Posts by Joshua

Quote from Epicurus and His Philosophy, by Norman DeWitt

[Epicurus'] finding is that time is "an accident of accidents," and, if his reasoning be closely scrutinized, time seems to be even less than this.

The line of reasoning may be sketched as follows: a human being is susceptible of sickness but sickness is not a permanent attribute, only a temporary condition, that is, an accident. Sickness in its turn may be long or short, but this quality of length or brevity is not a permanent attribute but an accident. Therefore it is an accident of an accident. Next, by analogy, since we associate time with states of health or sickness, the time of their duration is said to be long or short. Thus long and short become predicates of time while in reality they apply only to states of health or sickness. This amounts to saying that in the phrases "a long time" or "a short time" the adjectives are transferred epithets.

Incidentally, in the text of Epicurus this paragraph on the topic of time follows immediately upon the discussion of attributes and accidents. This juxtaposition confirms the assumption that the prolepsis is rightly interpreted as an anticipatory notion of the essential attributes of the subject of examination.

pp. 147-148

Following this line of thinking moves us firmly into Bryan's area, so perhaps he can comment.

Page 229 begins the subsection "Pleasure not increased by Immortality", which he ends thus;

Quote

The attainment to this state [the limit of pleasure], he now declares, is a condition of one dimension. He seems to think of it as an Alpinist would regard the ascent of an arduous mountain peak. The pleasure would not be increased by remaining on the peak.

Also, Cassius :

Quote

So Mitsis thinks that Epicurus would not say that if one has an option to choose between a long happy life and a short happy one he would choose the longer?

In fairness to Mitsis, I do not think this is his conclusion in the passage you quoted. If anything, Mitsis is saying that Epicurus would choose the long happy life over the short happy life, and that this choice involves him in a paradox.

That looks substantially more complete, thank you Don!

Welcome! You paint a pleasant picture.

Quote

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

- Constantine P. Cavafy, from Ithaka

(Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

Display More

And hey, why not:

Quote

Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine

Made of silver or of golden

Either from the mountains of Madrid

Or from the coast of Barcelona

Quote

Epicurus, as you yourself were saying, maintains that long duration can not add anything to happiness, and that as much pleasure is enjoyed in a brief span of time as if pleasure were everlasting.

I have to say, this does not appear to me to be a very literal translation. I'll look into this.

I still tend to think Epicurus was responding to Plato's Philebus in his discussion of limits, duration, and death. I'll have to review that dialogue.

Carpe Diem: Odes 1:11 - Horace — COONEYCLASSICS

Everyone knows the phrase “Carpe Diem,” or “seize the day,” but did you know where it comes from? The well-known Roman poet, Horace, gave the phrase its…

www.cooneyclassics.org

Horace's 11th ode gives us the phrase carpe diem, and a great many others carried the theme.

Usually it involves the speaker of the poem trying to seduce a woman;

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven,…

www.poetryfoundation.org

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled…

www.poetryfoundation.org

To His Coy Mistress

My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to…

www.poetryfoundation.org

Here is that passage from Candide:

Quote

Pangloss made answer in these terms: "Oh, my dear Candide, you remember Paquette, that pretty wench who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the delights of paradise, which produced in me those hell torments with which you see me devoured; she was infected with them, she is perhaps dead of them. This present Paquette received of a learned Grey Friar, who had traced it to its source; he had had it of an old countess, who had received it from a cavalry captain, who owed it to a marchioness, who took it from a page, who had received it from a Jesuit, who when a novice had it in a direct line from one of the companions of Christopher Columbus.[3] For my part I shall give it to nobody, I am dying."

"Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it?"

"Not at all," replied this great man, "it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently even[Pg 16] hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal. We are also to observe that upon our continent, this distemper is like religious controversy, confined to a particular spot. The Turks, the Indians, the Persians, the Chinese, the Siamese, the Japanese, know nothing of it; but there is a sufficient reason for believing that they will know it in their turn in a few centuries. In the meantime, it has made marvellous progress among us, especially in those great armies composed of honest well-disciplined hirelings, who decide the destiny of states; for we may safely affirm that when an army of thirty thousand men fights another of an equal number, there are about twenty thousand of them p-x-d on each side."

