Posts by Cassius

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Significant discussion recently here on the forum about emergence and Epicurus' opposition to Democritus' atomic reductionism, so just bumping this thread to remind people of the existence of this article by David Sedley directly on point.

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The topic with which this paper’ will concern itself is the relation in which, according to Epicurean metaphysics, a complex entity such as a man stands to its constituent parts and qualities. Although Epicureanism and Stoicism both give centre stage to bodily particulars, and in consequence have certain features of their respective epistemologies in common, their metaphysical systems are nevertheless in fact extraordinarily different. Stoicism is a top-down theory, which takes life and intelligence as irreducibly basic features of the world and of at least some of its occupants. The reason why all but a very few of the items in the world, including mental qualities such as virtue, are bodies, is not that body is more metaphysically fundamental than mind or intelligence, but simply that the ability of such things to cause anything is held to depend on their capacity for bodily interaction. In Epicureanism, on the other hand, bodies are indeed metaphysically fundamental, since they are, apart from the space which they occupy and move through, the only conceivable per se entities. Yet a Stoic-like concern with causality is hardly in evidence here, since in Epicureanism causal interaction goes on all the time between bodies and certain non-corporeal items, namely their properties.

Today we are making changes to our forum participation levels to make the titles more informative. The full details are on our Community Stands, Participation Levels, And Posting Policies page. The relevant part is reproduced below.

2. Participation Levels

EpicureanFriends.com is an on-line community dedicated to the study, promotion, and practice of Classical Epicurean Philosophy. As with the ancient Epicureans, it is both a place of learning and a community of people working together in the same general direction — a team. Our goal is not to educate passive observers but friends in the Epicurean tradition, actively carrying forward Epicurean activity in the modern world.

Participation at EpicureanFriends.com requires strong affinity for Epicurean philosophy, but we are not primarily a hierarchical organization where all participants are required to agree with everything the ancient Epicureans said or wrote. Participation at higher levels indicates closer agreement with a larger number of Epicurean positions, but no participant submits to any code of conduct or requirements that apply outside the EpicureanFriends forum.

We implement a participant level system to assist guests and participants alike in assessing how much weight to give to any particular post. Posts by guests and newcomers will at times contain questions or opinions not consistent with the goals of the forum. The participant level assigned to each post serves as an indication of probability that the post will be consistent with core Epicurean principles.

Epicurean Philosophy does not consider all opinions to be equally true, and EpicureanFriends.com does not allow any and all opinions to be advocated over time. Good-faith questioning and disagreement is allowed and encouraged, but sustained advocacy against core Epicurean positions is prohibited. Those who are perceptive enough to be interested in Epicurean philosophy in the first place, will readily understand the line between good faith discussion and inappropriate advocacy. Any questions about that line can easily be clarified prior to posting by sending a forum conversation message to a moderator.

2.1. Level Naming System

We have adopted several different naming systems over the years to indicate which participants have longer and closer participation on the forum. Our current system is as follows:

2.2. 1 — Guest

Guests are newly registered members who are in the process of exploring EpicureanFriends and establishing both for themselves and for the community whether they are a good fit for the EpicureanFriends community. Guests are limited to posting in the Welcome forum, where we confirm that new registrants are real people engaging in good faith exploration of Epicurus. To avoid spam and trolling, Guests are required to respond to a Welcome email with basic information about their background and interest in the study of Epicurus. All Guests should review previous exchanges in the Welcome forum to see how this process works.

2.3. 2 — Aspiring Friend

Aspiring Friends have demonstrated enough engagement and good faith to be welcomed into the main forums. They are invited to post across the public discussion areas of the site and to attend new member meet-and-greet Zoom sessions. Guests are promoted to Aspiring Friend status after a period of time and posting sufficient for the moderating team to extend an invitation. Aspiring Friends can be presumed to be generally "on the Epicurean team," but they have not yet demonstrated the long-term commitment that characterizes a Friend.

2.4. 3 — Friend

Friends are the long-standing core of the EpicureanFriends community. Friends are not casual acquaintances but have a bond built on shared values, sustained engagement, and demonstrated trustworthiness over time. Friends have the ability to post in most areas of the forum. Friends are also invited to participate in our regular Zoom Meetings— the forum's more advanced sessions. Reaching Friend status means the community has come to know you, trust your commitment to Classical Epicurean philosophy, and welcome you into the deeper levels of the shared project. Posts from Friends carry the credibility of that sustained relationship.

