stupid from the night's carousing. For he was both an immoral man and addicted to such practices as made it impossible for him to arrive at wisdom." The practices here referred to have been interpreted as the study of mathematics, but the mention of adolescent lads, of drinking, and of immorality make the true reference unmistakable to any reader conversant with the shadier side of student life among the Greeks.

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I haven't been able to find any concrete source on this. Though there are some suggestions or allusions that perhaps he had some relation in one way or another with Pythocles, whether that's in bad faith or not is hard to say given the nature of Plutarch.

I think DeWitt infers from one of Epicurus' alleged insults against Plato or Aristotle that he was mocking them for pederasty. I'd have to find the citation, which DeWitt (from memory) implies rather than states directly. Presumably the kind of invective that gets thrown at every one at some time or other in antiquity, all though the insult passage in Laertius is confusing because the biographer himself seems to discredit every word of it.

DeWitt occasionally cannot help himself from making bricks by first making clay...

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Dare I say that our philosophy departments need gardens?

One of the many reasons I love Friar Laurence from Romeo and Juliet;

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,

Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,

And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels

From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels.

Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,

The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry,

I must up-fill this osier cage of ours

With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;

What is her burying grave that is her womb,

And from her womb children of divers kind

We sucking on her natural bosom find:

Many for many virtues excellent,

None but for some and yet all different.

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies

In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:

For nought so vile that on the earth doth live

But to the earth some special good doth give,

Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,

Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;

And vice sometimes by action dignified.

Within the infant rind of this weak flower

Poison hath residence and medicine power:

For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;

Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.

Two such opposed kings encamp them still

In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;

And where the worser is predominant,

Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

I highlighted the parallel passages between that monologue and the fifth book of Lucretius in this thread. In a later passage he recommends to Romeo "Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy".

Thank you for advising me on the many dangers of the Ugni fruit! It sounds like you have far exceeded my meager knowledge on plants. And cheers on the myrtle: I've always wanted to grow a myrtle, since learning of the connection.

I think Greenblatt mentions that in The Swerve--as well as Montaigne's personal copy, discovered because of a marginal note, and a manuscript of the whole poem in Machiavelli's hand demonstrated by handwriting analysis.

Friendship has changed, and one of the symptoms of this is that modern readers can't quite come to terms with the language used between male friends in the preceding centuries. People nowadays will infer romance where there (probably) was none--as in the cases of Lincoln and Speed, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Alexander and Hephaestion, and so on.

You'll also enjoy this, from the Jesuit Review: "For us as readers, it helps to remember that friendship is, ultimately, a Christian concept. “A sweet friendship refreshes the soul,” says the Book of Proverbs (27:9)"

The 'true myrtle' or common myrtle, sacred to Aphrodite.

Onions were a staple vegetable, along with chickpeas which are universal around the Mediterranean. Leafy greens, whether cabbage or lettuce.

Wormwood was Lucretius' metaphor for the bitter medicine of philosophy as some see it.

I think the right answer is 'whatever you please'!

The root of one of my favorite words--usufructuary.

Quote from Edward Abbey

Within this vast perimeter, in the middle ground and foreground of the picture, a rather personal demesne, are the 33,000 acres of Arches National Monument of which I am now sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer and custodian.

Turner was a phenomenal painter all around. By another hand I might call that a pastiche of classical harmonies, but his fingerprints are all over the middle and far distance, where light, color and blank space are used to suggest form rather than insist upon it. You're right to cite his Garden as one of the better ones.

One of the books I read while I was surveying was Measuring America by the Scottish historian Andro Linklater. Thomas Jefferson had an image in his mind for what land use would look like if put to the service of maximizing his democratic ideals. As you say--plowed under or built over now.

Yep. Notifications (not push notifications, just the red dot on the top right), unread posts (red dot top left), and heavy use of the "recent" tab. Also, the chat box that pops up from bottom right never fails to drive me to distraction. When I try to make it go away it gets bigger...when I do finally manage to close it I just go the notifications area and click on whatever chat I haven't read, and read it there. There's probably a way to disable that from my settings...

We're two days away from the anniversary of Giordano Bruno's death, so the question is a timely one. He was questioned for 7 years, given many opportunities to recant his positions, and remained defiant until the end--when two nails were driven through his lips in the shape of a cross in order to silence him at last.

On the base of his statue in the Campo de Fiori, a plaque reads that the statue itself is the product of "The century predicted by him". Thereby suggesting that he was willing to die because his mind belonged to a future that did not yet exist. In other cases, people have died willingly because their world was now a thing of the past, such as was the case at the end of the Roman Republic. The later pagan poet Palladus gives voice to that pain around the year 391 A.D.

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Is it not true that we are dead, and living only in appearance,

We Hellenes, fallen on disaster,

Likening life to a dream, since we remain alive while

Our way of life is dead and gone?

Palladas, pagan poet, after the destruction of the Serapeon in Alexandria

A monastery and church were built on its ruins.