Ha! That genuinely made me laugh. I haven't read that text since...2019, so I'll need to refresh my memory.

Syphilis was endemic to the Americas, and was introduced into Europe by Columbus on his return. Well, Columbus and his men. I suppose I can't blame him personally. Voltaire discusses this in his Candide, which is the only thing I remember about that book; Syphilis is the price of getting chocolate, which was also exclusive to the Americas. Amerigo Vespucci wrote a few letters about his travels to the New World, and in one of them he says this about the native inhabitants:

Quote

We did not find that these people had any laws; they cannot be called Moors nor Jews, but worse than Gentiles. For we did not see that they offered any sacrifices, nor have they any place of worship. I judge their lives to be Epicurean. Their habitations are in common. Their dwellings, are like huts, but strongly built of very large trees, and covered with palm leaves, secure from tempests and winds. In some places they are of such length and width that we found 600 souls in one single house. We found villages of only thirteen houses where there were 4,000 inhabitants. They build the villages every eight or ten years, and when asked why they did this, they replied that it was because the soil was corrupted and infected, and caused diseases in their bodies, so they chose a new site. Their wealth consists of the feathers of birds of many colours, or "paternosters" made of the fins of fishes, or of white or green stones, which they wear on their necks, lips, and ears; and of many other things which have no value for us. They have no commerce, and neither buy nor sell. In conclusion, they live, and are content with what nature has given them.

Erasmus will certainly have read these letters. Not only were they sensationally popular, but Erasmus' close friend Thomas More used the voyages of Vespucci as the frame narrative for his Utopia. I explored this connection in tedious length in another thread here.

I think in some respects this text might bear fruitful comparison with The Epicurean, a dialogue by Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus has his interlocutor make the claim that "If we will speak the truth none are greater Epicureans than those Christians that live a pious life." I see that I started a thread on this text in December of 2019.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (Wikipedia), a didactic poem written in four 'epistles', touches somewhat inscrutably on many of the questions we deal with in our discussions here. This poem is well known for two quotations which have passed so far into common usage as to be justly called proverbs. From the first epistle comes the line "Hope springs eternal in the human breast", and at the opening of the second epistle is Pope's summary of the main thrust of the poem; "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; //
The proper study of Mankind is Man."

In an essay entitled Some Thoughts on the Remembering (and Dismembering) of Lucretius’s De rerum natura in Translations, Commentaries, and Philosophical Poems, 1650-1750, John Baker writes as follows;

Quote

What Hardie identifies in Milton and Lucretius recalls Miriam Leranbaum’s reading and description of Pope’s Essay on Man as “the reversing of Lucretius” (58).14 Lucretius’s arguments and positions are both contested and rejected, either explicitly and totally, as with Blackmore, or implicitly and partially, as is the case with Pope, but remain present. The two poems can be read as diametrically opposed examples of this imitation-through-opposition strategy. The dismemberment in the sense of outright refutation in Blackmore is systematic and repetitive. In the case of Pope one has the impression that Lucretius is often at the back (or indeed the front) of his mind despite the manifest presence of multiple other sources that have been signaled and discussed by commentators over the years, and that are flagged up in the editions of the Essay by Maynard Mack (1950) and, more recently, by Tom Jones (2016). David B. Morris asserts that “Pope’s primary model for An Essay on Man was undoubtedly Lucretius,” referring to him as “the classical prototype of the philosophical poet” (1984, 156).

Here are some of the relevant excerpts: I will caution readers not to assume that they have understood his views based on the following passages, for as I said, his philosophy is somewhat inscrutable without deeper study. I do not pretend to understand half of what he is saying here myself! Here are the opening lines;

Epistle I

• Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
  To low ambition, and the pride of kings.
  Let us (since life can little more supply
  Than just to look about us and to die)
  Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
  A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
  A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot;
  Or garden tempting with forbidden fruit.
  Together let us beat this ample field,
  Try what the open, what the covert yield;
  The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore
  Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
  Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies,
  And catch the manners living as they rise;
  Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;
  But vindicate the ways of God to man.