2.5. 4 — Veteran Friend

Veteran Friends have demonstrated deep commitment to the goals of the forum and participate in the responsibility of maintaining the quality and direction of discussion. The posts of Veteran Friends are presumed to be in agreement with core principles of Classical Epicurean Philosophy even though occasional disagreements on non-central issues may occur.

2.6. 5 — Administrators

Administrators are responsible for the overall direction and operation of the forum. All participation on the forum is subject to moderation, and the Administrators retain at all times the right to accept, reject, and remove any post or any participant at any time for any reason. EpicureanFriends is a team-building community and we constantly seek input and guidance from our friends, but only the Administrators are ultimately responsible for the official decisions of the EpicureanFriends forum.

All decisions as to movement of participants from level to level are at the discretion of the Administrators.

Inactive accounts — Participants who have not posted within the last two years are moved to the Inactive list. An Inactive account can be reactivated by posting in the Welcome forum or by messaging an Administrator.

2.7. Zoom Meeting Access by Level

The forum hosts several regular Zoom sessions with different levels of access:

Zoom links are available in the respective forum or via the forum's private message system. Meetings are largely informal, typically lasting about sixty minutes. All general forum rules apply in Zoom sessions. Attendance need not be consistent — participants join as their schedules allow.

Welcome to Episode 339 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we start are continuing our series reviewing Cicero's "Academic Questions" from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato's Academy and helps us understand Epicurus' position on the same issues.

This week after an extended treatment of Section 8 we will now be moving into Section 9 of Book 2

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We'll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we'll also refer to the Rackham translation here:

• Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

I've been looking at several aspects of reorganization of the forum, and I thought it would be useful to highlight ways in which Epicurus himself as a model was not just an individual thinker but as a primary part of his effort was working with others to build an organized school. What I am getting at here is that unlike for example Nietzsche or any of hundreds of other philosophers we could name, Epicurus wasn't just an isolated figure writing books and other being a recluse. He affirmatively spent his time building a community, which is not something most other philosophers do. I think that's a major aspect of his life's work that is way too underappreciated.

Here are a couple of ways to look at that aspect. I'd appreciate any comments or thoughts about this topic.

1. He built physical communities, not just a body of thought. The Garden was purchased property — a real financial and institutional commitment, not a borrowed lecture hall or public porch. Owning the space made it a permanent base rather than a seminar.
2. He moved his school strategically, city by city. Colophon → Mytilene → Lampsacus → Athens. Each move was deliberate: he was planting Epicurean communities as he went, not wandering in search of patrons. The communities in Lampsacus and Mytilene continued to function after he left.
3. The move to Athens was a competitive act. Athens was where Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum were. Setting up The Garden there was not accidental — it was a direct challenge to the dominant philosophical schools on their own ground.
4. He designed for succession, not just for his own lifetime. His will made specific provisions for the continuation of The Garden, the training of Hermarchus as his successor, and the care of the children of deceased friends. This is institutional thinking, not the behavior of a lone thinker.
5. He instituted continuing rituals. The Twentieth — monthly gathering on the 20th to celebrate Epicurus and Metrodorus — was an organized, repeating community event, not a one-time tribute. It became a tradition that outlasted him by centuries.
6. He maintained a network of communities through letters. His letters were not addressed to individual scholars; they were written to sustain and instruct communities of followers across the Greek world. He was running something closer to a distributed organization.
7. He radically expanded who was included. Women, slaves, and people outside the citizen class were welcome in The Garden. This was not an abstract philosophical position — it required practical decisions about membership, living arrangements, and social norms. Organization, not just theory.

8. He lived as an integral part of the community he built. After settling in Athens around 306 BC he remained there the rest of his life — roughly 35 years. The Garden was not a school he occasionally visited; it was his life. Compare Aristotle, who tutored Alexander and then returned to Athens to found the Lyceum — Epicurus had no patron phase, no royal appointment. He built from within.

   
   

Contrast with the major alternatives:

1. Socrates — no written work, no school, no property, no institutional continuity after his death
2. Plato — had the Academy, but it was more lecture-based than residential, and Plato remained an elite Athenian; no movement across cities building communities
3. Aristotle — the Lyceum was a great research institution but Aristotle was as much a scholar and court philosopher as a community builder
4. Democritus — Epicurus's atomic predecessor was a prolific writer but left no school, no organization, no succession

5. Pyrrho — widely admired but left no written work and founded no community; Pyrrhonism organized itself around him after the fact

   
   

- His philosophy made the community itself philosophically necessary. Friendship as "the greatest instrument wisdom provides" was not just a nice sentiment — it meant the community was not a byproduct of the philosophy but an expression of it. The Garden had to exist for the philosophy to be practiced, not just understood.

