Posts by Joshua

There are several scenes in the HBO series Rome

that deal with this historical question...for whatever that is worth! It plays out over a series of deliberations like the one shown here.

I see that in myself particularly with video games. {...New game -> binge -> tolerance -> increased need -> new variation -> binge...}, and so on. I think 'hijacked' is a fair term.

The pecuniary cost for me is quite small because of the modding community and its infinite variation, but the timesink is considerable.

I don't know if I'll have time for this one, but I think you are absolutely right about its application.

I'm curious whether Dr. Lembke goes into the other 4 major hormones/neurotransmitters of serotonin (mood, sleep, digestion), endorphins (mitigation of stress and pain), cortisol (increase of stress, and activation of "fight or flight" response) and oxytocin (associated with empathy, relationships and sex). Probably I do need to make time for this!

The Good Place has a great arc, if anyone does decide to watch it I'd at least see it through to the end of the first season

Quote

56–57. The wise man feels no more pain when being tortured himself than when his friend tortured, and will die for him; for if he betrays his friend, his whole life will be confounded by distrust and completely upset.

This shows up in the Vatican Sayings on the torture question. To be honest, I barely remember talking about this!

There is also that strange passage in the Hippocratic Oath enjoining its reader not to cut those who "labour beneath the stone". This is generally interpreted as being a kidney stone (which, incidentally, Epicurus suffered from).

Apparently Hippocrates felt that kidney stones were the domain of surgeons, not of the physicians he was instructing. It is possible that Hippocrates really was as high-minded as all of that, but to my juvenile ear upon first hearing or reading those words, the "stone" seemed in context more like a punishment from the gods which it was forbidden to treat. And further, that there was something effeminate in dying of this "labor".

It is indeed curious the emphasis (or sometimes invention) which the biographers have placed upon the death of philosophers--often written as if they had 'gotten their due'.

So it was that Empedocles (who thought he was a god) died by leaping into a volcano; Socrates, the wisest man (in his own estimation), in all of Greece, died by his own hand; Archimedes was slain by a blunt instrument of the Roman soldiery while himself distracted by the higher mathematics; Lucretius was offed after he quaffed, allegedly, a love potion; Zeno the Stoic died of holding his breathe to suppress the pain of a broken toe; Julius Caesar suffered epilepsy and, in spite of controlling the Roman empire could not control even his own body (much less the governing body of the Senate); Protagoras had held that 'man was the measure of all things', but found by experience that he did not measure up against the sea in storm (he died of shipwreck). And on it goes.

Lucretius and Pindar mention the stone, but without explaining it. In both cases they are describing a fate narrowly avoided.

Show Notes:

The House of Atreus;

https://www2.classics.upenn.edu/myth/content/tragedy/media/atreustree.gif

Tantalus;

In the third book of Lucretius

Referenced In the 8th Isthmian Ode of Pindar

In the plays of Aeschylus;

Of which the Oresteia contains the following;

The Agamemnon (Text of the play)

[See also The Browning Version]

The Libation Bearers

The Eumenides

Iphigenia;

In Lucretius (he calls her Iphianassa)

And also;

Don's translation and commentary on The Letter to Menoikeus

Nates compilation of The Principle Doctrines

My recording of The Torquatus (with thanks to Cassius)

And finally,

Why we chose the Reid translation

Cassius, let me know if I left anything out!

Happy New Year!

On an evening that asks us to gaze into an uncertain future, the words that come to my mind rise up from an impenetrably deep and distant past. They are the words of Diogenes of Oenoanda, which he inscribed in stone.

Quote

But if we assume it to be possible, then truly the life of the gods will pass to men. For everything will be full of justice and mutual love, and there will come to be no need of fortifications or laws and all the things which we contrive on account of one another. As for the necessities derived from agriculture, since we shall have no slaves at that time (for indeed [we ourselves shall plough] and dig and tend [the plants] and [divert] rivers and watch over [the crops), we shall] ... such things as ... not ... time ..., and such activities, [in accordance with what is] needful, will interrupt the continuity of the [shared] study of philosophy; for [the] farming operations [will provide what our] nature wants.

They are words, in part, that make me shake my head and smile; is there a charming naiveté about them? Yes, perhaps. But there is cold, steely prescience as well---the kind of sound cultural critique, a foresight born of wisdom, that would make the quack oracles of Delphi bristle with envy.

