Also: Torquatus section on Mathematics and Geometry (very brief):

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[72] Was he the man to spend his time in conning poets as I and Triarius do on your advice, when they afford no substantial benefit, and all the enjoyment they give is childish in kind, or was he the man to waste himself, like Plato, upon music, geometry, mathematics and astronomy, which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one whit towards living a more agreeable, that is a better life? Was he, I ask, the man to pursue those arts and thrust behind him the art of living, an art of such moment, so laborious too, and correspondingly rich in fruit? Epicurus then is not uneducated, but those persons are uninstructed who think that subjects which it is disgraceful to a boy not to have learned, are to be learned through life into old age!

And;

Infinite mathematical detail at the subatomic scale;

Fractal - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1316&context=jhm

I recall reading this article some time back, some parts of it may be worth discussing.

Don, do you think there is a connection between 'elements' in that sense and the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:18?

"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."

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And not least we did this for those who are called foreigners, though they are not really so. For, while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire earth, and a single home, the world.

-Diogenes of Oenoanda

Happy Earth Day!

"I am not the least afraid of death."

Charles Darwin--presiding here in stone over the main hall of the Museum of Natural History in London--died on this day in 1882. His last words were recorded by his children;

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I am not the least afraid of death. Remember what a good wife you have been to me.

Charles Darwin was no Epicurean. This thread just...is what it is!

Hmmm...

Here was my original thread on the subject:

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The Long Neglect of William Short

Here's an interesting thought; what do we actually know about this guy?

Judging from Mr. Jefferson's letter in reply, we may infer that William Short, like Jefferson, positively identified himself as an Epicurean. Cassius' recent reading of Frances Wright's other work has me thinking that there might be gems hidden here as well.

He was a talented, capable, brilliant protégé of Thomas Jefferson, and a deft hand at diplomacy. He forsook the dream of a high and polished political career in his…

Joshua

October 5, 2020 at 6:48 PM

Here's a secondary source:

https://www.vqronline.org/%E2%80%98-very-human-portrait%E2%80%99

And a passage from that source:

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In 1790, on a cold and windy day some time before the French Revolution had turned on liberal nobles such as the due, William and his love were out canoeing on a pond by the Seine when Short dove overboard and nearly lost consciousness in saving a boy from drowning in rapids. The hero had then returned to the due’s chateau, dined, “quaffed old Malvoisie & other wines to a degree that astonished everybody,” and played chess “with great success,” before drifting into a sweet sleep.

Thank you for all of this, Marco! A while ago I posted something to the forum written by one of Stephen Greenblatt's critics. She (a Christian interested in medieval theology) wrote that Epicureanism was never widespread after the Renaissance, or even before it.

Never widespread in antiquity!? This can only be attributed to a failure to examine the evidence. Thank you for providing some of it here!

Born on this day in 1743, in the same year as Daniel Brown's anonymous publication of an early English translation of Lucretius.

And I continue to think that it makes sense to situate Epicurus as particularly Ionian. Among the Pre-Socratics, Aristotle called the Ionians physiologoi---"those who study nature".

Lucian was also Syrian, but has long been noted for his command of the Greek Language.

Diogenes was Lycian or Anatolian.

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The films/images coming *from* things *to* our eyes or minds was a direct refutation of the competing ancient theory that our eyes beamed out some kind of ray. To me, it's a lighthouse metaphor (Epicurean theory) vs a flashlight metaphor (Platonic et al metaphor)

That was going to be my main angle into this issue on the podcast, but we didn't get that far yesterday. I've been scooped!

The Dawkins quote that I got somewhat wrong:

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“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

That's a good point, Don, and it raises an interesting problem in theology; while Christianity in the main stream has abandoned the injunction against 'making graven images', Islam still adheres to it. In the Charlie Hebdo case, this meant that western cartoonists were 'deserving of death' for their portraits of Mohammed. In one of the attacks against that magazine, twelve people were killed.

From a ban on physical images, it is but one more step to a ban on mental images:

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“It is not permissible at all to imagine how the Entity of Allah or any of His Attributes is.”

-The late Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen, a prominent scholar of Islam

By way of contrast, we may look into Bernard Frischer's argument from The Sculpted Word: the early Epicureans were not only noted for their dedication toward portraits, but actually used them as a method for advocating the philosophy.

That's a good point, Don, and it raises an interesting problem in theology; while Christianity in the main stream has abandoned the injunction against 'making graven images', Islam still adheres to it. In the Charlie Hebdo case, this meant that western cartoonists were 'deserving of death' for their portraits of Mohammed. In one of the attacks against that magazine, twelve people were killed.

From a ban on physical images, it is but one more step to a ban on mental images:

Quote

“It is not permissible at all to imagine how the Entity of Allah or any of His Attributes is.”

-The late Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen, a prominent scholar of Islam

By way of contrast, we may look into Bernard Frischer's argument from The Sculpted Word: the early Epicureans were not only noted for their dedication toward portraits, but actually used them as a method for advocating the philosophy.

Two other points to make by way of preface:

1.) Martin has been kind enough on a number of occasions to correct me when I use the phrase "many worlds". "Many-worlds" is an interpretation of modern quantum mechanics that is neither empirical nor falsifiable, and has nothing to do with Epicurean physics.

What we will be talking about is Cosmic Pluralism, which is simply the understanding that Earth, or the bodies of Solar System, are not the only celestial bodies in existence.

2.) The use of the word "idol" in 46 should not be construed to carry its religious connotations. Epicurus uses the Greek word εἴδωλον, eidolon, which is the root of the English word but means:

Noun Edit

εἴδωλον • (eídōlon) n (genitive εἰδώλου); second declension

1. phantom, ghost

2. shape, figure, image

3. image of the mind: idea, fancy

4. representation, statue, idol

We appear to be dealing with some combination of definitions 2 and 3.

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Further, we must not assert `up' or `down' of that which is unlimited, as if there were a zenith or nadir.

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Nor will their upward or their lateral motion, which is due to collisions, nor again their downward motion, due to weight, affect their velocity.

It seems to me that he is drawing a distinction between "down" in the sense of a direction that does exist, and "down" in the sense of a terminal position in that direction, which does not exist.

I had already read this, and thought of posting it; but now I can't remember much from it!

I don't know that I can quite get on board with identifying Thoreau as a Platonist or a neoplatonist. He was eclectic in the extreme (not to say eccentric), and seemed far more interested in the mysticism of the east than the philosophy of the west. He also denied the afterlife in one unusually candid journal entry.

I think he's decidedly more Aristotelian in many ways.

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!