References to Epicurus' Attitude Toward The "Place of the Sciences And Liberal Arts"

Absolutely it's not an absolute!

To further compare truth and justice as prolepseis: in order to provide further understanding of the prolepsis of justice, Epicurus provides 10 Principal Doctrines. In order to provide further understanding of (the prolepsis of?) truth, he provides the Canon.

That of course doesn't mean that truth is definitely a prolepsis, but it does seem to me to be an analogous situation.

Speaking of sweetness and bitterness.. and revisiting Clear & Vivid with Alan Alda... Here is an episode of that podcast that got me thinking of the prolepsis of sweet = good & bitter = bad. The guest talks about tiny worms that seek out sweet things and avoid bitter things. I think I can see the idea of the proto-prolepsis in the worm but I'm not sure if others would see the sensations or the reactions (pleasure/pain) or all three of the Canon working in concert. I believe this is in the first half of the episode if you get a chance to listen.

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So whether we have "prolepsis of truth" very possibly should always be stated to convey that we are talking about having a prolepsis of the truth of a particular situation.

Yes, that's very important!

Again to compare truth with justice, I think that it's also the case that a prolepsis of justice applies to a particular situation. Thinking about it, a prolepsis, being part of the Canon is a faculty to evaluate a particular situation. Similarly for sensations and feelings.

We can apply well developed concepts to the evaluation of specific situations, but a prolepsis is a more fundamental, gut level, lizard brain tool for evaluating. A different faculty from the use of reason. Which accidentally asks the question "is reason a faculty?" Maybe there's a better word that's specific to "abilities" outside of the Canon.

Epicurean_Preconceptions.pdf

I just found this article by Dr. Voula. It appears to have some good summaries of the current scholarship on the prolepses, and she gives her own take as well. I've only just begun reading, but a couple things jumped out so far including this list:

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In the first place, an examination of early Epicurean texts intimates that the range of objects of which we have preconceptions includes: natural kinds, such as man, horse and cow; abstract entities, for instance justice, utility and truth; moral and psychological attitudes like responsibility and agency; and non-perceptible items, such as gods and atoms. Preconceptions of these objects always have an evidential basis. One acquires the preconception of cow through repeated clear impressions of cows, that of justice by perceiving many just acts, that of moral responsibility by being exposed to acts of praise and blame, and the prolēpsis of atoms as constantly moving by observing corpuscula dancing in the light. However, the evidence makes it reasonably clear that only some of our concepts are preconceptions formed in the aforementioned way, while all other concepts are formed by internal mental processes in which the mind plays a role. ‘All notions arise by means of confrontation, analogy, similarity and combination, with some contribution from reasoning as well’ (DL 10.32).

The list is helpful, but I'm not sure I accept the conclusions. I find it interesting that she includes truth in the abstract concepts list! I'd like to know where that comes from in the texts to provide some context.

Prolepses are also described elsewhere as being innate, and, if they're innate, that seems to mean they are inborn. So, Tsouna's contention that they require multiple experiences doesn't seem to line up with that idea of innateness.

Onthe other hand, consider the acquiring of language by babies and toddlers (to look at the prolepses of language, e.g., cow, man, horse, etc.). My contention would be that as we are acquiring the words of our individual language (man, άνθρωπος, l'homme, etc.) we are attaching these to prolepses of the general meaning of man, car, house, tower, etc. These are NOT Platonic Forms but mental images we will immediately access when we again hear or read or imagine those concepts.

But is this prolepses or simply memory? For me, the innateness and reflexive automatic pre-rational access of the prolepses would argue against this kind of formation of prolepses. I'm much more inclined to the instinctual, inborn faculties as being the prolepses.

I'll have to study the texts and the scholarship more, but this is where my head is at right now.

Just for clarification:

The truth about something is not a prolepsis (in most cases). During the referred to podcast discussion, my agreement with truth as prolepsis was about the meaning of the word truth, not truth about something, and I thought the other participants were referring to the meaning of the word truth, too.

Quote from Cassius

Don, I wonder if you have the same concern about this as your earlier concern?

Sort of. (Oh, that's helpful, right?)

The more I read the current scholarship (and there seems to be a WIDE spectrum of thoughts) on prolepses, there definitely seems to be a language component. So, a "prolepsis of truth" seems to me to maybe simply be the faculty to recognize a true vs false statement in some way.

My problem, consternation, uneasiness comes in when we have statements like:

1. That is a round tower.
2. God saved me from the accident.

Those are not equivalent statements when it comes to determining their being true vs. false.

(1) can be resolved from observation and doesn't really need a prolepsis of "truth" because our senses will resolve whether it's true.

(2) cannot be resolved by observation. That statement is connected to somebody's internal/personal Truth (capital T) and, so, again I don't think it falls under a prolepsis because it would be innate. That seems more like a case of holding an empty or incorrect opinion.

There also seems to be some scholarship that tries to make the prolepsis of the divine (That they are blessed, immortal, etc.) a special case, but I don't think - personally - that Epicurus would create a category - prolepsis - to cover only one case. And if the prolepsis about the gods is innate, I would *think* that all prolepses are innate and pre-rational, especially if they're part of the Canon and used in determining a correct version of reality.

I just read DeWitt's section of Anticipations and find myself largely in agreement with him. I also see that he did NOT accept the idea of having a prolepsis of an ox, etc., for individual words.

Just finishing lunch break so back to work... But more later!

