Posts by Joshua

We are now requiring that new registrants confirm their request for an account by email.  Once you complete the "Sign Up" process to set up your user name and password, please send an email to the New Accounts Administator to obtain new account approval.

Regularly Checking In On A Small Screen Device? Bookmark THIS page!

  • Episode 277 - TD07 - Platonism Says This World Is Darkness But The Next World Is Light - Epicurus Disagrees!

    Here are the lines from Julius Caesar that I paraphrased. It seems probable that Shakespeare was alluding to Tusculan Disputations in this dialogue.

    Is Cassius Longinus exploiting his knowledge of Platonism to persuade Brutus to rise against Caesar?

    Quote

    The soul has not sufficient capacity to comprehend itself; yet, the soul, like the eye, though it has no distinct view of itself, sees other things: it does not see (which is of least consequence) its own shape; perhaps not, though it possibly may; but we will pass that by: but it certainly sees that it has vigour, sagacity, memory, motion, and velocity; these are all great, divine, eternal properties. What its appearance is, or where it dwells, it is not necessary even to inquire.

  • New Article in 'Nature' - April 23rd, 2025

    The text of dozens of burnt Herculaneum scrolls could soon be revealed
    Scans of 18 ancient papyri that were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius look ‘very promising’, and there are plans to digitally unroll many more.
    www.nature.com

    "Scans of 18 ancient papyri that were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius look ‘very promising’, and there are plans to digitally unroll many more."

    Quote

    Until now, only five of the scrolls had been imaged at high resolution, so an important first step was to gather more scans. Nicolardi selected the 18 papyri for this phase, prioritizing intact scrolls that might contain complete texts, as well as scrolls with a range of shapes — some are flattened, others compressed along their length like a spring — to test how the machine-learning algorithms cope with different patterns of distortion.

  • Image Sharing Alternatives

    Re: Imgur

    "On April 19, 2023, Imgur changed their terms of service and announced that they would delete inactive content that was not tied to an account.

    ...

    The new terms went into effect on May 15, 2023.[10] The move drew significant criticism, as removing archived images would compound the challenge of link rot that other photo services have also faced. The move also followed a similar move by Tumblr in late 2018.[11]"


    I only vaguely remember this controversy.

  • Episode 277 - TD07 - Platonism Says This World Is Darkness But The Next World Is Light - Epicurus Disagrees!

    I think these are the passages I quoted from Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great;

    Quote

    There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it “looks forward” in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment. This has been a constant trope, ever since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half-baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant.

    ***

    One of the very many connections between religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught. This tantrum-need is coupled with two other sorts of “guilty joy,” or, as the Germans say, schadenfreude. First, one’s own death is canceled—or perhaps repaid or compensated—by the obliteration of all others. Second, it can always be egotistically hoped that one will be personally spared, gathered contentedly to the bosom of the mass exterminator, and from a safe place observe the sufferings of those less fortunate. Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned. He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the man-made character of faith.

    And here is Tertullian being being predictably revolting. Note the glancing reference to Epicureanism;

    Every aspect of Greek and Roman culture is brought before his creepy, leering and 'insatiable gaze', every expression of it is condemned to everlasting torment, and the witness of that torment is one of the keenest pleasures of paradise.

  • Must an Epicurean believe in gods?

    For the six years I've been active here, I've always tried to hold myself to the following two precepts:

    • For as long as I stand under Epicurus' banner, I will make a good-faith attempt (given the surviving material) to understand his philosophy as it was understood by his successors.
    • When I present his philosophy, I will make a good-faith effort to present it as best as I can understand it. When I am offering my own opinion, I will try to make it clear that that is what I am doing.

    I am confident that Epicurus really did accept the existence of 'natural gods', and that he rejected the claim that there were gods (or anything else, for that matter) outside of nature. My understanding is that he believed that gods existed in nature, and as physical beings made of matter. This is what we call the "realist view" of the gods. There is a competing theory, the "idealist view", which holds (again, to my understanding) that Epicurus spoke of the gods as useful thought constructs; images of the good life that we can call to mind, in the same way that we can call the image of Epicurus himself to mind as a goal to strive for.

    The idealist view is probably a minority interpretation, but it has distinguished defenders. I believe David Sedley is the chief living proponent of this view. I might be mistaken! Don might have more to say about this.

