Posts by Joshua

The Frontispiece is from an early portrait of Henry David Thoreau which, as you suggest, Cassius, I would know anywhere! The book itself, and its author, are totally unknown to me.

Point #2 says Plato twice instead of Epicurus, but otherwise good points!

I mentioned that atomism was thought to be one factor in the condemnation of Bruno and other 'heretics' (like Galileo) by the Catholic Church, and that the whole issue turned on the point of the Transubstantiation of the Eucharist from bread and wine into Body and Blood. The historical evidence surrounding Bruno's death is fragmentary, complicated, and highly controversial even today. It's true that one of the witnesses who denounced him to the inquisition did so because of his 'denial of the Eucharist': this was by no means the only charge, and not the most important one either. Anyway, here is the Canon of the Catholic Church as promulgated at the Council of Trent, followed by a little bit of Aristotle, and finally Democritus where it all started.

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From the 13th session of the Council of Trent:

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it is indeed a crime the most unworthy that they should be wrested, by certain contentions and wicked men, to fictitious and imaginary tropes, whereby the verity of the flesh and blood of Christ is denied, contrary to the universal sense of the Church, which, as the pillar and ground of truth, has detested, as satanical, these inventions devised by impious men; she recognising, with a mind ever grateful and unforgetting, this most excellent benefit of Christ.

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And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which He offered under the species of bread to be truly His own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that, by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called Transubstantiation.

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CANON I.-If any one denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema.

CANON lI.-If any one saith, that, in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist, the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denieth that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood-the species Only of the bread and wine remaining-which conversion indeed the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation; let him be anathema.

CANON III.-If any one denieth, that, in the venerable sacrament of the Eucharist, the whole Christ is contained under each [Page 83] species, and under every part of each species, when separated; let him be anathema.

CANON IV.-If any one saith, that, after the consecration is completed, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are not in the admirable sacrament of the Eucharist, but (are there) only during the use, whilst it is being taken, and not either before or after; and that, in the hosts, or consecrated particles, which are reserved or which remain after communion, the true Body of the Lord remaineth not; let him be anathema.

Aristotle, on Substance and Species

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A substance—that which is called a substance most strictly, primarily, and most of all—is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g. the individual man or the individual horse. The species in which the things primarily called substances are, are called secondary substances, as also are the genera of these species. For example, the individual man belongs in a species, man, and animal is a genus of the species; so these—both man and animal—are called secondary substances.

Democritus

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By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

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Principal Doctrine 22. We must take into account as the end all that really exists and all clear evidence of sense to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

No kidding!

There is a passage in the Latin text of Lucretius that alludes to the Parentalia and Feralia, which I'll need to find. These are consecutive feasts for dead ancestors and baleful spirits, as the names imply. Most English translations that I've seen do not capture the allusion, but it's there in the Latin.

Also, lactose and galaxy!

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the "universe" of everything as a while

A good long while! 😄

We talked about that as well, ironically; in the Epicurean universe, things tend to endure. This allows us the reasonable expectation that change comes slowly, which is important for two reasons: it means (contra Heraclitus) that the pace of change is slow enough for things to remain explicable or understandable, thus evading a back-door into skepticism; and it means that you won't find Epicureans, like Millerite Christians, crowded onto mountaintops to get closer to heaven and the rapture.

Show Notes:

On "Primitive Tribes" and Observational Skills

Daniel Everett and the Piraha people:

On cave paintings and Renaissance art:

Cavemen Were Much Better At Illustrating Animals Than Artists Today

A new study finds that prehistoric humans correctly depicted the gait of four-legged animals much more frequently than modern artists

www.smithsonianmag.com

Acute observation necessary for survival:

https://www.survivalinternational.org/galleries/ingenious

Empiricism Vs. Poetry

John Keat's, Lamia:

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[...] Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

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Edgar Allan Poe, Sonnet--To Science

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Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

[...]

Walt Whitman

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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The Second Law of Motion

Newton's Three Laws of Motion

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This is the most powerful of Newton's three Laws, because it allows quantitative calculations of dynamics: how do velocities change when forces are applied. Notice the fundamental difference between Newton's 2nd Law and the dynamics of Aristotle: according to Newton, a force causes only a change in velocity (an acceleration); it does not maintain the velocity as Aristotle held.

This is sometimes summarized by saying that under Newton, F = ma, but under Aristotle F = mv, where v is the velocity. Thus, according to Aristotle there is only a velocity if there is a force, but according to Newton an object with a certain velocity maintains that velocity unless a force acts on it to cause an acceleration (that is, a change in the velocity). As we have noted earlier in conjunction with the discussion of Galileo, Aristotle's view seems to be more in accord with common sense, but that is because of a failure to appreciate the role played by frictional forces. Once account is taken of all forces acting in a given situation it is the dynamics of Galileo and Newton, not of Aristotle, that are found to be in accord with the observations.

Epicurus' postulated that all matter is in constant motion: this appears to place him closer to Newton's position (F=ma) than to Aristotle's (F=mv), but without gravity as a reference point (to say nothing of relativity) the question is largely academic. Aristotle proposed that the natural condition of matter was not inertia, but rest.

