Posts by Don

  • Happy Twentieth!

    I always like to go back to Philodemus's epigram inviting Piso to the 20th celebration in Herculaneum on this day:

    αὔριον εἰς λιτήν σε καλιάδα, φίλτατε Πείσων,

    ἐξ ἐνάτης ἕλκει μουσοφιλὴς ἕταρος,

    εἰκάδα δειπνίζων ἐνιαύσιον: εἰ δ᾽ ἀπολείψεις

    οὔθατα καὶ Βρομίου χιογενῆ πρόποσιν,

    ἀλλ᾽ ἑτάρους ὄψει παναληθέας, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπακούσῃ

    Φαιήκων γαίης πουλὺ μελιχρότερα:

    ἢν δέ ποτε στρέψῃς καὶ ἐς ἡμέας ὄμματα, Πείσων,

    ἄξομεν ἐκ λιτῆς εἰκάδα πιοτέρην.

    ***

    And, yes, it is udders οὔθατα and wine from the island of Chios Βρομίου χιογενῆ:

    "During the Hellenistic period, the island also had become the largest exporter of Greek wine, which was noted for being of relatively high quality (see "Chian wine"). Chian amphoras, with a characteristic sphinx emblem and bunches of grapes, have been found in nearly every country with whom the ancient Greeks traded. These countries included Gaul, Upper Egypt, and Southern Russia" (Wikipedia)

    You can find ancient recipes online for udders if y'all would like to try those.

  • Maximum pleasure as absence of all pain: a philosophical question concerning neuroscientific and Epicurean outlook toward the feeling of pleasure

    Here's some discussion too this point:

  • On Use Of The Term Apikoros / Apiqoros / Bikouros Against Epicureans

    See also:

    Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon - Hebrew Union College Press
    Before the Enlightenment, before Spinoza had rejected traditional beliefs about the Bible, came the humanistic skeptics of the Renaissance. Alongside such…
    press.huc.edu

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/23509248

    (I'll try and follow-up on that jstor paper)

    Heresy and the Formation of the Rabbinic Community
    books.google.com

  • On Use Of The Term Apikoros / Apiqoros / Bikouros Against Epicureans

    This is all fascinating! Evidently there's maybe more to the Epicurean link to Antiochus Epiphanes than I initially expected. Do we know how far back Apiqoros goes in Hebrew? To the time of the Maccabees?

    On Dune, Joshua shared this previously and it includes the additional mention of "Bicouros of Shaitan; "a lazy missionary of the devil"

    Thread

    A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arrakis

    So I've been thinking of getting into some light game modding and I've been getting into the worldbuilding side of Frank Herbert's Dune, one of the greatest sci-fi worlds ever made. His stories are set in our galaxy, but in a far distant future where Earth is nothing but a faint memory and mankind has spread across the stars. Herbert's narrative texture relies for its effect on extrapolating the development of human language, religion, and folkways across this vast scale of time, and words from…
    Joshua
    September 18, 2022 at 10:05 PM

  • What Would Epicurus Think of the Big Bang?

    Quote from Cassius

    does an analogy of ripples on an ocean have any different emotional impact or philosophical implication than the particles in space analogy?

    For me, no difference.

    I get the same sense of awe when thinking that the iron in my blood was forged in the heart of long dead stars, the oxygen I breathe is from the respiration of plants, the light that enters my eyes from Orion's Belt has been traveling for unimaginably long times before I sense it. It's only a matter of different levels of thinking about my connection to other people, other life forms, and the vast universe itself.

    PS. And I need to add that that connection isn't metaphorical or mystical or supernatural, it's literal. I am literally connected to everything else in a physical, tangible, material way. From the atoms that make me up coming from dead stars, to the air I breathe coming from plants, the acquintances and friends and relatives and acestors I have that come from all over the world, I am a result of all those connections rippling and bubbling and waving through the cosmos and out into the infinite All.

  • What Would Epicurus Think of the Big Bang?

    Quote from Bryan

    In minute 20 "There are no particles in the world, the basic fundamental building blocks of our universe are these fluid-like substances that we call fields"

    What is a "substance that is not made of any particles"?

    There are "particles" just not as we have become accustomed to think of them. The metaphor he uses of waves on the ocean seems appropriate as long as it's not taken literally.

    This whole presentation gets at the discussions we've all had on the forum in the past about different levels of perspectives and reality at different levels of perception. “By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void.” from Democritus. This presentation could be summed up “By convention atoms and void; but in reality waves and fields.”