That last line is taken nearly verbatim from John Milton's Paradise Lost.

• Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
  All but the page prescribed, their present state:
  From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
  Or who could suffer being here below?
  The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
  Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
  Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
  And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
  Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
  That each may fill the circle, marked by Heaven:
  Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
  A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
  Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
  And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
  Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
  Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
  What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
  But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
  Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
  Man never is, but always to be blest:
  The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
  Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

This section is interesting. Heaven is hidden from us, but, thinks Pope, we have good reason to hope for it. God sees all - including atoms and worlds made of atoms hurled into ruin.

• Yet cry, if man’s unhappy, God’s unjust;
  If man alone engross not Heaven’s high care,
  Alone made perfect here, immortal there:
  Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod,
  Re-judge His justice, be the God of God.
  In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;
  All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
  Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
  Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
  Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,
  Aspiring to be angels, men rebel:
  And who but wishes to invert the laws
  Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause.

In spite of what is to come in this poem, the poet establishes himself as pious in his religious views.

• Better for us, perhaps, it might appear,
  Were there all harmony, all virtue here;
  That never air or ocean felt the wind;
  That never passion discomposed the mind.
  But all subsists by elemental strife;
  And passions are the elements of life.
  The general order, since the whole began,
  Is kept in nature, and is kept in man.

Two lines of interest here. The first bears some similarity to this passage from Tennyson's Lucretius;

The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of mow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!

The second line - "But all subsist by elemental strife" - recalls the Empedoclean view of nature as bound by the competing forces of Love and Strife.

Epistle II

Here are the opening lines of the second epistle, and they summarize the main points of his ethical philosophy. The stoics and the sceptics both come in for some criticism.

• Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;
  The proper study of mankind is man.
  Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
  A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
  With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
  With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
  He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
  In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
  In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
  Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
  Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
  Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
  Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
  Still by himself abused, or disabused;
  Created half to rise, and half to fall;
  Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
  Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
  The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
  Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
  Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
  Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
  Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
  Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
  To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
  Or tread the mazy round his followers trod*,
  And quitting sense call imitating God;
  As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
  And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
  Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—
  Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

*A reference to the Peripatetics, perhaps? The line about imitating God smacks of Aristotle.

• Two principles in human nature reign;
  Self-love to urge, and reason, to restrain;
  Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call,
  Each works its end, to move or govern all
  And to their proper operation still,
  Ascribe all good; to their improper, ill.
  Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul;
  Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole.

Here Pope outlines the two principles which "in human nature reign" - not Empedoclean Love vs Strife, but self-love and reason.

• Let subtle schoolmen teach these friends (i.e. self-love and reason) to fight,
  More studious to divide than to unite;
  And grace and virtue, sense and reason split,
  With all the rash dexterity of wit.
  Wits, just like fools, at war about a name,
  Have full as oft no meaning, or the same.
  Self-love and reason to one end aspire,
  Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;
  But greedy that, its object would devour,
  This taste the honey, and not wound the flower:
  Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
  Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.

Now things are getting interesting. Pope seems to say here that self-love and reason, the guiding principles of human life, have a common end or telos; pleasure and the absence of pain. However, pleasure wrongly understood may well be the greatest evil; it is only pleasure rightly understood which is the greatest good.

• In lazy apathy let stoics boast
  Their virtue fixed; ’tis fixed as in a frost;
  Contracted all, retiring to the breast;
  But strength of mind is exercise, not rest:
  The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
  Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
  On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,
  Reason the card (compass card?), but passion is the gale;
  Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
  He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.

Here we have another surprising dig at stoicism.

• Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road,
  Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
  Love, hope, and joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train,
  Hate, fear, and grief, the family of pain,
  These mixed with art, and to due bounds confined,
  Make and maintain the balance of the mind;
  The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife
  Gives all the strength and colour of our life.
  Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes;
  And when in act they cease, in prospect rise:
  Present to grasp, and future still to find,
  The whole employ of body and of mind.
  All spread their charms, but charm not all alike;
  On different senses different objects strike;
  Hence different passions more or less inflame,
  As strong or weak, the organs of the frame;

And this passage continues the discussion of pleasure and pain. Also, we there is a line regarding sensation - different objects strike on different senses. This passage is followed by an extended meditation on vice and virtue, which I have skimmed. Read it yourself if you care so much!

