Posts by Joshua

And if you're not familiar with the painter, this should give some hint as to his legacy!

I had not heard of this work before. It was done as an illustration for Thomas Moore's "The Epicurean". Coming from a pre-eminent English painter remembered for his haunting portrayals of the force, power, and grandeur of Nature, this piece strikes me as an uncharacteristic nod to the balance of classical harmonies. I have not read this book, but I do mention it Here.

When we studied Turner in college as part of British Romanticism, it was his nautical paintings we looked at. You can find a gallery representative of his work on the Wikipedia page.

Although it occurs to me now that I haven't even taken Lucretius into account. 🤔

Since we're on the subject, I did recently have a conversation with a young man from Texas who tells me that cow udders are a delicacy in those parts. With a decent bottle of red, one, though of modest means, might nevertheless dine like an aristocrat.

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If you miss udders and draughts of Chian wine, you will see at least sincere friends and you will hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians. But if you ever cast your eyes on me, Piso, we shall celebrate the twentieth richly instead of simply.

-Philodemus

Going from memory, I believe that bread and water (Diogenes Laertius) and a 'pot of cheese' (Usener) will round out the attested fare.

I sometimes use Google's "Ngrams" feature to dredge up old writings on Epicureanism. Today I decided to do a few comparative searches.

Here's how this works; you enter a search term, and google scans through an enormous quantity of digitized books and newspapers published over the last two hundred years. The data is then plotted on a line graph. I don't know how much we can really glean from this data, since it's plagued by inevitable errors (text-scanning a photocopy is hideously inaccurate), and also inevitable omissions and biases (presumably works still under copyright are excluded, for example). Nevertheless, here are a few eye-catching comparisons:

I somehow missed this thread in May, but I'm glad to have caught it now.

It's true that we don't have much context here from an Epicurean point of view, but in other respects the context is quite rich—it involves the whole history of Greek culture.

The belief among these ancients seems to have been that the underworld was not a place of torture, except in a few notable and extreme cases, but a place of forgottenness. Achilles, Pericles, Homer—a handful of the select and renowned have gone to the Happy Isles, and their names will echo until the world ends. But the common lot of humanity is to wander forever listlessly as shades ("pale in wondrous wise" to quote a translation of Lucretius in reference to Ennius); no name, no face, no memory. Utterly forgotten. The Damnatio Memoriae was not only a punishment for tyrants brought low. It was, to the Greeks, the sad fate of almost all of us.

How happy, then, to be an Epicurean! Death holds no terror; no, not even the subtle anguish of living on without really living; of being, yet without Being. Yes, most of us will be forgotten, and not so long after our deaths.

But we will not care, because we will not exist.

Isn't it interesting? Epicureans can claim:

-The only preserved library of papyrus rolls from antiquity

-The largest collection of Greek and Roman statuary ever to be found in one place (Villa of the Papyri)

-The longest inscription surviving from the ancient world

-The best and most thorough biography in all of Diogenes Laertius' books

-An oversized share of surviving Greek and Roman cameo rings

-And to cap it all, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura–the only surviving long-form materialist work from antiquity

Not bad for a school that St. Augustine wrote off 16 centuries ago; "Its ashes are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them."

I continue to hold the view that Epicurus' approach to logic is inseparable from the intellectual climate in which he lived and worked. I've cited Stephen Spielberg's film "Lincoln" to this effect here before, and it's a perfect example of what I mean;

What Lincoln is proposing here (as memorably acted by Daniel Day-Lewis, and brilliantly scripted by Tony Kushner) is that moral laws of justice and equality can be derived from the logic of geometry. What's so striking about this scene is that it so perfectly mimics Platonism and Pythagoreanism and their geometric foundations. Lincoln is making a worthwhile and commendable moral stand, but his reasoning is faulty. There's nothing in geometry that can actually answer, with any kind of logical finality, these moral questions. In spite of the worthiness of the cause, it amounts to an abuse of reason.

This is not, in my view, to be understood as a carte-blanche dismissal of logic and reason.

Elayne I want to thank you in particular for correcting me on one point–'non-rational' is far preferable to 'irrational'!

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"When making decisions, don't use logic and reason, use the Epicurean canon.

Hmmm...🤔

I'm experiencing some heavy resistance to this phrasing. Let me see if I can articulate a response.

I first take issue with what might be differing interpretations with the word decision. If the word decision means "a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration", and these decisions can either be—according to the prevailing view of psychology—rational or irrational (in the neutral connotation of that last word), then we're faced with a startling apposition! Am I suggesting to my friends that they only make irrational decisions? I hope not. I think we too easily forget how quickly reason encroaches even on the simplest and most absent-minded of choices.

Here's a decision I often make based on personal pleasure; "I think I'll get a coke."

And here's only some of the underlying architecture of that decision;

-Observation 1: "This place sells soft drinks in a range of choices."

-Observation 2: "My previous experience with soft drinks—and it is extensive—suggests to me that a soft drink will give me pleasure."

‐Observation 3 (self evident): "pleasure is the end or goal of my life."

-Premise 1 (inductive reasoning): "If I get a coke it will probably give me pleasure this time, too."

-Decision/Conclusion: "I think I'll get a coke."