    We do have a fragment (collected by Usener in his Epicurea) in which Epicurus is said to have rejected Atheism;

    Quote

    [ U152 ] (link to the Attalus site)

    Philodemus, On Frank Criticism, Vol. Herc. 1, V.2, fragment VI: he will be frank with the one who has erred and even with him who responds with bitterness. Therefore, Epicurus too, when Leonteus, because of Pythocles, did not admit belief in gods, reproached Pythocles in moderation, and wrote to him {i.e., Leonteus, though Usener renders "Mys"} the so-called "famous letter," taking his point of departure from Pythocles...

    With all of that said, my own view is that a good-faith effort to a.) understand the information, and b.) present the information accurately, does not amount to a requirement to accept everything in it. I do not think the gods exist. It pleases me to think of the Earth itself as a second mother (alma mater, "nurturing mother", a phrase first appearing in Lucretius), and the idealist view of the gods likewise appeals to me. But that's as far as I can get.

    Quote from Rolf

    Do we disregard this as a mere product of its time or does it play some vital role within epicurean philosophy?

    The major problem with casting the gods aside is that doing so challenges Epicurus' view of the anticipations (prolepsis) as a canonic or epistemological faculty parallel to the senses (aisthesis) and feelings (pathe). These three are (for Epicurus) how we acquire knowledge about nature, including human nature, with confidence.

    The gods also play a role in our understanding of isonomia, the equitable distribution of things in nature. The fact that the atoms can come together to bring this world into existence means that there is no bar to them bringing other worlds into existence, and the fact that there living beings on this world means we should expect to find them elsewhere as well. I'll let Norman Dewitt take it from here so that I don't misstate the case;

    Quote

    It was from this principle [i.e. of the infinity of the universe in matter and space] that Epicurus deduced his chief theoretical confirmation of belief in the existence of gods. It was from this that he arrived at knowledge of their number and by secondary deduction at knowledge of their abode. He so interpreted the significance of infinity as to extend it from matter and space to the sphere of values, that is, to perfection and imperfection. In brief, if the universe were thought to be imperfect throughout its infinite extent, it could no longer be called infinite. This necessity of thought impelled him to promulgate a subsidiary principle, which he called isonomia, a sort of cosmic justice, according to which the imperfection in particular parts of the universe is offset by the perfection of the whole. Cicero rendered it aequabilis tributio, "equitable apportionment." The mistake of rendering it as "equilibrium" must be avoided.

    Epicurus and His Philosophy, page 271

    Edit; it seems I cross-posted with Godfrey, I agree with what he said!

  • Episode 276 - TD06 - Is Memory Evidence For The Divinity Of The Soul?

    While recording this episode we discussed Plato's view on learning and recollection, as described by Cicero here in section XXIV;

    Quote

    Besides, if desires and aversions were all that belonged to the soul, it would have them only in common with the beasts; but it has, in the first place, memory, and that, too, so infinite, as to recollect an absolute countless number of circumstances, which Plato will have to be a recollection of a former life; for in that book which is inscribed Menon, Socrates asks a child some questions in geometry, with reference to measuring a square; his answers are such as a child would make, and yet the questions are so easy, that while answering them, one by one, he comes to the same point as if he had learned geometry.

    I made a connection between this passage and books about "Near-death experiences" - books like Heaven is for Real, which tells the story of a young boy's appendectomy and his alleged experience of journeying to heaven after losing consciousness.

    In the book, the father (Todd) of the boy (Colton) claims to be 'initially skeptical' about the experience, and he questions his son on what he saw. He claims that he refrained from asking leading questions.

    Now, while kids are not omniscient, they are smarter than we give them credit for. In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a horse in Germany named Clever Hans, and during public demonstrations this horse would give the appearance of performing arithmetic - literally counting with a hoofbeat. Wikipedia gives this summary;

    Quote

    Hans was a horse owned by Wilhelm von Osten, who was a gymnasium mathematics teacher, an amateur horse trainer and phrenologist and was considered to be a mystic.[1] Hans was said to have been taught to add, subtract, multiply, divide, work with fractions, tell the time, keep track of the calendar, differentiate between musical tones, and read, spell, and understand German. Von Osten would ask Hans, "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?" Hans would answer by tapping his hoof eleven times. Questions could be asked both orally and in written form. Von Osten exhibited Hans throughout Germany and never charged admission. Hans' abilities were reported in The New York Times in 1904.