What if we zoom out a bit, then zoom back in. This is an off the cuff expression of my current understanding so I'm kind of going to ramble a bit.... The Canon is a three legged tool with which to measure the veracity of observations and/or arguments. One leg, the sensations, provides input. One leg, the feelings, responds to input (sensations, thoughts, etc) and also provides guidance for action. As to the leg of prolepses... it seems that this can be a bridge between the two other legs. Is it also an internal source of input, or, like feelings, is it strictly another response mechanism? As a response mechanism it would be an innate faculty, but subject to "training" over time.

I need to give this a lot more thought, but where I'm going is asking what the function of each leg is, how or if they work together, and whether or not this can help to define a prolepsis. Part of the difficulty in answering this is that there seems to be a wide variety of ways that the Canon can function.

Also, there are five or more sensations which interact with each other. The feelings have an inverse relationship as described by the Full Cup model. Is there something analogous in the workings of the prolepses? I often think of them as a bridge between the other two legs but I'm not sure that that's entirely accurate.

I'm not sure if this is useful or not but I figured I'd put it out there....

A further question that I periodically ponder is whether or not the three legs as conceived by Epicurus function together as a process, interact randomly, or both.

I keep leaning toward the notion that they function together as a process, but I may be bringing that to it from my personal bias. The way that I envision the process working is that the prolepses work on a "gut" level to route a received sensation to either a pleasure or pain receptor. If neither feeling is involved, then there's no prolepsis. So we determine a concept of justice not necessarily from a single use of the Canon but through multiple exposures to situations that involve justice and stimulate resultant feelings of pleasure or pain. The concept of justice is a mental construct (not Canonical). The prolepsis of justice is the "intuition" that gives us pleasure or pain from the situation involving justice or injustice.

Now there are situations that lead to feelings with, seemingly, no prolepsis involved: seeing a beautiful sunset, burning your hand on the stove. And there are situations that don't stimulate feelings (recognizing an ox as an ox) and so, by this line of reasoning, don't involve a prolepsis. But in thinking of it in terms of a process, the prolepses or feelings aren't activated without a stimulus. Which maybe after all is just a long winded way of saying that a prolepsis is not a concept, although more specifically I'm trying to ascertain if the Canon is considered to be an integrated process.

Some great points to consider, Godfrey and Cassius . Jumping off from your points, here is what I'm beginning to formulate about the prolepses:

• The Canon has three parts and those need to be pre-rational and they react to incoming stimuli. As Godfrey said "the prolepses or feelings aren't activated without a stimulus." I would add, by definition, the Sensations as well.
• It seems to me that it would make sense if the Sensations registered physical stimuli: light, sound, touch, taste, odors; the Prolepses "registered" abstract stimuli: justice (how do we sense fairness?), divinity (how do we sense awe?), language (how do we sense meaning?), etc. Okay, I need to flesh that out but later. But these are inborn faculties that need only honing in humans and are present in rudimentary form in animals. Then both these faculties feed into the Feelings to register pleasure or pain. Only afterward our memory and reasoning kick in to give us information about those concepts and sensations.
• One question I'm rolling in my mind came with Godfrey saying: "seeing a beautiful sunset, burning your hand on the stove." I think these are two different circumstances. The latter is just the nociceptors directly registering pain. The Sensations register heat > Feeling of Pain > later reason kicks in (How bad did I burn myself? Will it scar? Do I need to go to the doctor?) The sunset seems to be registering something else. I think it can't be a simple registering of sight. I think it may be a Prolepsis but of what? Consider too the similar feeling when you're taking in a vast Vista (my go to is my first view across Yosemite Valley. Breath-taking awe is my only description). It's more than just registering the light coming into your eyes. I would contend there's a prolepsis of awe or something at work before the Feeling of pleasure kicks in.
•   Godfrey also mentioned "So we determine a concept of justice not necessarily from a single use of the Canon but through multiple exposures to situations that involve justice and stimulate resultant feelings of pleasure or pain." I would say that we recognize fair and just actions from a *very* young age (from research I've seen) and even animals have a rudimentary prolepsis of justice. The prolepsis stimulates pleasurable feelings and so we are attracted to people and situations which are just. The multiple exposures simply reinforce our intuition and begin to acculturate us to our specific culture's laws and justice. When that culture's laws conflict with our prolepsis and they don't keep people from harming or being harmed, we see them as injustice. That intuition is the prolepsis, I believe.

I need to think and read more but that gets thinking out there in summary for review.

I guess I've absorbed more of DeWitt than I was aware of! It's been a while but I've read the sections on the Canon a couple of times though I don't consciously remember them. That's one reason why I'm not a lawyer!

Regarding the "images," to me there are two topics involved. Don rightly mentioned above that all three faculties aren't activated without a stimulus. To clarify my original point that he was responding to, my thinking is that the prolepses and feelings aren't activated without an internal stimulus. The sensations, it would seem, are reacting to external stimuli. They then transmit an internal stimulus to the prolepses or feelings.

The images are described as external particles stimulating the faculties. I'm not sure that I buy that and that is one topic of discussion. The other topic is our modern understanding of thoughts and dreams. On the subject of the Canon, I would describe these as internal stimuli that can then tickle the prolepses and feelings.

Don makes a great analysis of sunsets and burns. Sunsets, vistas, contemplating the universe; so many things do seem to stimulate a prolepsis of awe/wonder/mystery/connectedness. I'll even go out on a limb and say that this could be what some people (not me!) have referred to as "the god shaped hole" in their hearts. Which maybe leads back to "images."

Don I think we're saying the same thing about justice. I was attempting to differentiate between the concept and the prolepsis, but you've described it more clearly.