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Keep us posted. Can't help seeing that cover and thinking of Prufrock: 'Do I dare to eat a peach?/ I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.'

And something about lobsters, though I can't remember what just now...

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Does the faculty of Anticipations describe nothing more than concept-formation and the application of those concepts to new situations? Or - like i think most of us accept about the operation of pain-pleasure and even the 5 senses, the faculty of anticipations involves some kind of inborn predisposition of principles of operation which exist in us before any exposure to anything that causes the faculty of anticipations to generate any input to our minds.

It occurs to me that one reason for considering the anticipations to be involved in pattern recognition is that it obviates any need for "forms" or "essences". The categorization of oxen as oxen exists not as a separate type in an ideal state of things, but is simply something that forms in our minds.

I don't know that Epicurus would have taken this to Darwinian conclusions, though Lucretius hints at that, but it perfectly represents the folly of idealized unchanging forms. It is possible to prove genetically, for example, that whales (the purple cube) are descended from land dwelling ungulates of which oxen are one current class. The pink shape on the far left might represent a common ancestor of both. How does the Ideal Form of an Ox-like creature turn into the Ideal Form of a Whale-like creature? If the Forms are unchanging, as Plato suggests, then whence cometh the Form of the new-fangled whale?

Now that I think about, I wonder if the Principle Doctrines themselves were the "synoptic" overview of a longer and more detailed text, where he lays out the main points in the introductory material and then explicates each main point in more detail after. The surviving material by itself would make for a very short scroll--although it's possible that was the point.

I suppose the counterargument to that theory would by the Vatican Sayings, culled from many other works, where brevity was the whole point.

Yeah, I think Lucian refers to the Principle Doctrines as "that book".

The problem is that space is absurdly big. The nearest star is around four light-years away. On the fastest craft Earth has ever launched, it would take ~70,000 years to make the journey. It's a scale beyond comprehension. 70,000 years ago nearly all of our human ancestors living at the time were still in East Africa. From Epicurus' birthday to our own time amounts to 3 percent of that "distance".

All that being said, I always thought the retired Vatican Astronomer came off well in Religulous:

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-GAUNT-

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

Teach thy necessity to reason thus:

There is no virtue like necessity.

Think not the King did banish thee,

But thou the King. Woe doth the heavier sit

Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honor,

And not the King exiled thee; or suppose

Devouring pestilence hangs in our air

And thou art flying to a fresher clime.

Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it

To lie that way thou goest, not whence thou com’st.

Suppose the singing birds musicians,

The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence

strewed,

The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more

Than a delightful measure or a dance;

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite

The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

-BOLINGBROKE-

O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?

O no, the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites but lanceth not the sore.

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I was thinking of this exchange in Richard II in relation to 'ataraxia under duress'. John of Gaunt is Bolingbroke's father, and has dutifully argued for his own son's banishment--a service to the king which he comes to bitterly regret. One senses that his advice is as much for himself as for his son. But Bolingbroke is having none of it. "Who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus?"

There are basically two schools of thought, one representing a prescriptive approach to language and embodied by the Académie Française, and the other, a descriptive approach to language typified by the Oxford English Dictionary.

I prefer the OED approach myself, which is much more in accord with the Lucretian view of language--a view that sees it as naturally and gradually developing and changing over time. In this view there is no authority. The Oxford English Dictionary is unusually thorough, running to twenty volumes in print, but its purpose is to record and document words rather than to narrowly define them. When a new word comes into common usage and has staying power, the OED will generally record it. The Académie Française will often reject them, and propose a different usage that is more properly French.

Asking whether words have meaning is to me rather like asking if a thing has value. The value of something is settled by what someone will trade for it. The meaning of words is settled by what people will commonly understand by them.

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Now I am unfortunately inserting something random but I will be short: Here I feel in sympathy with Cicero. English, like Latin, is a rich language. There is something fundamentally wrong going on when we have a supposedly critical concept for which people insist on using an untranslated foreign word, as if English were insufficient to explain the concept. Like Lucretius, we should use our own language to explain what we mean by "katastematic pleasure," and if we can't or don't then that in itself indicates a major issue. And that's exactly what the great majority of commentators are doing in perpetuating the kinetic / katastematic discussion rather than engaging with people who come to Epicurean Philosophy for real answers.

A quote from William Harris on the subject:

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Latin has a relatively small vocabulary, with less that four thousand words in general, current use. Greek has three times that number, modern English prescribes 10,000 for a college student, 50,000 for a teacher, and there are half a million words available one way or another.

I'm not really prepared to unpack all that, but I thought it was worth mentioning. There are several cases in which foreign loan words seem more appropriate than any English equivalent would be, as in the cases of schadenfreude, déjà vu, or a cappella. I'm not sure katastematic is on that level though!

Joshua started a new event:

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Anniversary of the Execution of Giordano Bruno in the Campo de Fiori in Rome

Fri, Feb 17th 2023, 8:00 am – 8:00 pm

Joshua

February 6, 2023 at 12:58 PM

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