There is also, etched in that ancient stone, a strain of hope; a yearning for a better and wiser age---and that not selfishly, but altruistically wished for. His hope was not that he should live to see it, but that you and I, and those who follow, should live to see such an age; and I like to think we've seen a measure of it.

"That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

-George Eliot

I was once reading the comments under a YouTube video when I came across one that I thought very clever. I actually laughed out loud, not something I do often, only to discover upon looking at the name that it was my own comment I was laughing at. This is precisely the kind of thing we can and should expect, in view of our two or three pound mammalian brains. 😄

Cassius , meet Cassius!

Quote

As I interpret the argument, the theory was that if something is perfect then why would it increase? Sort of like adding an extra note or phrase to a musical composition can ruin the "perfect" composition. Hence the limit of pleasure as specified by Epicurus.

I wanted to flesh out my question more fully, particularly in light of what Godfrey has written here.

I can accept the basic argument that the hypothetically "perfect" can want (i.e. lack) nothing. What I cannot quite grasp is why an imperfect being (the human), arising from imperfect beginnings and employing imperfect means, must necessarily have as its aim something perfect. I think that Epicurus' solution to this Pythagorean/Platonic problem is a clever one, but at my current level of understanding I slightly wish that he had cut down that argument instead of trying to supply an adequate solution.

Nevertheless, I'm quite happy to acknowledge that this was actually the course he chose to take. Now I'm trying to better understand why he chose to take it. Since it recurs in almost all of the core texts, he must have felt that it was important.

I suspect that the answer has something to do with his conception of the gods; in paraphrase, 'they do not trouble us because their perfect happiness prevents them from wanting or needing to trouble us'.

Although here too, I confess that I am somewhat wistful about yet another missed chance...

Come to think of it, almost all of the parts of Epicurean Philosophy that are controversial even among Epicureans, from tranquility to his view of the size of the sun, hinge on these two premises of perfection and limitation.

Am I overstating that case? (Probably! )

Quote

"The ability to increase is proof that a thing is imperfect."

In my recent reading of Philebus, I found myself wondering why the interlocutors so readily agreed with Socrates on that point: why is it so necessary for the telos to be perfect, and admitting of no increase? It comes from the same school of thought that held that the Heroic past was Golden or, as we imply by it's grammatical tense, "perfect". John Keats gave ironic expression to this idea in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, where he found the vessel's artistic engraving enchanting, perfect even, but lifeless in its perfection; so still was that still-life that it was still-born.

"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"

-John Keats

I suppose I struggle to agree with Epicurus on this point; all that mindless numb tranquility, all that confusion about pleasure and pain---we could have avoided the whole troubling mess!

But it's questions like these that keep me going back to the texts, though too infrequently.

Quote

I'm waiting impatiently to become a grand-mother, and I have a lot of works to do for this issue that is the most important and happiest issue in my life.

Congratulations, Elli, really. 😁

I wish you and your growing family the very best!

I have only read the introduction so far, Don, and (feeling slightly the sharp nip of Philodemus' words), can feel myself confident in pronouncing my own:

We're lucky to have this.

Thank you for your hard work.

Kind praise, Cassius, but I must turn some of it your way: thank YOU for your work in doing the final editing and publication; and, of course, for the numberless hours you have given in the maintenance of this platform, and in support of that school "which," in the hopeful words of Diogenes Laertius, "while nearly all the others have died out, continues for ever without interruption".

That part is somewhere in that text, but I haven't found where.

Notes:

The Good Place;

The Brazen Bull;

Brazen bull - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Cicero's In Pisonem;

M. Tullius Cicero, Against Piso, section 77

(Somewhere in there he discusses the Brazen Bull)

^ THAT is a more helpful response, thank you Don!

I am far too ignorant of Prof. Warren's work to offer an opinion, Alex, although I understand that he was the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. Don might know something more there...

DeWitt's book is easy to recommend--in fact, I need to read it again myself, as it's been a few years.

I think my next read will be Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, by David Sedley. I was very impressed with the selection that Don read while we were discussing the Plague of Athens at the end of DNR Book 6.

I'm glad you enjoy the podcast! Hopefully someone else will have a more helpful response, Alex

-Joshua