Posts by Mathitis Kipouros

Let me share that I am very glad that in this forum my nerdiness for looking up the etimology of words in order to understand things better is more likely to find ressonance.

Quote from Godfrey

I would add that one can be grateful for without being grateful to. Religion teaches that a person should give thanks, but what is important is to feel thankful.

Aligned with your comment, lLet the nerdiness begin:

Adjective

grateful (comparative gratefuller or more grateful, superlative gratefullest or most grateful)

>>>Appreciative; thankful.

Adjective

thankful (comparative more thankful, superlative most thankful)

>>>Showing appreciation or gratitude.

Noun

thank (plural thanks)

>>>(obsolete) An expression of appreciation; a thought.

Etymology 1

From Middle English thank, from Old English þanc (“thought, favour, grace, pleasure, satisfaction, thanks”), from Proto-Germanic *þankaz (“thought, remembrance, gratitude”)...

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No object is mentioned. Once again, it seems like the word may have been repurposed.

Quote from JJElbert

I find myself alive in the universe. I know that there is sorrow, and fear, and that life sometimes hurts—but I also know that it is wonderful, really wonderful, sometimes sublime, just to be alive here. There is beauty and delight here that will move me even at my last breath. There is knowledge and philosophy to dull my pains, and to enhance my pleasures. There is friendship, romance, love, art, and literature—all the choicest fruits of a peaceable and prosperous age, in a free and civil society. To say that I am grateful is simply to say that I appreciate it. To appreciate something, and to appreciate the gift of something, are two different things. One who appreciates wine recognizes its worth and its specialness in a deep and penetrating way.

That's what it is to appreciate life and its blessings; to pause for a time and take stock. To see it deeply, and recognize its worth.

Yes, I agree with you. It's a matter of appreciation and to gifting to yourself that pleasureable feeling of wonder. Perhaps, what could be a good prayer would be something that comprises this: An expressión of acknowledgement of our existence as something wonderful, and with this renewed vision, an appreciation of whatever concrete things we have experienced during that day.

Quote from Don

"I am grateful for this food, the work of many people..." On a basic level, it makes us stop and think how we're connected to people and the world from who made the meal to who grew the food to who shipped the food and so on.

Yes this is a good point.

Quote from Don

With Nature, maybe gratitude isn't the right word. I think we can feel fortunate that we're alive and able to experience the pleasure of the sunshine on our face, the sight of stars in the sky, the power of a thunderstorm.

Well, yes. Acknowledging that it is good that we are where we are and can experience what we can experience, and to be able to reflect on it. Lucky lumps of atoms we. I agree this is a reason to be happy and good to have in mind before going to bed.

Quote from Cassius

On the other hand if they don't understand it at all there's not much point in it.

Yes, I agree. The point right now would be to have a placeholder for later, and not to continue reinforcing something that later on could certainly bring more confusion (the current prayers).

Quote from Cassius

24. If you reject any single sensation, and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion, as to the appearance awaiting confirmation, and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations, as well, with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation, and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.

I'm afraid I don't fully comprehend what this paragraph reads. I believe my English is not so bad, but please bear in mind that it is not my first language and there may be nuances here that I'm not being able to grasp. What I'm getting is: If you reject one sensation your judgement will certainly be incomplete? That first long sentence is particularly difficult for me to follow all the way to the end. The second sentence I understood as: If you affirm an image which is not confirmed by the senses in combination with the ones that have been confirmed, you would be contaminating your judgement?

Quote from Cassius

I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

“Or pleasure. What made you the happiest today? Let your toddler reflect on what makes them happy throughout that day. ”

I think this is a great idea, although I’d think more suited for older children, since right now I don’t think he’s yet ready to articulate something like this by himself.

But I see the potential in getting him accustomed to doing this, and later on being able to reflect each day on how he felt about such and such, to develop this awareness of sensations and feelings. I know I would’ve benefitted from doing this, instead of just asking to be kept safe and such.

