Posts by Little Rocker

Quote from Todd

I thought it was amusing that here we have a rare (possibly unique) case of DeWitt declaring a source to be unprejudiced, while another author is raising alarms.

Ah, yes, now I get it! I guess there's always the question of whether the person attempts to faithfully represent the view, but then cavalierly dismisses it on specious grounds or willfully mis-represents the view to make it easier to dismiss.

They do seem to agree that we should rely on Sextus for the definition of truth, which is where DeWitt so effusively praises Sextus.

Quote from Hahmann

But Sextus Empiricus gives us also the most explicit definition of truth in Epicurus.

Yeah, I also get the sense that they largely agree, especially about the what Hahmann calls a 'coherence-based approach' to adjudicating conflicting sense impressions (for example, 'the stick looks bent, but feels straight'). They are certainly both aiming to explain why the view is perfectly normal, possibly right, definitely not insane.

What I appreciate about Hahmann is that his Greek is transliterated, and he is less prone to using it without translation. I also appreciate that he explores to what extent (if any) Epicurus' confidence in perception differs from Stoic and Aristotelian confidence in perception. They were all empiricists, so they all required some mechanism for addressing Plato's pesky 'bent stick' example. So basically, I think Hahmann fills out the picture a bit.

Quote from Todd

Is Hahmann out-DeWitting DeWitt?!?!

Ha! I'm only getting a sense of the meaning of 'DeWitting' from context, but perhaps this could be a case where the apparent tension can be resolved. Maybe DeWitt means to suggest that Sextus was never particularly hostile to Epicurus (as so many were), while Hahmann means to remind the reader that Sextus was a skeptic, so his chief aim was to convince people that dogmatists like Epicurus were suffering from a psychic illness. Sextus even occasionally cops to using weak, but effective arguments to get what he wants--curing people of dogmatism.

In case anyone else would find it useful, I've attached a dense, but relatively clear and informative piece of recent scholarship on Epicurean perception, truth, and illusion. It seems to me that the author (Hahmann) manages to both survey the puzzles and advance some of his own lines of interpretation.

Plato is a slippery bastard who says different things in different places, so it's always difficult to pin him down. In Plato's Apology, for example, Socrates definitely recognizes an obligation not to harm others, at least one's fellow citizens, but he grounds that obligation in *self-interested* reasons. Namely, if you make someone worse, then you are yourself more likely to suffer injustice as a result. So, if I make my neighbor a worse person, then I have reason to fear that they will harm me. That, in some sense, is a quasi-Epicurean argument. Whether that gives you a prudential reason to *improve* people for self-protection is less clear, but I can at least imagine some cases that might motivate an Epicurean to make an attempt at 'frank speech' to strengthen or restore a relationship. For the most part, though, I think people who significantly violate trust get exiled from an Epicurean community. But those are just idle musings.

In case you're curious, I've attached the relevant passage from Republic 1, which is a mess of an argument for a number of reasons. The upshot is that a person cannot make someone a worse person and call it justice.

To me the biggest difference between Epicurus and Plato on justice is that for Epicurus, we create justice through an agreement. For Epicurus, justice simply doesn't exist until we make it. For Plato, justice is something we discover--it exists prior to (and independent of) any experience or agreement. That's not to say that Epicurus does not build objective criteria into his conception--he has empirical mechanisms for critiquing agreements in terms of their ability to achieve security for members. The objectivity for Plato, by contrast, comes from an abstract perfection that exists independent of human agents.

One of my favorite passages in Lucretius (to which Cassius alludes, I think, above) talks about the explanations of human dispositions and behaviors at the atomic level (DRN 3: @310, attached). This is one of those great Epicurean science passages, actually, because it's like, 'trust me, there's a physical explanation. I just can't give it to you here, but it's definitely physical.' I find it interesting that he says we can change, but never entirely--some things can't be erased.

As for the effects of environment/circumstance rather than pure physiology, I remember one passage in Philodemus (also attached) where he says that the proper practitioner of 'frank speech' will know a lot about the person's 'birth and upbringing' because that influences their receptivity to frank speech and what kind of frank speech works best.

Textual note: apologies if this has already been mentioned, but my impression is that Lucretius suggests that Democritus was (or would be) justified in suicide (he 'voluntarily went to meet death') because he was suffering the onset of dementia (DRN 3: 1040). My rough read on this is that the best strategy for coping with the end of life is to recollect memories, so dementia undermines the best way of coping with dying.

Hello, Epicurean Friends! I'm excited to discover a group so keenly dedicated to the study and practice of Epicureanism! It's like the respite of a small garden located on the outskirts of a neo-Stoic internet hellscape (with all due respect to my neo-Stoic friends).