Posts by Joshua

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.

I mentioned on the podcast the Principle of Explosion. It's not exactly as I described it, but that's the wikipedia page.

It's similar to the Hermarchus problem under discussion, if not an exact fit.

There's a biographical data point that bears on this question, yes? In his early career he made the city of Mytilene too hot to hold him, and was driven to Lampsacus and the mercy of a king? I don't know if I have the details right exactly.

Suppose I decide that I am absolutely completely convinced by all my faculties and life-long experiences that Jesus Christ is the Living God, which I identify in my mind as a concept I entitle Christianity.

I am persuaded of the truth of Christianity beyond any need for seconds further data or reflection.

Has Christianity now entered into what I should understand from Epicurus that my canon of truth should be?

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Indeed not, good sir! But I'll have to get into the 'why' after I get to work.

And as for women, two notable Americans were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller, living at the time of Frances Wright or not long after. Both were prodigious, but Margaret Fuller in particular was extraordinary for her time. She had a reading fluency in Latin and German, and also studied Greek and several other European languages. I recall writing a paper on the pair in college.

Regarding her age, it's not at all historically unusual for British education to produce prodigies.

John Milton:

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Milton's first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15 at Long Bennington. One contemporary source is the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, an uneven compilation including first-hand reports. In the work, Aubrey quotes Christopher, Milton's younger brother: "When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night". Aubrey adds, "His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College

Alexander Pope:

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Pope's formal education ended at this time, [age 12] and from then on, he mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, as well as English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden. He studied many languages, reading works by French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, [age 17] Pope came into contact with figures from London literary society such as William Congreve, Samuel Garth and William Trumbull.

Thomas De Quincey:

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In 1800, De Quincey, aged 15, was ready for the University of Oxford; his scholarship was far in advance of his years. "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one", his master at Bath had said.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

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Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only 17.

John Keats:

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However, at 13 he began focusing his energy on reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.

William Wordsworth:

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However, [his father] did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. [...]

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 [age 17] when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

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In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read.

J.R.R. Tolkien:

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Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. [...] While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. [Age 17] Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his invented alphabets" appears. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

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At age six, he was sent to a day school run by the vicar of Warnham church, where he displayed an impressive memory and gift for languages. [...] In 1802 [age 10] he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford, Middlesex. [...] Shelley developed an interest in science which supplemented his voracious reading of tales of mystery, romance and the supernatural. During his holidays at Field Place, his sisters were often terrified at being subjected to his experiments with gunpowder, acids and electricity. Back at school he blew up a paling fence with gunpowder.

Oscar Wilde:

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Later in life he claimed that his fellow students had regarded him as a "prodigy" for his ability to speed read, claiming that he could read two facing pages simultaneously and consume a three-volume book in half an hour, retaining enough information to give a basic account of the plot. He excelled academically, particularly in the subject of Classics, in which he ranked fourth in the school in 1869. His aptitude for giving oral translations of Greek and Latin texts won him multiple prizes, including the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament.

John Stuart Mill:

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He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.

Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.

At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.

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Welcome to the gardens of pleasure;

may you find it the abode of peace, of wisdom, and of virtue. [...] See to that luminary! Lovely and glorious in the dawn, he gathers strength and beauty to his meridian, and passes in peace and grandeur to his rest. So do thou, my son. Open your ears and your eyes ; know, and choose what is good ; enter the path of virtue, and thou shalt follow it, for you shall find it sweet. Thorns are not in it, nor is it difficult or steep: like the garden you have now entered, all there is pleasure and repose.

Yes–by a modern (and U.S. centered) analogy, he set up shop in Central Park, not in Montana.

But I suspect that like Aristotle he would have found his way to Athens in any case. A century or two earlier, Miletus: a century or two later, perhaps Alexandria.

I haven't read the article, but I'd be leery of reading too much into it. If Cicero's Tusculum Villa had survived in place of his writings, we might think him an Epicurean indeed!

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I don't get "retirement **from the world**" at all from ἐκχωρήσεως τῶν πολλῶν at all. It's literally "'withdrawal' from the hoi polloi."

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OK I will say it:. The intersection of the viewpoint of many academics with their preferred translation may well be that the academics consider everyone but themselves to be hoi polloi, and thus they see no difference between "hoi polloi" and "the world.

A slightly more charitable interpretation (since their Greek is better than mine);

Some of the translators may be latching on to a punning connection between πολύς (many) and πόλις (city-state, or more poetically "the affairs of the world").