    The problem of how this horse could give the appearance of doing these things was answered in 1907, when

    Quote

    psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer. The horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.

    On the one hand, we are asked to believe uncritically that a horse can understand fractions, and that a little boy went to heaven and came back, and that a child can explain geometry without having learned it - and from all this we should infer, for example, the eternality of the soul, the reality of Paradise after death, and the innate knowledge of everything at birth.

    On the other hand, we can choose to approach these claims critically. Perhaps Todd Burpo, a Christian pastor himself, had filled his son's head with claims about heaven, and then heard those claims restated under questioning. Perhaps horses as well as humans are shrewd observers, and derived information from these observations that other baffled humans did not even know that they were themselves providing.

    Perhaps the mind is a better and more sagacious judge when calm and sober, and that when undergoing traumatic experiences the mind is less reliable and not more so.

    And perhaps that is why Lucian of Samosata in his Alexander the Oracle-Monger suggests that these apparent prodigies provide

    Quote

    an occasion for a Democritus, nay, for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus, perhaps, a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by scepticism and insight, one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that, though this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.

  • References on Motion in Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius

    Quote

    Given that there is never in any of these statements that there is "something else" pulling the atoms "down," I presume a good case can be made that regardless of the terminology, Epicurus was clear that this force of "weight" was something within the atoms themselves, not a force that is separate and apart from the atoms themselves.

    Exactly, and to put it in Aristotelian terms the atoms are 'originitive of motion'.

    The word Lucretius uses in that passage is ponderibus[que]. Ponderibus is the dative and ablatative plural of pondus.

  • Why Everything Turns More Complex

    That is a very interesting article, Martin, thank you!


    Quote

    Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged — this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations.

  • Anniversary of the Founding of Alexandria in 331 BC (Mon, Apr 7th 2025)

    Joshua created a new event:

    Event

    Anniversary of the Founding of Alexandria in 331 BC

    Following the work of the French Egyptologist Pierre Jouguet on the so-called pseudo-Callisthenes in 1940, April 7th 331 BC is the traditional date for the founding of the ancient city of Alexandria. Here is an account of that founding, from The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid (a book which I have listened to repeatedly, and always with pleasure):

    […]

    Mon, Apr 7th 2025
    Joshua
    April 3, 2025 at 10:16 PM

  • Epicurus and His Influence on History, Ben Gazur,

    Quote from Cleveland Okie

    One of the chapters of the book is about Titus Pomponius, “called Atticus for his love of all things Athenian.”Gazur says it is not certain that Atticus was an Epicurean, but at the very least it appears he was interested in Epicureanism and influenced by it. (I noticed there was a thread about him on this forum, and I will look at it after I post this).

    The book says that when Julius Caesar came to Athens, he stayed at Atticus’ home. It says Atticus did not take sides in various civil wars and conflicts. It also says, “His refusal to join a band of rich men in raising funds for Caesar’s assassins led to the collapse of the attempt. But when Brutus, who was a close friend, had to flee to exile he sent him money. He would not support a friend for political reasons, but never ignored a friend in need. When Brutus himself had fallen, Atticus extended friendship to the dead man’s mother, despite the risks.”

    Today (March 31st) happens to be the anniversary of the death of Atticus:

    Quote

    [21] # After [Atticus] had completed, in such a course of life, seventy-seven years, and had advanced, not less in dignity, than in favour and fortune (for he obtained many legacies on no other account than his goodness of disposition), and had also been in the enjoyment of so happy a state of health, that he had wanted no medicine for thirty years, he contracted a disorder of which at first both himself and the physicians thought lightly, for they supposed it to be a dysentery, and speedy and easy remedies were proposed for it; but after he had passed three months under it without any pain, except what he suffered from the means adopted for his cure, such force of the disease fell into the one intestine, that at last a putrid ulcer broke out through his loins. Before this took place, and when he found that the pain was daily increasing, and that fever was superadded, he caused his son-in-law Agrippa to be called to him, and with him Lucius Cornelius Balbus and Sextus Peducaeus. When he saw that they were come, he said, as he supported himself on his elbow, "How much care and diligence I have employed to restore my health on this occasion, there is no necessity for me to state at large, since I have yourselves as witnesses; and since I have, as I hope, satisfied you, that I have left nothing undone that seemed likely to cure me, it remains that I consult for myself. Of this feeling on my part I had no wish that you should be ignorant; for I have determined on ceasing to feed the disease; as, by the food and drink that I have taken during the last few days, I have prolonged life only so as to increase my pains without hope of recovery. I therefore entreat you, in the first place, to give your approbation to my resolution, and in the next, not to labour in vain by endeavouring to dissuade me from executing it."