“I don't have any specific saying of Epicurus or Lucretius right now, but one option might be focusing on gratitude. What are you most thankful for today? Or come up with a rote litany like a prayer: I'm thankful for ... And... And...“

The thing with gratitude is, as I understand it, that someone has to be the object of your gratitude, because you’re grateful that he/she has been willingly good to you, and thus you recognize this good will. Being grateful to nature or some other non human thing would have to imply endowing them with the ability to will something unto us; please share a different point of view about gratitude if you can.

So When we tried this gratitude prayers we focused on being grateful to mom and dad for whatever (which seemed rather boastful since he’s not coming up with these thoughts ) and to his kinder teacher and to his grandparents and such...

Thanks guys, as usual you don’t disappoint. From your first post Cassius, I was thinking something derived from this:

“no one can live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly, and no one wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly. ”

It’s short and it has a nice rhythm to it. Plus it’s useful to know by heart, as it would be expected to happen after daily repetition.

But as of now, for me, honorably falls within the realm of platonic ideals, but I’m open to a more pragmatic meaning for it, like justice (don’t harm and don’t be harmed) or wisely (use sensations, feelings and reason as criteria).

I have a toddler who has a going-to-bed-routine that now involves prayer. The reasons for why this is are rather complex for me to explain here, but it shall suffice to say that it’s a deeply ingrained custom.

The prayers are catholic, since this is the religion we were brought up with; I don’t feel comfortable making him repeat every night a prayer asking for permission to go to sleep to a non existing being and to thank another for guarding him during day and night.

Since I didn’t have a better option, and thinking I’d have opportunity to fix this later on, I let it slip for a while, but now I’m thinking I should stop it early on.

I say I didn’t have a better option because I do believe that this ritual puts him in the right state of mind to go to sleep, so I do think having something to reflect upon, and repeat, would be valuable; it’s the content of what he’s repeating I’m having trouble with.

During my stoic phase I substituted the prayers, with a phrase I took from reading Marcus Aurelius, which goes something like this: “everything suits me that suits your designs oh universe, nothing comes to early or too late but in your own good time oh nature; everything comes from you, everything persists in you, and to you, all things return”

It seems pretty innocuous and neutral, with no supernatural elements except for perhaps the “design” part of it... I think it is better than the catholic ones, but not good enough yet.

Are there any epicurean sayings that you could recommend that could work for this?

Welcome LukeL . The school your planning sounds like a very interesting project. Congratulations.

Just some things I've gotten out of it. Some remarks so people who haven't read it perhaps get a feeling of what it includes (witout any promise of comprehensiveness, these are just things I highlighted for myself) and some doubts (that I'll be marking with bold type) I'd like to bring to the forum to see if they can be resolved.