But Epicurus is known to have favored plainer speech. Further, he chose Athens, the beating heart of Greek culture. Samos off the coast of Asia was at a far greater remove from the Greek world.

Welcome, AGB! Learn to Read Latin is a good one if you have the discipline for the grammar-based approach. I didn't. Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata is a direct-reading approach, and, I think, far more pleasureable.

You might also look into the Dowling method, the Schliemann method, and the Old Idiosyncrat's method, courtesy of the late William Harris of Middlebury College. I'll find a link!

In the meantime, I strongly recommend Latin Per Diem, which you can find on YouTube.

The idea of a textual "progress bar" is interesting, but would fail to account for attrition; I was considerably more well-versed in the key texts 3 or 4 years ago than I am now. Without continual re-reading, I can feel the ground slipping away under my feet. Bill Bryson captures my feeling neatly;

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“I drove in the gloomy frame of mind that overtakes me at the end of every big trip. In another day or two I would be back in New Hampshire and all these experiences would march off as in a Disney film to the dusty attic of my brain and try to find space for themselves amid all the ridiculous accumulated clutter of half a century’s disordered living. Before long, I would be thinking, ‘Now what was the name of that place where I saw the Big Lobster?’ Then: ‘Didn’t I go to Tasmania? Are you quite sure? Let me see the book.’ Then finally: ‘The prime minister of Australia? No, sorry. No idea."

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Joshua just to be clear from what you wrote, which was excellent,let me confirm: while they are clearly related, do you see 1 isonomia, and 2 nature never makes a single thing of a kind, as separate and distinct arguments?

That is an excellent question, for which I don't have an easy answer!

The closest I can come to this analogy in the texts is Vatican Sayings 17 (Peter Saint-Andre translation):

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"It is not the young man who is most happy, but the old man who has lived beautifully; for despite being at his very peak the young man stumbles around as if he were of many minds, whereas the old man has settled into old age as if in a harbor, secure in his gratitude for the good things he was once unsure of."

The old man followed the compass furnished by nature, directed toward pleasure, through the whole of his life. The young man is still fumbling over a cluttered desk of conflicting charts, inaccurate log-books, wild rumors and legends of monsters, and on and on.

I'm coming late to this thread, so there will probably be some overlap. But I think I have a novel approach.

Don asked the question (if I'm summarizing fairly) whether the primary 'end' of life can ever be described as other than the highest good.

First, a quote from Tony Kushner's excellent script in the film Lincoln:

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Thaddeus Stevens:

You know that the inner compass that should direct the soul toward justice has ossified in white men and women, North and South, unto utter uselessness through tolerating the evil of slavery.

Lincoln:

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll point you True North from where you are standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what's the use of knowing True North?

Now, that quote has problems (ahem...True North?), but the analogy of the compass doesn't seem half bad here.

An Epicurean might well say that the inner compass furnished by nature will–not should, but will–direct the soul toward pleasure. The compass is not normative, it is descriptive–even the inner compass of infants can be inferred to point toward pleasure.

If an individual finds themselves repeatedly veering toward pain and anxiety, it is not because their compass doesn't work–it is because they are ignoring it, or have conditioned themselves to use it improperly, or they've been given misleading directions or a faulty map (for example, they've been raised to understand that "real pleasure" is in following Christ, or whatever). What they need is not a moral chastising, but simply better training. They need to consult their compass, not someone else's poor directions.

The direction of pain isn't evil, or the "greatest bad", any more than South is bad. But it's not the direction we're driven toward by instinct, and upon reflection we'll probably find it's not the direction we really want to be going anyway. Nature has not furnished us a compass that points toward pain.

Even in consulting our compass, furnished by nature to point toward pleasure, we won't always be able to travel there in a straight line. Sometimes we have to traverse in the direction of pain to find a route that goes ultimately toward pleasure; a route that answers the cry of the inner compass.

So perhaps instead of saying "life is the highest good", or "pleasure is the highest good in life", we should be saying "pleasure is the magnetic North of life's compass".

Reading more on isonomia, I can see this as the under-pinning logic that gets us from one observed world, to many conjectured worlds, as one example. In that case, it is a species of inductive argument: "the inference of a general law from particular instances".

There's a quote in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories where Sherlock Holmes says that if a logician were presented for the first time with a drop of water, he could infer the existence of a Pacific Ocean and a Niagara Falls without ever having seen either.

Isonomia would be an even more direct line of argument; someone presented for the first time with a Niagara Falls could very reasonably infer the existence of a Victoria Falls.