So that even if I were to restrict the question only to 'decisions about pleasure', or 'decisions about the proper end of life', I would still have problems with it. But how much more troubling when we move beyond these humble beginnings!

I have family members who hold to a position they call "Zetetic Astronomy". One of the conclusions of their astronomy is that the Earth is flat. We have very little to learn from what these people think, but there is a lot to be learned from how they think. The basis of Zeteticism is that the traditional Scientific Method is fundamentally flawed. Scientists begin by making hypotheses about their observations, which they then attempt to falsify. From the point of view of the Zeteticist, these scientists are merely introducing a prejudice or bias into their work when they hypothesize. "What they ought to be doing instead (this is me paraphrasing) is performing the observation with an unbiased mind, and trusting the results."

For example; "I don't observe a gravitational pull when I put two apples side by side. No evidence for gravity."

"When I pour water on a baseball, it runs off onto the ground. No evidence for spinning ball with water on it."

"When I ride a merry-go-round, I can feel movement and rotation. I don't normally feel that. No evidence for motion or rotation of Earth."

You get the gist. I've had wearying hours of such "arguments", and have no stomach for them any longer. This particular individual used to drive me to distraction by failing to meet one simple demand; articulate your argument in the form of a syllogism. He never agreed to do it. C'est la vie!

TL;DR—The point I'm laboring to make is that reason and logic impend rather quickly in any decision-making process. Epicurus was right to exclude them from the canon, but they become inescapable fast. No, that's not advice I would give to my friends.

I like this idea. It took me a few moments to figure out who "D.L." is, it might not hurt to give the full name on the first citation.

I reported to the ER one time with visual lights/patterns, transient aphasia, confusion, headache, vomiting—and was diagnosed with complex migraine with aura. Lucky me, I thought I was having a stroke!

It was miserable. I wouldn't say chronic, but I have had them intermittently over the years. My experience tracks with what Charles said. As soon as I understood what was going on (a phenomenon called spreading cortical depression), I began to handle them much better. The physical pain was the same but the suffering was considerably lessened. Now I know what's going to happen before it happens, and I can take measures to mitigate it. It becomes much easier to protect my abiding pleasure in this way.

I agree with Don.

And I think my answer to the bliss pill would be tentative and empirical: I'll observe its effects in others who take it, and begin to form my conclusions then. Ask me another silly hypothetical question—I have no shortage of silly hypothetical answers!

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Now I have to go back to the intermundia for a while.....

There, by contrast, is a sentence you don't often see in Georgia!

I moved to NW Florida a year ago and I'm still resisting the allure of "y'all". In lieu of bringing back "ye", which contrary to popular notions was historically plural, I'm still clinging to "you guys". But more generally I try to reframe my sentences so as to escape the problem altogether!

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I suspect good analogies could be drawn between how disinformation spreads today with they way a particular kind -Christianity- spread in the Roman Empire.

"Our problem is this: our prefrontal lobes are too small, and our adrenal glands are too big, and we're afraid of the dark and afraid to die, and we believe in the truths of holy books that are so stupid that a child can—and all children do, as you can tell by their questions—actually see right through them." -Christopher Hitchens

Bevil Higgons; "In Imitation of Lucretius"; 1736; English poem by a Jacobite historian, which attempts a Christian refutation of Lucretius' Epicureanism.

Second side note: on the line "W–– govern'd in a B–– Reign";

I'm not entirely clear who is referenced here, but Higgons and his family were well-known Jacobites who held fast to the House of Stuart after the Glorious Revolution and the installation of the Hanoverian dynasty with George I.

My best guess is that "W" is Robert Walpole, who governed under "B", being King George (either the First or Second), Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Walpole was a Whig and the Jacobites were associated with the Tory's.

Side note: he precedes his poem with a Latin inscription from Ovid:

"Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe—quem dixere Chaos;"

"There was one countenance upon all of the world—which they call Chaos;"

http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId…=&brand=default

Yet another random find.

When I saw that this was published posthumously I started to get my hopes up. Too salacious to let out in his lifetime? Sadly not. This poem should be called Against Lucretius. It's basically a systematic refutation of Lucretius' Epicureanism as expressed in the first part of DNR Book I. First there's the invocation of the biblical creator. Then a paean to the triumph of Britain; next, a nod toward atomism but bracketed by the claims that God is the designer of the atoms, and that materialism itself could never proceed past the point of random chaos.

All boiler-plate up to here, but then an interesting turn: an inversion of the crime of Agamemnon. After laying out his belief that all races are brothers (as all men are sons of Adam), it is fratricide that marks out the real crime. Slavery, suggests Higgons, is proof that man is hopelessly sinful without the guidance of God. He might as well have translated it literally—"to such heights of evil are men driven without religion."

And just a few other features of interest. His science is mostly adequate for its time, but with an oddity or two. If I'm reading it correctly, he says in one line that gravity causes heavier objects to fall faster than lighter objects–something even Lucretius knew was wrong. He also acknowledges the probable existence of life on other worlds, which is somewhat odd for someone who believes in the myths of Genesis.

Its a fairly quick read, but doesn't amount to much for us. A few pages of serviceable but uninspired heroic couplets.