• P4 "The gods are not to be feared, because 'the incorruptible being is immune to feelings of anger or gratitude'". Keeping this attitude will put the reader in "the right disposition to learn subsequent teachings".
• P4 Epicurus employs the synoptic view as a device to facilitate teaching/learning, that goes from the general view to the details.
• P4 "The universe consists of atoms and void" so the soul is composed of atoms. Is somebody willing to ellaborate on this point?
• P4 Epicurus believed that the the truth can be properly described in terms of its details, parting from the whole, and only if "the beginning was rightly made", and so knowledge can be attained.
• P5 The first text for students of Epicurs was "The Little Epitome, which is extant as the letter addressed to Herodotus".
• P5 "Faith was recognized for the first time as a factor in happiness". I guess this will be expanded upon later in the book, but... why does faith play such an important role in Epicurean Philosophy? How is this not contradictory to its materialistic ontology and its empiricist epistemology?
• P5 The poem of Lucretius "On the Nature of Things" is the follow-up text for the student after "the Little Epitome".
• P5 The nature of gods, which is presumed to be the topic of the book missing from Lucretiu's poem. What is Epicurean Philosophy's stance on this topic since there is no extant text about it? Or there is?
• P5 There is a mention about "the thirty-seven books on Physics". What is this referring to?
• P5 The synoptic view of Epicurus and his philosophy are "presented in the form of dogmatic general statements". From my first reading, I remembered some reference about the value of dogma, but I don't know if its this one or another one later on. Dogma doesn't strike me as a constructive thing, let alone in philosophy; is this something that is just asked of the reader at the beginning because of the synoptic view, or is dogma a particularly important part of the philosophy?
• P6 The stated objectives of the chapter are "to show where Epicurus belongs in the succession of philosophers, how his tought is related to the cultural context in which it arose, and how it survived in the cultural context into which it was finally absorbed", "to orientate the reader at the outset as to create the proper attitude for a sympathetic understanding of the man and his work; and not less to warn the reader against the disparagement and prejudice that abound in all the secondary literature".
• P6 Diogenes Laertius wrote an "excellent biography of Epicurus" and it is used as "chief authority" on his life.
• P7 "He was the first to promulgate a dogmatic philosophy" ... "The distinction of being a dogmatist was naturally not denied him, because it was deemed a demerit, the renunciation of inquiry". This is the part I was referring to (in my comment lines above); I too think that dogmatism is a reunciation of inquiry; how is this not in agreement with Dewitt? Am I understanding something wrong? Why does he propose dogmatism as an argument in favor of the philosophy.
• P7 Epicurs epistemology is not empiricist in the modern sense, since "he never declared sensation to be the source of knowledge; much less did he declare all sensations to be trustworthy". What is Dewitt refering to when he says "empiricism in the modern sense"?
• P8 Epicurus used mostly ("his chief reliance") deductive reasoning.
• P8 "The mistake is to look upon Epicurus as an effeminate and a mora invalid". My doubt here is not specifically about the philosophy but rather how in this instance and in some other texts stoic texts I've read they refer to femininity (which I take as having a behavior that likens that of women) as a very bad thing. This hasn't aged well. My surprise here is that the one who uses this adjective is Dewitt, as he's not quoting a text of that old period. This doesn't seem to me to be very Epicurean, from what I've understood so far of Epicurus.
• P8 "He was an altruistic hedonist".
• P8 Epicureanism "shunted the emphasis from the political to the social virtues and offered what may be called a religion of humanity". "The mistake is to" ... "think of its founder [of the philosophy, Epicurus] as an enemy of religion". Again, religion (for me) is the epitome of dogma; how important is religion to Epicurean philosophy? Does religion here have a different connotation than what it usually means? How is somebody going to be able to learn something different (and change his/her mind to something better) if we argue in favor of dogma and religion?
• P8 Epicureanism has survived in literature and ethics "by amalgamation with Stoicism, chiefly through Seneca and Marcus Aurelius".
• P9 Some influences of Epicurus were Isocrates, Euclic, Diogenes, Aristotle, Aristobulus, Nearchus, the first Ptolemy.
• P9 From Euclid he got a simple style for communicating and deductive procedures.
• P9 From the Cynics, the quest of honesty, but repudiating "their insolence and vulgarity", emphasizing that "honesty be joined with courtesy and decorum".
• P10 From Aristotle, "the revelation of a new order of Nature", and from here "Epicurs rejected the hypostatized Reason of Plato as the norm of truth and looked instead to Nature as furnishing the norm".
• P10 The "chief negative influences were Platonism and oratory" which were both obsessed with politics, rendering "happines of the individual [as] inseparable from his life as a citizen".