    [22] Having delivered this address with so much steadiness of voice and countenance, that he seemed to be removing, not out of life, but out of one house into another, - when Agrippa, weeping over him and kissing him, entreated and conjured him "not to accelerate that which nature herself would bring, and, since he might live some time longer, to preserve his life for himself and his friends,"- he put a stop to his prayers, by an obstinate silence. After he had accordingly abstained from food for two days, the fever suddenly left him, and the disease began to be less oppressive. He persisted, nevertheless, in executing his purpose; and in consequence, on the fifth day after he had fixed his resolution, and on the last day of March, in the consulship of Cnaeus Domitius and Caius Sosius [ 32 B.C. ], he died. His body was carried out of his house on a small couch, as he himself had directed, without any funereal pomp, all the respectable portion of the people attending, and a vast crowd of the populace. He was buried close by the Appian Way, at the fifth milestone from the city, in the sepulchre of his uncle Quintus Caecilius.

    -Cornelius Nepos, The Life of Atticus

    edit; there is a mention of Lucretius in the same source that I was unaware of;

    Quote

    He also brought off Lucius Julius Calidus, whom I think I may truly assert to have been the most elegant poet that our age has produced since the death of Lucretius and Catullus, as well as a man of high character, and distinguished by the best intellectual accomplishments, who, in his absence, after the proscription of the knights, had been enrolled in the number of the proscribed by Publius Volumnius, the captain of Antonius's engineers, on account of his great possessions in Africa; 5 an act on the part of Atticus, of which it was hard to judge at the time, whether it were more onerous or honourable. But it was well known that the friends of Atticus, in times of danger, were not less his care in their absence than when they were present.

  • Episode 272 - TD02 - Is Death An Evil?

    Quote from Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 24

    I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me! “I shall die,” you say; you mean to say “I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death.” 18. I am not so foolish as to go through at this juncture the arguments which Epicurus harps upon, and say that the terrors of the world below are idle,—that Ixion does not whirl round on his wheel, that Sisyphus does not shoulder his stone uphill, that a man’s entrails cannot be restored and devoured every day;[8] no one is so childish as to fear Cerberus, or the shadows, or the spectral garb of those who are held together by naught but their unfleshed bones. Death either annihilates us or strips us bare. If we are then released, there remains the better part, after the burden has been withdrawn; if we are annihilated, nothing remains; good and bad are alike removed.

  • Did the Ancient Epicureans Travel in Pairs?

    This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I am noticing that there are a number of named pairs in the surviving fragments of Epicureans journeying to (and getting kicked out of) the ancient cities of the Mediterranean.

    Cicero in his Academic Questions addresses the style of Amafinius and Rabirius, and elsewhere says that Amafinius was the first to write philosophical texts in Latin.

    Quote

    And, therefore, I did not choose to write treatises which unlearned men could not understand, and learned men would not be at the trouble of reading. And you yourself are aware of this. For you have learnt that we cannot resemble Amafanius[3] or Rabirius,[4] who without any art discuss matters which come before the eyes of every one in plain ordinary language, giving no accurate definitions, making no divisions, drawing no inferences by well-directed questions, and who appear to think that there is no such thing as any art of speaking or disputing.

