Posts by Joshua

Interesting reading, Alex, thank you!

I think this is something we have to consider in its context. What we now know is that the seat of consciousness is in the brain; the ancients, including the Epicureans, had other ideas. Some believed that the seat of the 'soul' was in the breast with the heart. It is easy to observe in oneself the quickening of the pulse in love or fear; more difficult, to intuit that this behavior is governed by signals from the nervous system.

The Epicureans thought that the 'soul'—call it what you will—consisted of a sort of skein of finer atoms spread throughout all the members. If a portion of this soul rests in the hand at any given point in time, and the soul's chief end is pleasure, perhaps the argument of Chrysippus makes a little more sense?

Of course the shift of the soul from the members or the breast to the brain simply shifts the problem. Does the brain feel the lack of the Supreme good? I think of the restlessness that Lucretius describes of the Roman nobility; in the city they wish they were in the country, and in the country they wish they were in the city.

One of Epicurus' achievements was to instruct us in how to tap new sources of pleasure—even something as simple as remembering past pleasures can be a constant source of genuine pleasure available to us whenever we need it.

Last one for now...

I can also see this becoming a huge waste of my time! 😄

If I can get this right, it would pair well with an image of a young man and an old man, and Epicurus' quote that it is never too early or too late to study philosophy.

https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2009/01/12/princessbride.jpg

Ambigrams read the same right-side-up or upside-down. Not a great example, but an interesting start!

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since I am prone to conspiracy theories, I don't even watch the news.

A mature and responsible decision!

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I am working on getting government benefits so I don't have to work so much.

I don't have an opinion on government benefits.

Covid has given me some reservations about abundant free-time. Not everyone I know has handled it well. It may be helpful to explore the Roman concept of Otium—constructive leisure (which you've already hinted at). Come to think of it, we should have a thread on Otium.

Lurker or participant; either way, I wish you well!

I was reading through r/AskReddit the other day and there was a thread titled something like "What was the closest you've ever come to suicide, and what was it that brought you back?" I clicked on it for the human interest angle, and read a post that said that 'studying stoicism really helped.'

Hey, if you're at that terrible point in your life, and stoicism is the one thing that pulls you through, that's great. I'm not going to argue or judge.

But is that the advice I would give to a friend? Sadly, no. Surely we can do better than to tell a suffering fellow human that the way to move beyond suicide ideation is to realize that life and its experiences are 'indifferent.'

I hope everyone in that thread is doing ok.

My experience with the Humphries translation is very similar to Cassius'. The audible version is great! I also have and love the paperback. He somehow manages to strike the right chord every time.

I think you'll especially love his rendition of the hymn to Venus! As I type this, I can hear it in my head.

Welcome, Patrick! DeWitt is an excellent start. If you want a few more good laughs, try Lucian's Alexander the Oracle-Monger.

Lucian of Samosata : Alexander the False Prophet

Thank you all! I really enjoyed, I will be interested in doing it again!

This is a wide subject! Allow me to narrow it through the lens of a few poems I like.

Romance:

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Drink to me only with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I’ll not look for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise

Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope, that there

It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

And sent’st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

Not of itself, but thee.

-Ben Jonson

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simple hospitalities:

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Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainement, where none was: Rest is their feast, and all things at their will; The noblest mind the best contentment has.

-Edmund Spencer

The countryside: (from a much longer poem)

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[...] Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee

With other edifices, when they see

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,

May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.

-Ben Jonson

Wine: (from a much longer poem)

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O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth. Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

-John Keats

Traversing the landscape:

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Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

-Robert Frost

Walking alone by night:

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The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

-Thomas Gray

Thinking about nature and the cosmos:

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There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

-Lord Byron

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Finding a good translation of a classic text:

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Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

-John Keats

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And now one or two of my own:

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No more! Aye, fly! Fly to thine pleasure

Great noble bird, sun-midst sailing,

Prow a-gleaming, southward seeking;

Seek thee still a sweeter shore

And I, a sweet philosophy.

Yet I will linger here a time

Tasting of the morning's fruits—

'Ere long the yawning sea shall call:

The tide shall fail, and then the light,

And we shall mingle, you and I

Void with void, and mote with mote.

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And in lieu of a lucrative synecure for writing poetry: the pleasure of my day job, land-surveying!

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Thoreau and the Geometry of Misattribution: Field Notes

Mid-morning, June the twenty-fifth. Clear, calm;

The water's edge of Choctawhatchee Bay—

All glass and brass and darting precision—

Where little fins answer the noiseless psalm

Of some invisible magnetism.

Our survey maps the shore's meandering way

Easterly; thence perambulates this marsh

And cypress swamp. "Never look back unless

You are planning to go that way"? A harsh

And hollow saw; return is not regress—

A surveyor's first sight is his backsight.

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That last one I sent off to the Walden Woods Project (Thoreau was a surveyor by trade), and they (allegedly) filed it away in their archives.