• P11 War ensued with the program of Platonic education, because Platonism "stood for the tight combination of ethics with politics which disqualified philosophy for universal acceptance".
• P11 Stoicism is written off as a possible influence in the life of Epicurus.
• P12 Sophocles may have inspired the principle that pain is evil, and Homer was cited as "authority for the doctrine that pleasure is the telos or goal of living".
• P12 Epicurus "declared dialectic a superfluity". " He rejected geometry as having no bearing upon problems of conduct".
• P12 Epicurus's "classification of the desires is developed from a Platonic hint, and he begins to erect his structure of hedonism from the point where this topic was left by Plato", and "more than half of his forty Authorized Doctrines are direct contradictions of Platonic teachings".
• P13 With Aristotle he had in common a "direct analytical approach to problems as opposed to the circuitous analogical approach adopted by Plato", but Epicurus was also pragmatic at the same time.
• P13 "There is no better preparation for the ethics of Epicurus than a perusal of that that treatise (Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle), and especially of the sections on Friendship, the Magnanimous Man, and Happiness".
• P13 "Many anticipations of his teachings may there be identified: for example, the possibility of man's attainment to a life that in respect of quality may be called immortal or divine". Did Epicurus actually used inmortality or divinity as qualities to describe a good life? Isn't this a bit contradictory?
• P13 "Aristotle's study of the embrio seems to have given rise to the doctrine of innate ideas or Anticipations...". It just seems kind of incongruent that they would derive conclusions from things they were unable to sense in any way, and criticize others for doing the same in a different domain. But here I have doubts I may be misunderstanding something.
• P13 Epicurus based his theroy of pleasure and definition of justice in animal behavior.
• P13 He studied with Nausiphanes who gave him a suggestion about a canon of truth. What suggestion would this be?
• P14 Many explanations as to why Epicurus didn't show gratitude to his teachers.
• P15 "he arrogated the title of Sage or Wise Man" and he was capable "of claiming perfection of knowledge, because he had approximated to the life of the gods". What do you think this means?
• P15 He held a presumptuous attitude "virtually imperative for him as thte founder and head of a sect". The term sect to me holds a negative connotation; would you agree to call Epicurus's movement a sect?
• P15 He revived "the tratidion of Ionian science, which had been interrupted by Socrates and Plato".
• P15 Two separate trends can be identified in Greek philosophy: One observational and speculative, and the other mathematical and contemplative.
• P16 Geometry inspired a movement that was romantic; Plato seemed to see in it "absolute reason contemplating absolute truth, perfect precission of concept joined with finality of demonstration". "He began to transfer the precise concepts of geometry to ethics and politics". "Especially enticing was the concept which we know as definition. This was a creation of the geometricians; they created it by defining straight lines, equilateral triangles, and other regular figures. If these can be defined, Plato tacitly reasoned, why not also justice, piety, temperance, and other virtues? This is reasoning by analogy, one of the trickiest of logical procedures. It only holds good only between sets of true similars. Virtues and triangles are not true similars. It does not follow, therefore, because equilatereal traingles can be precisely defined, that justice can be defined in the same way." This makes sense, at least at a glance. But perhaps it could be argued that it still lacks more arguments for proof. I think if this can be further developed by way of examples it could be validated, without the need for mor argumentation. Can you think of any?
• P17 The abilities of both Socrates and Plato gave fruit to the "dramatization of logic which is called dialectic, best exemplified by the Platonic dialogues".
• P17 "The quest of a definition, of justice, for example, presumes the existence of the thing to be defined". What would be your answer to the argument that, from this sentence, follows that justice doesn't exist?
• P17 "Hence arose Plato's theory of ideas. The word idea means shape or form and he thought of abstract notions as having an independent existence just as geometrical figures exist, a false analogy". This was rejected as absurd by Epicurus. So... geometrical figures are things that exist, that can be abstractly defined, in terms of its relations with physical things. But the ideas of virtues, don't exist in the physical world. Then, a definition of them, eludes us, because we cannot derive it from observation of their existence in the physical world of atoms and void. Or, so we can try to define them, albeit poorly or in a very limited fashion, in abstract terms, when we observe something in the physical world that we would call is a physical manifestation of said idea, but accepting that the definition can only comprise the observed phenomenon, and hence it cannot be absolute or universal and only related to that one observation?