    Aelian, found here and elsewhere venting his spleen in the general direction of the Ceramicus, is quoted in the Suda in a passage relating to the Epicureans Alcaeus and Philiscus:

    Quote

    They banished the Epicureans from Rome by a public senatorial decree.[8] And also the Messenians, the ones who live in Arcadia, expelled those reputed to be members of this, let us say, "manger", saying that they were corrupters of the youth and attaching to their doctrine the stain of infamy because of their effeminacy and impiety; and they gave orders that, before sunset, the Epicureans be out of the borders of Messenia and that after they had left, the priests purify the temples and the timouchoi (this is the name Messenians give to their magistrates) purify the whole city, as delivered from some filthy contaminations and offscourings. [Note] that in Crete the citizens of Lyktos[9] chased away some Epicureans who had come there. And a law was written in the local language, stating that whoever thought of adhering to this effeminate and ignominious and hideous doctrine were enemies of the gods and should be banished from Lyktos; but if anybody dared to come and neglect the orders of the law, he should be bound in a pillory near the office of the magistrates for twenty days, naked and with his body spread with honey and milk, so that he would be a meal for bees and flies and the insects would in the stated time kill them. After this time, if he were still alive, he should be thrown from a cliff, dressed in women's clothes.

    Footnote: "[8] The reference is to the expulsion of the Epicureans Alcaeus and Philiscus in 154 BCE as a result of their ethical teaching."

    Diogenes Laertius in his tenth book of Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers gives the names of two others:

    Quote

    And there were the two Ptolemaei of Alexandria, Ptolemaeus the Black, and Ptolemaeus the Fair.

    Strabo in his Geography lends interesting insight into these practices:

    Quote

    Among the other philosophers, “‘Those whom I know, and could in order name,” were Plutiades and Diogenes, who went about from city to city, instituting schools of philosophy as the opportunity occurred. Diogenes, as if inspired by Apollo, composed and rehearsed poems, chiefly of the tragic kind, upon any subject that was proposed.

    Wikipedia suggests that this passage from Diogenes Laertius refers to the same Diogenes:

    Quote

    That even if the wise man were to be put to the torture, he would still be happy. That the wise man will only feel gratitude to his friends, but to them equally whether they are present or absent. Nor will he groan and howl when he is put to the torture. Nor will he marry a wife whom the laws forbid, as Diogenes says, in his epitome of the Ethical Maxims of Epicurus.

    And I am grateful as always for the work of our friend Eikadistes for compiling this list; perhaps some of the other names listed there will shed light upon the question.

  • Epicureanism as the spiritual essence or 'religion' of an entire community

    Quote from DaveT

    He taught that there is no un-caused cause; there is nothing that comes from nothing.

    This is getting into semantics, but one could perhaps say that the atoms themselves are the uncaused causes.

    Cicero In his De Finibus says this;

    Quote

    "The swerving [of the atoms] is itself an arbitrary fiction; for Epicurus says the atoms swerve without a cause, — yet this is the capital offence in a natural philosopher, to speak of something taking place uncaused."

    However, the atoms are uncaused if we are speaking in terms only of their existence. The particular motion of the atoms is partially caused by an infinite regress of other causes (an endless chain of billiard balls bouncing, hooking, clinging, separating, and hurling apart through the void inertially), and partially, as in the swerve, their motion is caused by their own nature.

  • Epicureanism as the spiritual essence or 'religion' of an entire community

    This is probably of some interest here as well;

    Quote

    U152

    Philodemus, On Frank Criticism, Vol. Herc. 1, V.2, fragment VI:

    "he will be frank with the one who has erred and even with him who responds with bitterness. Therefore, Epicurus too, when Leonteus, because of Pythocles, did not admit belief in gods, reproached Pythocles in moderation, and wrote to him {i.e., Leonteus, though Usener renders “Mys”} the so-called “famous letter,” taking his point of departure from Pythocles..."

Finding Things At EpicureanFriends.com

What's the best strategy for finding things on EpicureanFriends.com? Here's a suggested search strategy:

  • First, familiarize yourself with the list of forums. The best way to find threads related to a particular topic is to look in the relevant forum. Over the years most people have tried to start threads according to forum topic, and we regularly move threads from our "general discussion" area over to forums with more descriptive titles.
  • Use the "Search" facility at 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." Also check the "Search Assistance" page.
  • Use the "Tag" facility, starting with the "Key Tags By Topic" in the right hand navigation pane, or using the "Search By Tag" page, or the "Tag Overview" page which contains a list of all tags alphabetically. We curate the available tags to keep them to a manageable number that is descriptive of frequently-searched topics.