Posts by Joshua

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So we're talking about the Criterion of Truth, and what amount and class of evidence beyond our own experience should be required to form such an opinion?

This must necessarily vary with the nature of the claim being made, or the hypothesis being proposed.

There's an interesting thought experiment in one of Patrick Rothfuss's books, which I will attempt to badly paraphrase from distance and memory:

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"Imagine a wild forest with three villages clinging to its edges. You travel to the first village, and the residents warn you not to go into those woods, for the place is haunted by demons and no one comes back alive.

In the second village, you are again advised to keep a wide berth from the trees, for the forest is home to a powerful witch. All who go there fall under her spell, and are never seen again.

At the third village they tell stories of men who were killed by werewolves in the night, and talk of the howling shrieks by moonlight that pierce the verdant gloom as darkness settles over the hamlet.

Which of these is true? Neither of them? Neither, of course. But here's the real question:

Would you go into those woods? Perhaps the witch and the demons are simply bandits or thieves, whose first and best weapon is fear? The howling beasts merely wolves, yet no less deadly for that? Maybe the forest is every bit as dangerous as they all say, though they all say it wrongly."

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The point, I think, is that mundane claims require no great amount of evidence, but fantastical claims demand a great deal more--a demand they seldom satisfy.

I'd like to see someone draw a map of terra incognito and write, "I don't know what's here, but I'll warrant it isn't dragons."

Ah! That dread and dismal realm of human underachievement called 'politics'!

The first thing I recommend is a corrective--a palate cleanser, if you will. If you cannot steer wide of politics, then at least allow yourself the pleasure of a temporary restorative. In their art the Greeks called this Catharsis. In medicine, relief. Sometimes this is as easy as reframing your perspective: say, by gazing at the forbidding immensity of space;

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The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

Or by sitting quietly at the back door.

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There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Sometimes it takes a single day well spent, going slowly un-mindful of the world.

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Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be

thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that

falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast,

gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company

go, let the bells ring and the children cry -- determined to make a

day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let

us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool

called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this

danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With

unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another

way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it

whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why

should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward

through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,

and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe,

through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord,

through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and

religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we

can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin,

having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place

where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely,

or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future

ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had

gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to

face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces,

as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you

through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your

mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we

are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel

cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our

business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but

while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink

deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I

cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I

have always been regretting that I was as the day I was born.

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So much for the Sage of Walden Pond. But how to proceed?

Here are some ideas:

• Throttle your news intake. This is difficult, but I think essential. More copy is printed everyday than a person could possibly read, and there are no points for trying! Curate your news reading, and try to do it efficiently. I used to get the Economist delivered. If I still had a subscription, I'd get an E-reader for it. At all costs avoid the endless 24-hour-news internet click machine! People made it through two world wars with a daily newspaper. Get through it quickly, and have done with it.
• Read dispassionate reporting, dispassionately. The former is difficult to find, and the latter more difficult to do, but we can try. When I read about the end of the Roman Republic, I'm not rooting for a side; this "old news" means nothing to me. And the day is not far off when the geopolitics of 2022 won't mean much to me either. Try to situate yourself in that context. Imagine what it would be like to read about this year in 2122. BO-RING! This isn't an argument for cynicism or jadedness. This is advice meant to direct our passion to the things we care most about. Thoreau didn't care who sat in the governor's mansion, but he did care deeply about the horror of slavery, and that was where he directed his effort and attention.
• Recognize that you cannot carry the world's traumas on your shoulders, and that it's not even a reasonable thing to ask. It sometimes feels heartless to disconnect from politics, or to neglect the news, when so many people are suffering. But just knowing about it doesn't really help, does it?

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The fate of the country does not depend on who you vote for at the polls--the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

All quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Further Show Notes:

The Great Chain of Being;

Or "Ladder of Being"

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The great chain of being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals.

Dante's Inferno:

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Speak thou, and satisfy my wish. May those,

Who lie within these sepulchres, be seen?