I'm going ot have to finish this in another post.

Quote from Cassius

There's a huge difference between social utilitarianism and individual utilitarianism ?. We are definitely not social utilitarians in this philosophy.

This makes me feel uncomfortable on a very deep level. Perhaps it is because I have accepted for a long time as true the concept that universal well-being is achievable. I am of course suspicious of its idealism, since I don't know how it could happen, and I recognize that very quickly when trying to lay a concrete pathway towards it, things start to require a lot of wichful thinking and even perhaps a little fantasy. I would like to believe that a universal utopia is achievable. But I guess, a mor realistic view of the world could show that this doesn't happen anywhere.

As a side note, and related to the question of how people new to Epicureanism take to it: I'm entertaining this deep feeling of discomfort right now trying to come to terms with what's more likely real, rather than what is desirable but less likely. Possibly this discomfot, and our willingness/capacity to be with it, is what helps people find a relief in religion, and what causes a lower adherence to Epicureanism.

Getting back on track, one of the reasons for this discomfot is, I think, the realization that there are people in the world that don't meet the basic needs to relieve pain or to achieve pleasure (shelter, nutrition, etc...), and the possibility (rather slim in some cases) that anyone of us could find ourselves in it at some point in our lives; I guess it is matter of just living in the moment versus having a longer term view. How could we not attend to social utilitarianism when we think of this? How can we not see that as long as we have people who can't relieve these basic pains, or achieve these basic pleasures, any equilibrium we think we have in our self sufficiency is rather unstable, because these people either some day will try to achieve them without the sophistication that comfort allows, or because they will fall prey of others for manipulation, perhaps even against us. So individual utilitarianism seems rather short-sighted for me.

Perhaps if we see that, in nature, survival and well-being happen in larger groups, and that these groups always have some sort of justified hierarchy, we could say that a structure of society is needed to guarantee my well-being, and that for it to be stable for the longest time, this structure should have social utilitarianism in mind to guarantee the well-being of others who for whom I'm not able to look after; the hierarchy is constantly revised in order for it to keep its justified character.

We could call this a larger group "friends", but that would be rather idealistic. The problem with calling it friends, is that it could get confusing when we remember the tightly related (to friendship) concept of loyalty, which could be defined as "I don't have to doubt you'll be there for me, and thus, you do't have to doubt it either", as, I guess more likely than not, happens with siblings (at least until a certain age where we haven't been corrupted). I such a big group, I won't always be there particularly for you, if you're not one of my true/close friends; that's just reality. Is not physically possible. My standing there shouldn't be on a basis of loyalty, but rather on a basis of how active you are in produring this society is a provider of pleasure and an eliminator of pains for the most. And what if I decide to change to another society because I think here I'm not providing, or am not being provided for, in terms of peasure/pain. I couldn't be called disloyal, I'm just attending to my individual utilitarianism, as well as the social utilitarianism of the society I'm leaving and perhaps the one I wil lbe joining.

Also, to further delve into friendship; as stated before, it is a concept that can also very easly slip into the realm of idealism. To keep it real, we will quickly realize that true friends are those that we feel the need and pleasure to keep in our lives as we would our siblings, hence I don't believe of universal brotherly love, but I do think that with our friends, our love should be brotherly. And these people can't be many, just by the fact that we're not able to correspond or reciprocate in a convenient fashion to more than just a few. If we then try to say our friends are people who "are like us" in "this or that way", we slip into idealism. And how could our self-sufficiency be stable if we can only depend for it on such a small group of people? It's a bit of wishful thininking again.

Quote from Cassius

I was about to stop there but perhaps it must be included that humans possess a degree of agency that assures us that neither fate nor theories of hard determinism make it useless for us to exert ourselves to improve our lives.

For me the answer to the free will/determinism debate perhaps won't have a concrete answer, but I compare it to something I read in my Epicurean explorations about whether or not we should care about some gods that, if they exist, don't actually show godlike qualities, at least not in a way beneficial for us to care... similiarly, if free willl doesn't exist, the illussion is so real, that it actually doesn't matter.

Quote from Cassius

(1) no supernatural realm or order, (2) no reward or punishment or life of any kind after death, (3) identification of the goal and guide of life with feeling, primarily pleasure, rather than virtue or piety; (4) the view that it is correct to be confident that we can attain knowledge that is based on"reasoning" tied tightly to the senses, the anticipations, and feelings, rather than to dialectical logic; (5) a common sense view of the universe being totally natural and effectively infinite in size, eternal in time, and in which humans on earth are neither the only life in the universe nor the highest.

Perhaps what you've summed up here includes what I'm about to say... but it's been kind of revelatory for me now that I'm reading DeWitt. Once I read about the acceptance that Socratic, and then Platonic, thought got out of their rhetorical ability, it's started to become more evedient the extent to which "Plato's 'forms'" (or whatever you want to call these unnecessarily-complex, undefinable-definitions) have permeated everything in our world. I see plenty of conflict caused by our unconscious acceptance of the existence of things that aren't there, and that we've grown up with, and that we take for as real as the air we breathe. So one thing I would add, although, like I said, perhaps is already there, is a conscious and disciplined effort to "catch" these concepts that we normally accept automatically, because of their ubiquitous nature, and the lack of awareness of almost everybody about them.