If you hold as a premise that "nature never furnishes only one thing of a kind", then the argument becomes deductive and the conclusion stands or falls exclusively on the merit of that premise.

So the obvious question that imposes is this; do we accept or reject the premise? Does nature ever furnish only one thing of a kind? Bearing in mind, of course, that each kind of atom always occurs in refulgent quantity.

(Some atoms are unstable and do not, evidently, occur in nature. It requires a particle accelerator to produce them and they only "survive" for a fraction of a nanosecond. But the potential to produce them is always there.)

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Are there any other contenders for the role of primary divinity in Epicurean religion?

If the interpretation of George Santayana and other scholars is to be trusted, Lucretius' Venus is only one half of a dyad representing the Empedoclean principles of Love and Strife, re-creation and destruction, accretion and dissolution—things coming together and things falling apart. Co-equal and co-eternal, and each a necessary condition for the existence of the other.

Venus, then; first among equals? I don't have an opinion on whether or not DRN is a finished poem, but I find I love the idea that a 7th book would have ended with a Requiem to Mars—as in a sense the 6th book does, with the account of the plague in Athens.

Interestingly (or perhaps not), Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky and Mars occasionally outshines even Jupiter himself for third place.

Your post brings back a memory of Civics class in high school. One of our homework assignments was to draft a Declaration of Independence from whatever we chose. I wish I could remember what I declared my independence from.

I think Don is on the right track. Principal Doctrine 31 makes the point explicit:

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Natural justice is a symbol or expression of usefullness, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another.

And 24:

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Those animals which are incapable of making covenants with one another, to the end that they may neither inflict nor suffer harm, are without either justice or injustice. And those tribes which either could not or would not form mutual covenants to the same end are in like case.

In light of this, "natural justice" is not to be confused with "Natural Law"; it is merely the sense of justice inherent to human nature. And yet even here there is hairsplitting, for though all humans likely possess this innate sense as an heirloom of our evolutionary past, it is quite possible to be conditioned by culture or circumstance out of a sense of justice.

Even in lower order animals we can see certain seemingly altruistic behaviors, like food-sharing, that hint at the development of this trait in humans.

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Divine Nature as an abstraction is also thought to be innate. Epicurus' evidence for this is the near-universality of belief among humans; even today, the rate of proper atheism among U.S. adults is something like 5 percent. There is a tendency among the non-religious to believe that religious belief at some distant epoch will at long last perish from the Earth, ushering in a golden age of...well, I don't know what exactly.

But if Epicurus is right, this is not to be hoped for. Like Sigmund Freud in his Future of an Illusion, Epicurus seems to have recognized that the religious sense is innate; like the sense of justice, it can be conditioned against by culture or circumstance, but on the whole our species is not likely to abandon it altogether.

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But here is where things get interesting; in the case of justice, Epicurus' account is descriptive, not normative. It tells us how things are, in other words; not necessarily how they should be. Primitive tribes whose culture or circumstance prevent them from exercising a sense of justice are not thereby unjust. In living without justice, they also ipso facto live without injustice. The words cease to carry any meaning or applicability for those peoples.

And this should be true of the divine nature as well. There will be those for whom the hypothetical objection imagined by Pascal is a truth to their own nature; "I am so made that I cannot believe."

Lacking a sense of the godly ought not make one ungodly, if the same is true of justice. It ought to be possible to, I might say, sublimate beyond the reach of the question altogether; to change one's state so completely that it no longer applies. But that's my argument, and not Epicurus'.

My late grandmother wrote a letter–something like 14 pages of fine cursive—toward the end of her life to one of my many cousins for a school project.

It is the only extant "memoir" in my family that I am aware of for that period, and is full of historical interest in a parochial kind of way. A copy of the letter did not fall into my hands until it began to recirculate after her death.

It was in reading that letter that I first became aware of a particular feature of interest of that time period, dotting the landscape of the upper midwest; the ballroom venue.

It was during a tour of these venues (the "Winter Dance Party Tour") that Buddy Holly's plane crashed after his last performance at a ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. The family farm, which another cousin now runs, is less than hour from that very venue.

So thanks for posting these! My family on both sides were living in the northern counties of Central Iowa at the time; out of 30-odd aunts and uncles, someone must have seen The Epicureans play.

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If the Romans thought it was perfectly adequate in the order they used then we can make sense of it too.

😂

For an extra treat, look up the etymology of the English word 'adequate'.

After reading the thread I spotted it at once.

Also, if someone can post the Stallings translation I'd like to see how she handles it in long lines.