Already all the lids are rais'd, and none

O'er them keeps watch." He thus in answer spake

"They shall be closed all, what-time they here

From Josaphat return'd shall come, and bring

Their bodies, which above they now have left.

The cemetery on this part obtain

With Epicurus all his followers,

Who with the body make the spirit die.

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The Fermi Paradox

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The Fermi paradox is the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence.[1][2] As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.

The Dark Forest Hypothesis;

In science fiction; Liu Cixin

The Hellmouth

And I will add that the Parthenon in Nashville is WELL worth seeing!

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In this case, my remark is that this episode marks the return of Joshua after a two week absence, and as I complete the editing I keep thinking to myself that this is one (of many) strong episodes by Joshua.

Ha! I thought things were getting off to a bad start at the very beginning of the recording when I made some excuse and instantly pushed it back over to you.

One further point I'm gleaning from Wikipedia; the Greeks celebrated birthdays monthly instead of annually. So we've got a local Athenian calendar, enshrouded in a Greek culture, which has been generally interpreted for us by non-Athenians, non-Greeks, and/or latecomers.

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The 21st day: "the later tenth". The Attic month had three days named "tenth" (equivalent in a straight sequence to the 10th, 20th, and 21st days). These were distinguished as

10th: "the tenth (of the month) waxing"

20th: "the earlier tenth" (i.e. waning)

21st: "the later tenth" (i.e. waning)

Does this clarify things for you?

Also of note; the 7th day of each month was (apparently) sacred to Apollo. Since one of the aspects of that God was Apollo Epicurius, is it too bold to propose that Neocles and Chaerestrate may have had this in mind when they named him? Or perhaps Epicurus really was born on the 10th or 20th, and later ancient commentators pigeonholed him into the seventh to fit the Apollo connection.

Impossible to say. But I would like to see this "3 tenths" business cleared up.

I should have watched the video before I posted that, he explains it rather well!

I don't think that methodological naturalism asserts that there is nothing supernatural--that to my understanding would be 'philosophical naturalism'. Methodological naturalism is not so much a doctrine or belief, as it is an attitude or approach to inquiry.

But to state my own position plainly, I think that Epicurus was a philosophical naturalist, who further employed methodological naturalism in his study of nature.

By contrast, Dr. Francis Collins who is a renowned geneticist and was the the head of the Human Genome Project is not at all a naturalist, being a Christian, but in his scientific work he sought natural explanations for the phenomena of nature.

I think I mentioned that term on the first episode of the letter to Pythocles, during the discussion as to whether the ancients were really doing "science". I'd have to listen back to be sure.

But I certainly think it's applicable to what Epicurus was doing in the 4th century.

I'll try to summarize what I recall to be the main points of the essay;

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-Epicurus' primary interest in the size of the sun is to rule out the supernatural.

-A superficial reading of the passage will always be plagued with error.

-The author stresses the importance of considering the question in light of the whole philosophy.

-And that includes offering a few explanations, not just asserting one.

-Epicurus draws a distinction between how we interpret things that appear to our senses, and how those things actually are.

-The senses themselves are to Epicurus never wrong. Merely the judgment we make about sense-perception can be wrong, or not.

-The sun may be bigger or smaller than it appears, but it's not possible to know which (in the fourth century B.C) because we can never change our perspective by getting closer or going further away.

-The passages in both Pythocles and Lucretius are very noncommittal in their grammar and diction. Something like 8 subordinate clauses in five lines. So there's a resistance to speaking certainly about it. Nowhere does any Epicurean actually make a definite claim about the size of the sun.

-In the discussion on eclipses, the ancient sources seem to imply or suggest that the sun may be larger than the Earth. One of the explanations offered for eclipses is the interposition of the Earth between the sun and the moon.

-The author suggests that the sun-size issue is a didactic challenge to students and readers; like the plague at the end of Lucretius, it sets up a test to see how well you've grasped Epicurean method. The reader will come to that passage, and then feel compelled to review the other material to make sure they haven't missed something.