If I seem too earnest, it might be because I recently had the pleasure of socializing with two piglets

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nor during its life can it afford any other service, as the other animals do, which either afford a vehicle for riding, or aid in the cultivation of the fields, or draw waggons by their neck, or carry burthens on their back, or furnish a covering with their skins, or abound with a supply of milk, or keep watch for guarding our houses.

This is patently false. Pigs provide excellent services. They clear tenacious, thorny and invasive weeds by digging up the roots; they turn and till the soil; they produce manure for fertilization; they are used to establish new ponds, for by their wallowing they compact and seal the ground to hold water; in Florida they are kept to drive off snakes, which protects people and animals (especially children and young); they are used to hunt for truffles; In medieval Europe, and in New York City as late as the nineteenth century, pigs were used to clean city streets of thrown out food.

And they are curiously intelligent and companionable. I know of at least one instance where a pig saved a woman's life. She had a debilitating heart attack, and when her pig found her he managed to get out to the nearby road where he flagged down a car! The driver got out and followed the pig back to where the woman had collapsed, and she was rushed to a hospital.

If Lactantius was incapable of imagining a use for this noble beast, he ought to have let the pig do his thinking for him!

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What's the reference to firefighters and pigs?

Rather grim I'm afraid. When you've smelled a burn victim.....

We talked a lot about pigs. This video by the late Christopher Hitchens is an excellent reading from a chapter of one of his books on specifically this subject.

In reading the Rolfe Humphries translation of this passage I found something interesting. At Loeb line 921, he translates with an emendation;

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In the first place, from everything we see

There is bound to be an everlasting flow.

Ah, look about you! Watch a glimmering pool

In the first shine of starlight, see the stars

Respond, that very instant, radiant

In water's universe. Does this not prove

How marvelous the swift descent from heaven?

Our other senses know of emanance

In fragrances [...]

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I was startled by the seemingly unwarranted poetic license, and the Loeb edition did not point to a lacuna in these lines. However, when I did a search for Lucretius' use of that imagery it took me all the way back to a heavily corrupted passage in Book 4. Here is a part of the Loeb note on page 292.

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[...] The new passage should begin before 217, but after 216, the opening of it being lost. 217-229 are repeated, with a few minor variations, in 6.923-935, and the reviser of this work thinks it most probable that 217 was preceded by two lines identical or almost identical to 6.921-922, and that those two lines were preceded by lines by lines in which the new subject was introduced. [...]

It seems the translators are doing their best to use these two passages (both corrupted in the manuscripts) to form a coherent whole.

Upcoming publication: a companion edition to The Pocket Stoic, published last year.

The Pocket Epicurean by John Sellars

Will Publish December 2021

Cloth-Bound $12.50

University of Chicago Press

Author:

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John Sellars is a Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London (where he is an Associate Editor for the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project), and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford (where he was once a Junior Research Fellow).

Description:

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A short, smart guide to living the good life through the teachings of Epicurus.

As long as there has been human life, we’ve searched for what it means to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus came to his own conclusion: all we really want in life is pleasure. Though today we tend to associate the word “Epicurean” with indulgence in the form of food and wine, the philosophy of Epicurus was about a life well lived even in the hardest of times. As John Sellars shows in this concise, approachable guide, the ideal life envisioned by Epicurus and his followers was a life much more concerned with mental pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquility or contentment.

In The Pocket Epicurean Sellars walks us through the history of Epicureanism, starting with the private garden on the edge of ancient Athens where Epicurus and his students lived in the fourth century BC, and where women were as welcome as men. Sellars then moves on to ancient Rome, where Epicurean influence flourished thanks to the poet Lucretius and his cohort. Throughout the book, Sellars draws on the ideas of Epicurus to offer a constructive way of thinking about the pleasures of friendship and our place in the world.

Table of Contents

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Prologue

1. Philosophy as Therapy

2. The Path to Tranquillity

3. What Do You Need?

4. The Pleasures of Friendship

5. Why Study Nature?

6. Don’t Fear Death

7. Explaining Everything

Epilogue

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This will be a good opportunity for a timely and topical discussion of a short, manageable and inexpensive book at the time of its publication. His prior work is heavily Stoical. Shall we expect to be Tranquil-ized? Let's find out!

Mark your calendars!

We briefly discussed George Santayana's essay on Lucretius maybe a year or so ago. His essay was in fact taken from a book called Three Philosophical Poets—Lucretius for the materialist or "natural" view, Dante for the supernatural, and Goethe for the Romantic. I have not read these other two essays. It might be worth looking over them as they relate to this conversion.

I have read nearly everything of significance that came out of American Transcendentalism—the major figures as well as the lesser lights, including their diaries and journals, and the letters they exchanged. This was my major obsession in college, and I can still read these authors and find them occasionally refreshing. I'm more likely now to find them unhelpfully obscurantist.