Epistle III

Here are the opening lines of the third epistle. Earlier in the poem (in a passage which I did not quote) Pope has laid forth his explanation of the Great Chain of Being, and in this passage he reinforces the general idea. There is also another reference to atoms.

• Here, then, we rest: “The Universal Cause
  Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.”
  In all the madness of superfluous health,
  The trim of pride, the impudence of wealth,
  Let this great truth be present night and day;
  But most be present, if we preach or pray.
  Look round our world; behold the chain of love
  Combining all below and all above.
  See plastic Nature working to this end,
  The single atoms each to other tend,
  Attract, attracted to, the next in place
  Formed and impelled its neighbour to embrace.
  See matter next, with various life endued,
  Press to one centre still, the general good.
  See dying vegetables life sustain,
  See life dissolving vegetate again:
  All forms that perish other forms supply
  (By turns we catch the vital breath, and die),
  Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
  They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
  Nothing is foreign: parts relate to whole;
  One all-extending, all-preserving soul
  Connects each being, greatest with the least;
  Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast;
  All served, all serving: nothing stands alone;
  The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

This next passage stands in profound contrast to Lucretius' understanding of human prehistory;

• Who taught the nations of the field and wood
  To shun their poison, and to choose their food?
  Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand,
  Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand?
  Who made the spider parallels design,
  Sure as Demoivre, without rule or line?
  Who did the stork, Columbus-like, explore
  Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before?
  Who calls the council, states the certain day,
  Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?
• III. God in the nature of each being founds
  Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds:
  But as He framed a whole, the whole to bless,
  On mutual wants built mutual happiness:
  So from the first, eternal order ran,
  And creature linked to creature, man to man.

While Lucretius held that language, fire, agriculture, and civilization arose gradually out of primitive conditions by human effort alone, Pope believes that God endowed man with the capacity for these things and that nature instructed man in the use of that capacity. I have excerpted only a tiny portion of his argument here, which is rather long and rambling. He ends this epistle with the following couplet; "Thus God and Nature linked the general frame, // And bade self-love and social be the same."

Epistle IV

• Oh, happiness, our being’s end and aim!
  Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate’er thy name:
  That something still which prompts the eternal sigh,
  For which we bear to live, or dare to die,
  Which still so near us, yet beyond us lies,
  O’erlooked, seen double, by the fool, and wise.
  Plant of celestial seed! if dropped below,
  Say, in what mortal soil thou deign’st to grow?
  Fair opening to some Court’s propitious shine,
  Or deep with diamonds in the flaming mine?
  Twined with the wreaths Parnassian laurels yield,
  Or reaped in iron harvests of the field?
  Where grows?—where grows it not? If vain our toil,
  We ought to blame the culture, not the soil:
  Fixed to no spot is happiness sincere,
  ’Tis nowhere to be found, or everywhere;
  ’Tis never to be bought, but always free,
  And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee.
  Ask of the learned the way? The learned are blind;
  This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind;
  Some place the bliss in action, some in ease,
  Those call it pleasure, and contentment these;
  Some, sunk to beasts, find pleasure end in pain;
  Some, swelled to gods, confess even virtue vain;
  Or indolent, to each extreme they fall,
  To trust in everything, or doubt of all.
  Who thus define it, say they more or less
  Than this, that happiness is happiness?

These are the opening lines of the fourth epistle, in which the poet reiterates that 'happiness', also variously called good, or pleasure, is "our being's end and aim". Pleasure or happiness is the telos, but "the learned are blind" and cannot expound on this pleasure or happiness without falling into error. He does come close to explaining himself, however, which is a mercy;

• Know, all the good that individuals find,
  Or God and Nature meant to mere mankind,
  Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
  Lie in three words, health, peace, and competence.
  But health consists with temperance alone;
  And peace, oh, virtue! peace is all thy own.
  The good or bad the gifts of fortune gain;
  But these less taste them, as they worse obtain.
  Say, in pursuit of profit or delight,
  Who risk the most, that take wrong means, or right;
  Of vice or virtue, whether blessed or cursed,
  Which meets contempt, or which compassion first?
  Count all the advantage prosperous vice attains,
  ’Tis but what virtue flies from and disdains:
  And grant the bad what happiness they would,
  One they must want, which is, to pass for good.
  Oh, blind to truth, and God’s whole scheme below,
  Who fancy bliss to vice, to virtue woe!
  Who sees and follows that great scheme the best,
  Best knows the blessing, and will most be blest.
  But fools the good alone unhappy call,
  For ills or accidents that chance to all.

