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Welcome to Episode Thirty-Two of Lucretius Today. I am your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we'll walk you through the six books of Lucretius' poem, and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers, and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book, "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Cana…

Related issue: events vs properties, from Book One:

From Chapter 15 of A Few Days In Athens: To conceive of mind independent of matter, is as if we should conceive of color independent of a substance colored: What is form, if not a body of a particular shape? What is thought, if not something which thinks? Destroy the substance, and you destroy its properties; and so equally — destroy the properties, and you destroy the substance. To suppose the possibility of retaining the one, without the other, is an evident absurdity." Context: "Our young fri…

Episode 32 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. In this episode, the panel discusses the Epicurean viewpoint that the atoms are colorless, and the implications of this doctrine. As always we appreciate your listening and we're happy to entertain comments or questions about the episode in the thread below or at the Epicureanfriends . com forum. Remember that you can subscribe to the podcast on your smartphone using any podcast application. Thanks for listening! spreaker.com/episode/40…

Don as I recall from the episode there was discussion to the effect that "indivisible" ultimate particles might be sustainable by modern science and something that we can or should still maintain to be true, but not "immutable." I think that's probably the issue you're addressing but I am not quite sure from what you wrote where you would come down on that. Could you clarify what you're saying as it applies to that issue? Over the last several episodes - and this is likely to continue - I think …

At risk of cluttering up this thread I want to copy/paste here a set of clips from Delacy's commentary to On Methods of Inference that I posted here. I think what we are debating here involves the category of knowledge in the Epicurean scheme that Delacy refers to under his heading 2b, which DeLacy says "is important because it involves validity of the doctrine of atoms and void." Below is the clip, and I think what we are wrestling with are our opinions of the validity of the terminology and ho…

We just finished recording Episode 33 and I think we had a very interesting discussion that will help us advance our thinking on these topics. I will work to edit and post this asap so we can keep the flow going.

If I am following you correctly then I definitely agree that "necessary" and "sufficient" are very relevant terms. However I think where this goes is that simply using those terms does not really advance the ball to the ultimate conclusion, which is understanding when we can confidently apply those terms, and why we are confident in applying them in a particular situation. Ultimately in every case we have a conceptual issue of what happens at the limit of our ability to observe directly. Is it p…

I am about 50% of the way through editing Episode 33, which is a discussion directly relevant to these issues, and I definitely hope to have it up in the next 12 hours. As you'll see we struggled through many of these same issues and though I don't think we resolved anything permanently I think you'll find it helpful.

Good link on necessary and sufficient. The words can seem obvious, but that's a good reminder that ALL of the necessary conditions must be present in order to reach the "sufficient" level. But in common discussion, even "sufficient" implies that something more is needed, so you have to be conscious of whether that is true or not and the basis on which you're making the conclusion.

(Quote from Don) I do not see these as contradictory. The evidence hopefully improves with technology, but the analysis process - the rules that constitute how to apply the observations as standards of proof - ought to be (in my mind, anyway) - exactly the same. I think what you are hearing in recent podcasts is our working toward a way to better articulate this -- and we have quite a way to go yet, I think. That's why I am personally not nearly as concerned with the specifics of their conclusio…