    We don't exist at the level of waves and fields, we live our lives in the macroscopic world. But we make use of the knowledge gained by quantum field theory every day in our electronic devices. But pleasure and pain don't need to be understood at the subatomic level to guide our lives. We're flesh and blood and bone and brain interacting with other physical, emotional creatures trying to get through the day.

    For me, the idea that the particles that make me are ripples on a cosmic ocean, connecting me to every other thing in the universe, is awe-inspiring in the best way. No gods necessary. Just the infinite structure of an infinite universe bubbling up here and there.

  • What Would Epicurus Think of the Big Bang?

    Quote from Bryan

    In minute 15 he says that the field operates while being "never touched" and "without ever touching," and says "the field is real... you can affect things far away using the field without ever touching it."

    How can something be affected without contact?

    That was a physical demonstration by Farday and a demonstrable effect of the electromagnetic field. He may have stated it in an unfortunate layperson, non scientific way, but the effect is real. The electromagnetic field is "invisible" to our naked unaided eyes, but using the right equipment, you can see it, detect it, use it. It's not supernatural or eerie or anything like that. He's just using "touching" in a colloquial, touch it with your finger sense. If real. It what makes what we're doing online possible as well.

  • What Would Epicurus Think of the Big Bang?

    Quote from Cassius

    All of which leaves the biggest questions that Epicurus wanted to address, such as whether there is something outside of "this observable universe" that these physicists are talking about (something which implicitly might be "god") totally unanswered. That larger question is at least as important to our daily lives as it is to get a better understanding of fields.

    From my perspective, Epicurus answered the question of "is something outside of 'this observable universe'" explicitly. The answer was yes. The cosmos (kosmos ΚΟΣΜΟΣ), from everything I have read, is akin to our idea of an "observable universe." I'm going to use K kosmos instead of C cosmos because we tend to define cosmos as the "universe" colloquially, but I want to get across the idea of the ancient kosmos. The kosmos is the world-system in which we live. The Library of Congress has a wonderful article on ancient Greek cosmology:

    https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/modeling-the-cosmos/ancient-greek-astronomy-and-cosmology/

    Important points:

    • From the 5th c BCE, it was known we live on a sphere.
    • "In this system the entire universe was part of a great sphere. This sphere was split into two sections, an outer celestial realm and an inner terrestrial one. The dividing line between the two was the orbit of the moon."

    The other stars and planets were thought of as spheres, too, since even Epicurus wrote against people thinking the stars and wandering stars were gods because they were perfect spheres. So, it would have been theoretically possible to travel to other "worlds" - other spheres - without leaving our kosmos. See the diagram below...

    So, that's OUR kosmos.

    Epicurus also posited other kosmoi - other world-systems - that would be other kosmoi somewhere else in The All, the universe. Such as..

    .

    with, supposedly the gods residing in the metakosmos/intermundia/"the space between world-systems."

    That's my perspective on how Epicurus envisioned The Universe. There is plenty of space "outside our observable universe." It's just filled with other kosmoi with their own worlds, animals, humans, and even philosophers.

  • What Would Epicurus Think of the Big Bang?

    For reference, here's a thread from 2020 where we were discussing this topic:

    Thread

    Infinity and the Expanding Universe

    Recently there was some discussion of the expanding universe, heat death, the infinite (in time and space) universe and the ramifications of these ideas. I just came across an image from 1750 of the universe comprised of infinite galaxies, which made me think that it might be useful to start a thread on the topic. Just in case anybody would like their mind blown!

    epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/1240/

    Here's the article that the image came from:

    …
    Godfrey
    July 23, 2020 at 4:50 PM

    It includes a link to the Dawkins/Krauss video.

    PS. I feel the need to emphasize that the Epicueans clearly conveyed that "nothing comes from nothing." But the texts may use that shorthand but elsewhere clarify that theymean "nothing comes from that which did not previously exist." Basically, everything gets recycled into something else in the infinite expanse of the universe - not just our little cosmos here but what Epicurus and others called The All in the texts, To Pan ΤΟ ΠΑΝ... Latin uses universus (From ūnus (“one”) +‎ versus (“turned”), hence literally "turned into one") with the same meaning.