Pleasure consists of health, peace, and competence, and each of these rest on virtue. Only fools think that good people are unhappy.

• “But sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed.”
  What then? Is the reward of virtue bread?
  That, vice may merit, ’tis the price of toil;
  The knave deserves it, when he tills the soil,
  The knave deserves it, when he tempts the main,
  Where folly fights for kings, or dives for gain.
  The good man may be weak, be indolent;
  Nor is his claim to plenty, but content.

^Here we have more on the same theme.

The poet then goes on to explain that wealth, fame, power, etc only really give benefit to the good and wise. He then ends the poem with a prayer.

As a medieval scribe once wrote in the margin of a manuscript, “Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

Serafino de' Serafini, Allegory of St. Augustine as Master of the Order

St. Augustine as Master of the Order

Nature's God; The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Cicero, On Ends

Quote

It is however my opinion that if I shew there is something moral, which is essentially desirable by reason of its inherent qualities and for its own sake, all the doctrines of your school are over- thrown. So when I have once briefly, as our time requires, determined the nature of this object, I will touch upon all your statements, Torquatus, unless perchance my recollection fails me. Well, by what is moral we understand something of such a nature that, even if absolutely deprived of utility, it may with justice be eulogized for its own qualities, apart from all rewards or advantages. Now the nature of this object cannot be so easily understood from the definition I have adopted (though to a considerable extent it can) as from the general verdict of all mankind, and the inclinations and actions of all the best men, who do very many things for the sole reason that they are seemly, right and moral, though they see that no profit will follow.

*************

‘How I wish, said he, ‘that you had felt a bent towards the Stoic school! It was surely to be expected of you, if of any one, that you would place in the category of good nothing but virtue.’ ‘Look well to it, said I; ‘perhaps it was rather to be expected of you, inasmuch as your views substantially agreed with mine, that you would not force upon the doctrines new titles. Our principles are at one, and only our language is at variance.’ ‘Our principles are very far from being at one,’ said he, ‘for whatever that thing may be over and above morality, which you declare to be desirable, and reckon among things good, you thereby quench morality itself, which we may liken to the light cast by virtue, and virtue too you utterly overthrow.’ ‘ Your words, Cato,’ said I, ‘are grandiose; but do you not see that you share your high- sounding phraseology with Pyrrho and Aristo, who are thorough- going levellers? I should like to know what you think of them.’ ‘Do you ask what I think of them?’ said he. ‘I think that all the good staunch upright soberminded statesmen of whom we have been told, or whom we have ourselves seen, who without any learning and merely following nature’s guidance, have performed many meritorious exploits, were better trained by nature than they could possibly have been trained by philosophy, if they had accepted any other doctrine than that which regards nothing save morality as belonging to the category of good, and as belonging to the category of evil nothing save baseness; as to the remaining philosophical systems which, no doubt in different degrees, but still all of them to some extent count as good or as evil some object unconnected with virtue, they, as I think, not only fail to aid us or strengthen us in the struggle to become better, but actually corrupt nature.

-Translated James Reid

My chart on Ethics

Diogenes of Oenoanda

Quote

If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involved inquiry into «what is the means of happiness?» and they wanted to say «the virtues» (which would actually be true), it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this, without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not «what is the means of happiness?» but «what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?», I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which are inopportunely messed about by these people (being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end), are in no way an end, but the means to the end. Let us therefore now state that this is true, making it our starting-point.

Suppose, then, someone were to ask someone, though it is a naive question, «who is it whom these virtues benefit?», obviously the answer will be «man.» The virtues certainly do not make provision for these birds flying past, enabling them to fly well, or for each of the other animals: they do not desert the nature with which they live and by which they have been engendered; rather it is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist.