-The final suggestion the author makes is that the sun-size issue became a shibboleth for ancient Epicureans. That it became a way of 'sounding out' the Epicurean knowledge-base of the interlocutor. Cassius often says that hard cases make bad law. But the argument being made here is that this hard case is useful for determining how well other people really understand this. Useful for teachers with their students, or for scholarchs with their scholars.

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The essay does not make the following point, which I think is nevertheless important; namely, how stupid do people think Epicurus was to say that he thought the sun was the size of an orange!?

Certainly the sun is, at minimum, bigger than the biggest object that crosses it but fails to entirely eclipse it. A lifetime's accumulated experience would surely have been sufficient for Epicurus to know that the sun was bigger than a bird. Bigger than a horse, a house, a tree, a trireme--bigger than the better part of a mountain. Bigger than the moon.

Edit: I need to review some of this information to make sure the comparisons refer to the diameter of the Sun in relation to the diameter of Earth. Don't take it at face value just yet

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Anaxagoras, 500-428

-Sun as a mass of blazing metal, larger than the Peloponnese

Eudoxus of Cnidus, 408-355 BC

-27 Concentric Spheres

Epicurus, 341–270 BC

-"The sun is to us the size that it appears"

Aristarchus of Samos, 310-230 BC

-Heliocentric

-Sun is 6 times bigger than the Earth

Hipparchus of Nicaea, 190 – 120 BC

-Sun is 1,880 times bigger than the Earth

Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, 100-170 AD

-Geocentric Universe

Actual Size of sun; 109 times the size of the earth?

I have been listening once again to the Folger Library's dramatic audiobook rendition of Romeo and Juliet, and it occurred to me that someone needs to write a paper on the Lucretian influence in this particular play. Well—someone has done just that!

This link gives a flavor of the approach that Dr. Roychoudhury has taken, and I pronounce myself in love with it!

I have not read the paper yet, which is actually a chapter out of her book, Phantasmatic Shakespeare, but it just moved to the top of my list.

When I have read the work, I will report back;

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What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Probably my approach to this question would be twofold. The first point I would like to see articulated is that Epicurus' opinions abouts sex and romance—whatever they turn out to be—are just that; opinions. I'm not very likely to consult a dead philosopher at all on these matters, they being so intimate and so personal, and I am especially uninterested in giving my ear to any High Priest of Epicureanism on what I should do, or what I am allowed to do when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

The second point is this; apart from the physicality of the thing itself, nearly everything about sex and about romance has changed wildly since the 3rd century BC. "Chaste"—I detest the word pure when applied to people—but "chaste" women tethered to their looms, and shut away in an inner room, is no longer the order of the day. Richard Nixon famously said about economics that "we are all Keynesians now". Well, in the 21st century we are, in the English-speaking world of my experience, nearly all Epicureans when it comes to sex. Purity and sin, thank heavens or culture, are on the outs, and choice and avoidance are the new watchwords.

My parents have an average of 8 or 9 siblings. Them and their siblings have an average of two or 3 children. This fact tells a story that the homilies of their parish priests do not tell. They will continue to say one thing, but secular culture and law has allowed them to choose quite another.

So, if you are lucky enough now that no one has the power to coerce you—what will you choose? That is, in my view, the only question that means anything.

Maybe! The problem is I remember so little--only the rough outline of a passing vignette...

I think;

-That it was a poem (rough start, I know!)

-The poem was written by a British man.

-And was written in the Victorian period or earlier.

-The speaker of the poem is intoxicated, possibly by opium or laudanum, or maybe by absinthe or wine. In any case, there's delirium.

-The speaker meets an 'exotic' man, and tries to speak to him.

-When English fails, the speaker switches to ancient Greek, possibly by recitating a few lines from Homer.

That's all I've got! I thought it was Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater, but he was an essayist. His Greek, however, was very good.

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[I] was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen, I wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen my command of that language was so great, that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment-- an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which, in my case, was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish extempore: for the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention, for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of thing, &c. gave me a compass of diction which would never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays, &c. "That boy," said one of my masters*, pointing the attention of a stranger to me, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one."