All things are born from their seeds

Spontaneous Generation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation :

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The doctrine of spontaneous generation was coherently synthesized by Aristotle, who compiled and expanded the work of earlier natural philosophers and the various ancient explanations for the appearance of organisms, and was taken as scientific fact for two millennia. Though challenged in the 17th and 18th centuries by the experiments of Francesco Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani, spontaneous generation was not disproved until the work of Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall in the mid-19th century.

John Tyndall striking a blow for Epicurus yet again!

In salamanders:

https://sdzwildlifeexplorers.org/animals/fire-s…%20the%20flames.

Don and Cassius, the above will hopefully allay an concerns we have with this epigram, which is otherwise very fine.

Here is one potential solution to the confusing matter of the "annual" feast of the Twentieth:

Which I find in this JSTOR article;

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24519291?read-now=1&seq=6

Did you know Vergil signs his name in the first four lines of the Aeneid?

In 2012, the classicist Cristiano Castelletti discovered that Vergil included a boustrophedon acrostic in the first four lines of the Aeneid. An...

www.reddit.com

There ^ is interesting food for thought!

I'll look into Horace's Ars Poetica this evening, and see what I find. He has quite a lot to say about meter and style. There are many other grammatists from the ancient world to look into, but for me the Virgil/Horace connection clinches it. The allusion seems very clear.

My own suspicion is that the confusion here comes in because logic is rather 'slippery'. It is a very powerful tool of cognition. It is absolutely critical to the field of computer science:

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A computer is a digital electronic machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically.

We know that it works. But that is a separate question to the one we're really asking: Is logic a source of direct knowledge?

That's the question that it is difficult to get a hold on. Logic is amazingly flimsy stuff when it doesn't rest on something solid--which is to say, something known. When Thomas Aquinas set out to prove the existence of a god, he could not rest his proof on the evidence of his senses; his senses furnished no evidence of god. So he employed instead the twin vacuous pillars of faith and logic; his Five Ways to prove the existence of god do not stand up to even slight scrutiny, as some honest Christians will admit. He started with nothing, and logic took him nowhere fast.

Epicurus was neither strictly an empiricist, nor anything like a rationalist; but he was far closer to the former than to the latter, which is part of the reason he rejected geometry. This chart does a fair job, I think:

It's not likely to be a coincidence, if that's the implication of your question! Virgil has a well-known acrostic in his Georgics in the terminal characters of four lines, spelling out O-T-I-A. He was followed by Horace in his Satires, who employed the same acrostic in the first characters of four lines.

Otium was an important word for upper-class Romans with good educations: it signified for them the kind of dignified leisure that they praised most highly; managing (perhaps directing is a better word for it) the cultivation of their country estates, maintaining personal libraries, collecting statuary, frescoes and fine furniture, playing host to the convivium, and, of course; reading and writing Greek and Latin literature.

Ask someone on the street to describe poetry, and the first thing they're likely to say is that 'it rhymes'. But poetry in the ancient world did not rhyme; like Milton and Shakespeare, they wrote in strictly metered blank verse. Also like Shakespeare, they continued to avail themselves of many other literary devices to ornament their work: Alliteration, assonance, dissonance, cacophony, chiasmus, asyndeton, onomatopoeia, metonymy, synecdoche--and probably a hundred others that I never even learned the names of!

There is a bawdy epigram in the Greek Anthology whereby the epigrammatist, a noted παίδἐραστής, observes that: (spoiler...)

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The numerical value of the letters in πρωκτὸς (anus) and χρυσὸς (gold) is the same. I once found this out reckoning up casually.

Perhaps not the most helpful example of wordplay I could furnish, but certainly one I won't soon forget...

Very interesting! I'll need to read that again more attentively, thank you for sharing that!

We had a bit of a slog through this very question during the podcast recording on Sunday. I was 'off my game' Sunday morning...hopefully with Cassius and Martin engaged in the discussion we managed to produce something intelligible

I still haven't read anywhere near enough of David Sedley's work, so I won't be much help here either!

"Now, whoever will be sure to eat good fruit, must do it out of a garden of his own."

Oddly enough, I'm finding his opinions on gardening to be more interesting than I expected!

I don't expect I will go much further into this book at present, which is more of a gardening handbook, or so I gather; but a few interesting passages present themselves.

The text is available in digitized form here:

Sir William Temple upon the gardens of Epicurus - Biodiversity Heritage Library

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I think Joshua mentions he thinks that DeWitt indicates Menoeceus might have been written first, but the main reason I am posting this is that we probably ought to check that in case we need to have a correction to the sequence here in this thread.

I actually cannot find my copy of DeWitt right now, but Wikipedia cites page 9:

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Epicurus's Letter to Menoeceus, possibly an early work of his, is written in an eloquent style similar to that of the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (436–338 BC), but, for his later works, he seems to have adopted the bald, intellectual style of the mathematician Euclid.

Godfrey, yes I certainly did find that worth reading! Thank you.