Diogenes of Oinoanda Fragment 32 (Martin Ferguson Smith)

Quote from Usener Fragment 67

"For I at least do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a visible form."

Whenever we discuss the Letter to Menoikeus, I feel it's important to contrast it with what Epicurus wrote in the above surviving fragment from a lost work Peri Telos, "On the End". For this and other reasons, I am unwilling to cede the word pleasure to the naysayers. We lose far more than we stand to gain. Lucretius sets the tone for me: dux vitae dia voluptas; Divine Pleasure, the guide of life.

If people hear 'pleasure' and think 'bodily pleasure', I do not regard that as a problem - mainly because I think those people are probably motivated to this misinterpretation by religion or politics or culture or upbringing, and they would reject Epicureanism no matter how thoroughly it was explained to them.

We tested the Zoom to YouTube process this evening.

On the day of the livestream, navigate to the EpicureanFriends YouTube Channel and click on the logo shown here;

While the livestream is active this logo will have a red ring around it.

After the livestream ends, YouTube will put the recording under the live tab;

This is the link for the EpicureanFriends YouTube Channel.

Quote

CASSIUS

I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus,
As well as I do know your outward favor.
Well, honor is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Caesar; so were you;
We both have fed as well, and we can both
Endure the winter’s cold as well as he.
For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me “Dar’st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood
And swim to yonder point?” Upon the word,
Accoutered as I was, I plungèd in
And bade him follow; so indeed he did.
The torrent roared, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy.
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake. ’Tis true, this god did shake.
His coward lips did from their color fly,
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world
Did lose his luster. I did hear him groan.
Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
Mark him and write his speeches in their books,
“Alas,” it cried “Give me some drink, Titinius”
As a sick girl. You gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone.

Display More

Another drowning story, again with an Epicurean as the rescuer. I don't know how I missed it before!

That is the plan, Godfrey!

I was vegetarian for nearly a year. I stopped when I started driving truck, and since I had to have a physical done to get a CDL, I also had bloodwork and my vision tested. Both of them had actually improved after just under twelve months.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I was surprised by the changes!

He repeatedly cheated Death (Thanatos, one of the psychompomps who escorted souls to the afterlife.)

We can start by categorizing ancient languages based on three factors;

• The quantity of surviving texts
• The transmission of the language and its script from antiquity to modernity
• The modern languages descended from or influenced by them
• Surviving grammars and lexicons and other commentaries on the language itself written by native speakers

For example, the Linear A script of the ancient Minoan language (which has not yet been deciphered) presents several major challenges to scholars. One challenge is the very small body of surviving texts, only ~1400 inscriptions. Latin, by contrast, is thought to survive in more than half a million inscriptions (to say nothing of the massive corpus of literary works). The number of surving Linear A inscriptions is then less than 28 hundredths of 1 percent of the number of Latin inscriptions. Linear A is itself an ancestor of Linear B, the script of Mycenaean Greek, the oldest form of Ancient Greek which we know about.

At the other extreme are Classical Latin and Ancient Greek. In both cases, we can rely on the following lines of evidence;

• Large quantities of surving texts

  Literary texts, political and legal documents and decrees, private letters, inscriptions, funeral epitaphs, graffiti, surviving papyrus scrolls, and place names that are still in use after 1500 years

• Alphabets that have been in use continuously since antiquity
• Well studied living descendant languages (although Ancient and Modern Greek are considered sets of dialects of the same evolving language, much like Old, Middle, and Modern English)
• Commentaries on the language written by native speakers from the ancient world
• An unbroken succession of native speakers (Greek) or non-native learners (Latin). There was never any point in time within the last two thousand years when no one living could read Latin.

If I was getting a tattoo in Latin or Greek, and a friend asked me how I could be sure what the text of the tattoo really said, this is the kind of information I would present to them.