Charles Lamb; Motes in the Sunbeams; 1775-1834; a poem referencing a well-known passage in Lucretius.

I am doggedly pursuing a poem that I remember from college but cannot find; during the chase I stumbled on this, which is mildly interesting:

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The motes up and down in the sun

Ever restlessly moving we see;

Whereas the great mountains stand still,

Unless terrible earthquakes there be.

If these atoms that move up and down

Were as useful as restless they are,

Than a mountain I rather would be

A mote in the sunbeam so fair.

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There's a long-standing tradition in British literature on the comparison of value between 'use' and 'beauty'. This seems to me a very muddled take on the matter.

Now, back into the salt mine!

I'll try to summarize what I recall to be the main points of the essay;

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-Epicurus' primary interest in the size of the sun is to rule out the supernatural.

-A superficial reading of the passage will always be plagued with error.

-The author stresses the importance of considering the question in light of the whole philosophy.

-And that includes offering a few explanations, not just asserting one.

-Epicurus draws a distinction between how we interpret things that appear to our senses, and how those things actually are.

-The senses themselves are to Epicurus never wrong. Merely the judgment we make about sense-perception can be wrong, or not.

-The sun may be bigger or smaller than it appears, but it's not possible to know which (in the fourth century B.C) because we can never change our perspective by getting closer or going further away.

-The passages in both Pythocles and Lucretius are very noncommittal in their grammar and diction. Something like 8 subordinate clauses in five lines. So there's a resistance to speaking certainly about it. Nowhere does any Epicurean actually make a definite claim about the size of the sun.

-In the discussion on eclipses, the ancient sources seem to imply or suggest that the sun may be larger than the Earth. One of the explanations offered for eclipses is the interposition of the Earth between the sun and the moon.

-The author suggests that the sun-size issue is a didactic challenge to students and readers; like the plague at the end of Lucretius, it sets up a test to see how well you've grasped Epicurean method. The reader will come to that passage, and then feel compelled to review the other material to make sure they haven't missed something.

-The final suggestion the author makes is that the sun-size issue became a shibboleth for ancient Epicureans. That it became a way of 'sounding out' the Epicurean knowledge-base of the interlocutor. Cassius often says that hard cases make bad law. But the argument being made here is that this hard case is useful for determining how well other people really understand this. Useful for teachers with their students, or for scholarchs with their scholars.

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The essay does not make the following point, which I think is nevertheless important; namely, how stupid do people think Epicurus was to say that he thought the sun was the size of an orange!?

Certainly the sun is, at minimum, bigger than the biggest object that crosses it but fails to entirely eclipse it. A lifetime's accumulated experience would surely have been sufficient for Epicurus to know that the sun was bigger than a bird. Bigger than a horse, a house, a tree, a trireme--bigger than the better part of a mountain. Bigger than the moon.

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east-meets-west

For good reason!

Dionysus was thought for a very long time to be an Eastern import into the Greek pantheon. His mythological birthplace was Mt. Nysa, which was sometimes said to be in India.

Apparently modern scholarship and the discovery of certain references in Linear-B has led to a rethinking of this claim. I didn't know that part. Some very recent books still talk about him as a foreign and exotic god.

I've just received this collection of essays, published in February, with an excellent paper concerning the size of the sun by one T.H.M. Gellar-Goad.

I may attempt an outline; in the meantime, here's a good bit toward the end;

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By staking out a stance of aporia conditioned by sense-perception and reasoning thereupon, the Epicureans did in fact prove to be less wrong than everyone else [...] Epicurus and his school, in avoiding a concrete statement of the sun's size, avoided being concretely wrong, in contrast to Eudoxus and all the rest.

aporia; doubt, or a difficulty in resolving the available data into established truth.

The author is thoroughly familiar with Epicurean epistemology, and explores the question not on its face, but based on a careful understanding of the whole philosophy. I thought it was very well done.

If you can find a library copy, or get online access through an institution, you'll save a bit of coin--but it will be good to have read this as we move into the Letter to Pythocles on the podcast.

I don't know that I'll make this one.