Posts by Joshua

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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I suppose we can use pleasure as a word that refers to a group of positive sensations the same way we use dog to talk about a particular kind of animal that is a member of a group of domesticated canines... without going down the Pleasure and Dog ideal form route. We just have to remember we're talking language and not philosophy (although, yeah, the line is fuzzy).

What DeWitt is saying is that pleasure ≠ sensation; that no pleasure is a sensation because pleasure presumes judgment ("I like this") and sensation is irrational and incapable of judgment. I realize that after a certain point this all begins to get a little nit-picky.

To clarify, my "yes!" Was in response to Don's post and not Cassius' question (in which we cross posted).

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Is not the awareness of consciousness itself - of being alive - a "sensation" of some kind? And would that not factor in to the apparent view that so long as pain is not present what is being felt is pleasure, even if it is just awareness of being alive?

My (again, tentative) reaction to this would be no. When DeWitt says that Epicurus was not an Empiricist he was pushing back against the tendency to merge all faculties into one and call it sensation. DeWitt regards sensation as being incapable of judgment, memory, etc.

When Epicurus talks about 'pleasant expectations for the future', or 'the memory of past pleasures' he's describing mental faculties apart from sensation. DeWitt uses the example of the man unjustly convicted in court. He experiences a feeling of pain at hearing the judgment quite apart from the aural sensation itself. It would of course be impossible for the man to know of his unjust conviction without sensation, but after he knows of it he stops requiring sensation to feel pleasure or pain about it.

Yes!

I pointed to four situations that suggest an innate faculty for fairness by four different lines of evidence.

1. Among very small children, if you break a cookie in two unequal halves they'll each be happy to get a part of the cookie even if they don't get equal shares. When they're very young they'll notice that they both got "cookie", but they won't notice differences in quantity.

2. Among somewhat older children, two unequal shares won't cut it anymore. They each want a perfect half, or each individual wants the larger half for themselves.

3. Among chimpanzees, if two are given celery they'll both be happy. If one is given celery and one is given grapes, the one given celery will be visibly upset--grapes are better than celery.

4. Among chimpanzees, if you give food to chimpanzees that are not in a cage they will sometimes share their food with another chimpanzee in the cage who didn't get food.

Yes, that's basically the discussion we were having this morning. I had tentatively suggested that it would be possible to experience pleasure not caused by sensation. For example, if one is plagued with anxiety about the fear of death, then the removal of that fear (which is not a sensation) produces a pleasurable feeling of relief. I then clarified that it might be possible to experience pleasure or pain uncaused by sensation, but requiring nevertheless some kind of change in stimulus. In the case I mentioned above, the change in stimulus would be changing one's mind.

I'm ashamed to say I still haven't read his book, so there will be no help forthcoming from me in the near future.

And then there are the obvious problems with languages:

I'm trying to get my bearings, but a bear bearing down on me is more than I can bear. Does that have any bearing on our conversation?

Here's something strange--possibly meaningless, or maybe not.

When θεωρίαις passed into Latin as theōria, it was reduced to a single definition: contemplation/speculation. Festivals was lost.

When I looked at the bibliographies of Hicks, Yonge, and Mensch, I noticed this; Yonge spent most of his translating time working on Latin texts, and he uses the word θεωρίαις in the Latin sense of contemplation. Hicks and Mensch, on the other hand, spent most of their time working on Greek texts, and they use festivals.

Do three trees make a row in this case, or am I just out of my depth per usual?