Trying to be more concrete, an example of this could be the "shoulds" that we think of as unavoidable: ultra competitiveness; enduring sickening stress because of a work ethic; professional success and prestige; I don't know if I'm making sense...

Quote from Cassius

We all want to think that our way of seeing the world is the "right" one, and that everyone who is an Epicurean will agree with us, but it seems to me that that just isn't so, and it is very disappointing to people when they realize that.

I have been liking Epicureanism so far because it's been serving me as a way to more easily identify what's right and what's wrong, without overcomplicating things. I still have the hope that this is possible. But it's also shown so far to be a bit problematic.

When you talk to someone and try to make them see your point of view from the perspective of what makes sense (generally, no particularly you) in terms of pain or pleasure, they start to answer with mental constructions of what should be, what it's always been, what's orthodox and how that's more safe, etc... and they show an almost visceral reaction when you point that out, but that doesn't make the truth false, it just makes then inaccessible at the moment.

This also brings to mind something I've been grappling with lately... since pleasure and pain are things you can only experience yourself, it makes it very clear that things can start to become less absolute (and thus less comfortable - hence the resistance) and more relative... perhaps a person does something that is not the best for a third party, but it brings him geunine pleasure, or it eliminates genuine pain, so he wasn't acting with harm in mind... so how can you say he is bad if he is even ignorant of the pain he's causing to said third party... If he does it after it has been brought to his attention the pain his suffering to someone else, then he would be bad, but not before?

Quote from Don

You bet! It's Greek: ευ- "eu-" good as in euthanasia (good death), eulogy (good words), etc. + άγγελος "angelos" messenger as in "angel" (again, co-opted by the Christians). It literally just meant the bearer of good news (like victory in a battle) or to bring good news as a verb. The ευ/eu- got the "ev" pronunciation instead of "you" pronunciation in the c. 1st-4th c. CE when the Christians would have been appropriating and coining terms.

Oh my... I just spiraled down the wiktionary rabbit hole again. If you search for the etimology of messenger you don't get to "angelos", but to th latin "missaticum" which comes from the verb "mitto" (to send) and "atticum" (the later as I understood it is just a suffix to indicate pertinence to the verb. Perhaps we could create our own word "eumittization"?

Quote from Cassius

I think that's the area where we need more creative thought. How do we build closer bonds and get and keep motivated around a common goal, while at the same time making sure that our efforts to build numbers don't turn into a 'big tent' strategy that waters down the objective?

I'd say the wiki, if it's collaborative, could be a great resource to start gaining terrain against the popular confusions. If it's active, I'd bet it would start to pop up more often in the first page of the search engine results. Also, it could help to tackle the most common confusions with pages that tackle them specifically/directly.

Quote from Cassius

One thing I really think is helpful is for us to have skype conversations, and camotero (and others who are reading this and might be interested) I hope you can consider joining us on one of those.

Yes, please count me in; I'd love to join one of those.

Quote from Cassius

I think over the last year (almost two now) we've done a lot of work on that with the "Not NeoEpicurean" list and assorted articles elaborating on its points.

In terms of marketing, or promotion, I heard a guru a while back say that it's always a great idea to promote by referencing to the popular thing (brand, product, whatever). People have an easier way getting to you when you connect the path to your thing to a place they already know about.

Quote from Cassius

http://www.epicrueanfriends.com/wiki

Hi Cassius! Is this an active project? I followed the link but encountered an error.

Quote from Cassius

Good thoughts. What word would you suggest as more appropriate than "activism"?

Looking back at what we wrote lines above... I don't think we did a good job at addressing your question. I think a better word would, in this case, would be "collaboration". "Opportunities for collaboration". All of the said things about evangelism still stand, but the opportunities are not for "evangelization", but rather for collaboration towards that "evangelical" effort.