One final note; we cannot really discuss levels of confidence with regard to an entire language system. There will always be uncertainty around the edges, what with words that only appear once in the entire surviving corpus (hapax legomenon), a particular morphology of a known word that never appears at all (like the pluperfect of a verb that only survives in the present active infinitive, for example), gaps (lacunae) in surviving texts, and so on.

The point here is that we can be resoundingly confident in the meaning of the word aqua, while at the same time being less certain about the etymology of the word mentula as used in the erotica poems of Catullus.

I don't have an answer, but I would like to point out that there is good reason to think that Hermarchus was the first friend and scholar to join Epicurus apart from the latter's own brothers.

Epicurus' course brought him through the following places:

Born on Samos -> Colophon -> Mytilene -> Lampsacus -> Died in Athens

--His brothers may have gone with him, or they may have joined him later.

--Hermarchus was from Mytilene.

--Metrodorus, Polyaenus, Colotes, Idomeneus, Batis, Leonteus, and Themista were all, if the meagre evidence is to be relied upon, from Lampsacus.

Quote

An Account of my last interview with David Hume, Esq.
Partly recorded in my Journal, partly enlarged from my memory, 3 March 1777

James Boswell

On Sunday forenoon the 7 of July 1776, being too late for church, I went to see Mr David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just dying. I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. He had before him Dr. Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end. I think these were his words. I know not how I contrived to get the subject of immortality introduced. He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke. I asked him if he was not religious when he was young. He said he was, and he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing, having no inclination to commit them. This, he said, was strange work; for instance, to try if, notwithstanding his excelling his schoolfellows, he had no pride or vanity. He smiled in ridicule of this as absurd and contrary to fixed principles and necessary consequences, not adverting that religious discipline does not mean to extinguish, but to moderate, the passions; and certainly an excess of pride or vanity is dangerous and generally hurtful. He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious. This was just an extravagant reverse of the common remark as to infidels.

I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever. That immorality, if it were at all, must be general; that a great proportion of the human race has hardly any intellectual qualities; that a great proportion dies in infancy before being possessed of reason; yet all these must be immortal; that a porter who gets drunk by ten o'clock with gin must be immortal; that the trash of every age must be preserved, and that new universes must be created to contain such infinite numbers. This appeared to me an unphilosophical objection, and I said, 'Mr. Hume, you know spirit does not take up space'.

***

I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes. 'Well,' said I, 'Mr Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.' 'No, no,' said he. 'But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new.' In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother's pious instructions, of Dr. Johnson's noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith.

***

He had once said to me, on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright, that he did not wish to be immortal. This was a most wonderful thought. The reason he gave was that he was very well in this state of being, and that the chances were very much against his being so well in another state; and he would rather not be more than be worse. I answered that it was reasonable to hope he would be better; that there would be a progressive improvement. I tried him at this interview with that topic, saying that a future state was surely a pleasing idea. He said no, for that it was always seen through a gloomy medium; there was always a Phlegethon or a hell. 'But,' said I, 'would it not be agreeable to have hopes of seeing our friends again?' and I mentioned three men lately deceased, for whom I knew he had a high value: Ambassador Keith, Lord Alemoor, and Baron Mure. He owned it would be agreeable, but added that none of them entertained such a notion. I believe he said, such a foolish, or such an absurd, notion; for he was indecently and impolitely positive in incredulity.

***

I said, 'If I were you, I should regret annihilation. Had I written such an admirable history, I should be sorry to leave it.' He said, 'I shall leave that history, of which you are pleased to speak so favourably, as perfect as I can.' He said, too, that all the great abilities with which men had ever been endowed were relative to this world. He said he became a greater friend to the Stuart family as he advanced in studying for his history; and he hoped he had vindicated the two first of them so effectually that they would never again be attacked.

Mr. Lauder, his surgeon, came in for a little, and Mr. Mure, the Baron's son, for another small interval. He was, as far as I could judge, quite easy with both. He said he had no pain, but was wasting away. I left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time.

Display More

Immortality: Hume and Boswell

I thought Philosophy Talk listeners might enjoy Hume’s last thoughts on immortality, as recorded by James Boswell, who visited Hume hoping for a deathbed…

www.philosophytalk.org

https://understandinghumanism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-death-of-David-Hume.pdf