    In modern physics, they're not saying "nothing comes from nothing" either. Their confusing shorthand provocative layman's "nothing" is just the quantum fields permeating all of space. The idea of the cosmos - our observable universe - coming out of a quantum fluctuation... similar to what some cosmologists posit is the ultimate fate of our cosmos (NOT the universe remember) an unimaginable number of billions and trillions of years in the future - strikes me as elegant. The new cosmos and our current one doesn't/ didn't come from nothing. It was birthed from the very existing underlying structure of the infinite universe.

  • Further Thoughts On Science And Epicurean Philosophy

    As far as ritual or religioius practices, Epicurus leaves money in his will for "the funeral offerings to my father, mother, and brothers." The word translated "funeral offerings" in τὰ ἐναγίσματα (ta enagismata) < enagisma. See:

    Chapter IV. The ritual pattern
    1. The sacrificial rituals of Greek hero-cults This study has had two aims, first of all, to establish the sacrificial rituals of Greek hero-cults in the…
    books.openedition.org
    Quote

    1.4. Destruction sacrifices

    12Destruction sacrifices at which no dining took place, covered by the terms holokautos in the inscriptions and enagizein, enagisma and enagismos in the literary texts, are rare and cannot be considered as the regular kind of ritual in hero-cults. All the terms seem to cover the same kind of ritual, the destruction of the offerings, but they have different bearings on the character of the recipient. Holokautos was more neutral, being used for both heroes and gods, while enagizein, enagisma and enagismos are particular to hero-cults and the cult of the dead. Apart from referring to a destruction sacrifice, enagizein, enagisma and enagismos also mark the recipient as being dead and therefore impure in some sense, and distinguish him, or a side of him, from the gods, who are immortal and pure. In most cases, the destruction sacrifices to heroes were performed as separate rituals and not in connection with a thysia.

    13The enagizein sacrifices seem to have been aimed at highlighting the dead and impure character of the hero. The destruction of the offerings formed part of the cult of the dead, but it is doubtful to what extent they were performed with animal victims, since the sacrifice of animals had practically disappeared from the cult of the ordinary dead already in the Archaic period, partly as a result of the funerary legislation.

    14Partial and total destructions of the victims are also found in the cult of the gods and can sometimes be viewed as a result of the character of the recipient, but perhaps more clearly as a reaction to or as a reminiscence of a particularly pressing and difficult situation. Similarly, in hero-cults the destruction sacrifices are not only a reflection of the recipient’s character, but may also be a response to the problems and stress of a particular situation or may be performed in order to avoid difficulties in the future. Seen from this angle, these rituals were used in the same manner as in the cult of the gods.

    15The evidence for the terms enagizein, enagisma and enagismos, considered to be standard terms for the sacrifices to heroes, is slight for sacrifices to heroes in the Archaic and Classical periods (no use at all is made of the terms in inscriptions before the late 2nd century BC, for example). More remarkable is the frequent use of the terms in the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD, particularly in the 2nd century AD and especially by Pausanias and Plutarch. The popularity of the terms during this period, evident also from the hapax enagisterion (attested in an inscription dating from c. AD 170), can be linked to the antiquarian tendencies of the Second Sophistic. Enagizein sacrifices seem to have been regarded as an old and venerable ritual, and the terms enagizein, enagisma, enagismos and enagisterion are predominantly used for heroes considered as being ancient, a tendency which may have originated in a desire to separate the old, traditional heroes of the epic and glorious past history from the more recently heroized, ordinary mortals of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This link between heroes and enagizein may, in its turn, have been the reason for the almost mechanical use of enagizein in the scholia to explain and elucidate sacrifices to heroes in the Classical sources, whether or not these rituals contained any actions of the kind usually covered by enagizein. It is also interesting to note that, in the 2nd century AD and later, enagizein began to be used for sacrifices to gods, though often to divinities connected with the sphere of death and the underworld, and for sacrifices differing from regular thysiai. In this late period, the term seems gradually to have taken on the meaning “to burn completely”, no matter who was the recipient.

  • Further Thoughts On Science And Epicurean Philosophy

    Quote from BrainToBeing

    Don It would not be the first time, nor the last. Certainly, the posturing of Descartes in the first few pages of "Meditations on First Philosophy" clearly suggest he was seeking to avoid the fate of Galileo, only a few years prior.

    Oh, I don't doubt a sense of personal safety was a *part* of his decision. After all, that's one reason he taught on his own private property and not in the gymnasia or stoas. But I firmly believe Epicurus also got a great deal of pleasure, enjoyment, and satisfaction from participating the religious rites of his city. For ease of access, here are my thoughts from my perusal of On Piety:

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