Episode 338 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week our episode is entitled: "Are Knowledge And Wisdom Available Only To Gods?"

Quote from DaveT

I'm not sure how to take this comment to my statement above. Please explain if you are speaking to me as "one of those"?

No no not at all directed at you - it's just a general reference to a topic that's regularly on my mind - how to balance competing priorities. This topic has covered a lot of ground and that comment arose from my constantly thinking about how to figure out where the "guard rails" should be. I go to the Epicurean Reddit fairly regularly myself, and in general I'd encourage people here to drop in there at least occasionally. We need to be aware of and be able to debate all sides of these issues, the tricker issue is how much time to spend doing it.

Quote from Peter Konstans

Consciousness requires a dynamically-evolving sense of self-awareness which requires a human brain and its biological substrate.

i agree with Peter K's post and "liked it." I singled out this sentense only because I don't think he meant to imply that animals are not conscious, or only a "human" brain can be conscious. If you did mean that Peter please correct me, but I took your sentence in the context that the word "human" had been omitted and that your intended focus was on the "biological substrate." I suppose even the "biological substrate" might not be necessarily precise enough, but I think most of us consider that to be a reasonable way of describing what we think is required for consciousness. I would focus on Peter's "dynamically-evolving sense of self-awareness" as the right direction for a test of consciousness.

Quote from Martin

In both cases, pattern recognition built on past input is applied to new input to generate a response.

At least at present that's the way I am seeing a relationship that is productive to discuss.

No doubt there are many differences, but i would not underestimate the significance of even this short part of Martin's statement.

When the major other alternatives are things like (1) "God (or my daemon) tells me what the truth is" or (2) "I know the truth because I remember it from my past life when I was living among the ideal forms," then the option (3) "my mind starts at birth assembling patterns that I then use to deal successfully with new experiences" is a huge improvement.

Quote from DaveT

I guess I'm not an Epicurean but rather a student of Epicurean thought and an adopter of many of his methodologies for discovering knowledge.

That "student" term would describe all of us, and is one of the two major goals of the forum.

The other major goal of the forum is to build a community of "advocates" for Epicurean philosophy as a coherent body of thought for normal people. That's not directed toward "discovering knowledge" as much as it is toward "living happily."

For that reason, we curate the forum along the major lines stressed by advocates such as Lucretius and Diogenes of Oinoanda and Philodemus. For those who want no advocacy and guard rails of any kind, there's always Reddit. Both (and other variations as well) have their legitimate places.

I like talking about these things as it builds clarity. I've never been convinced that "EpicureanFriends" was the best title for the forum, but it got picked because it does describe things everyone ought to expect. Whenever someone new comes here, the name tells them to expect to encounter people who are clearly Epicurean, and who clearly think of each other as friends both of each other and of the ancient Epicurean school.

ADMIN NOTE: Speaking of things breaking apart due to atomic collisions, I think Kalosyni is looking at dividing this thread up into more manageable topics such as separating the prolepsis of gods topic from prolepsis analogies to llm (while leaving marker posts) so don't be surprised if that happens.

Quote from Don

The bigger issue for me is talking about "gods" "living" in the "intermundia".

I don't recall that we've discussed this but it would probably be interesting to pin down exactly what it was about being "between the worlds" that the Epicureans would have associated with the idea that this was a particularly hospitable place.

I suspect we today would look for the reasoning revolving around gravity or the spinning of galaxies or the atoms being more "spread out" with more space between them or something like that, because we would think about all the matter in a particular area being attracted toward a localized center. But I am not sure why that would translate in Epicurus' mind as an environment easier to sustain oneself in. Fewer atomic collisions?

I don't expect we would take the same approach at all today but if we understood what he was thinking about we'd probably have a better understanding of whether the gods are "by nature" imperishable or whether they "act to maintain" their imperishability, and that in turn might make the entire picture more relatable.

Quote from Don

I think I'm an atheist or at least agnostic anymore.

This is probably what you meant as written but just to be clear - this is not missing a "don't" is it? (The "anymore" rather than "nowadays" at the end is the main reason i ask that.)

And thanks to Bryan for immediately weighing in with some texts - not many or any others here could do that so well! Who needs AI when you have that kind of memory?

Quote from Bryan

The idealist position would have to argue there is no original source (no hypokeimenon). But according to Epicurus, if there is no original source, the object is not real -- and the proposition that it is real, is necessarily false (such as the proposition "minotaurs exist").

This aspect of the "idealist" position as cited by Bryan reminds me to clarify: I think Epicurus' position on divinity served important goal-identifying and psychological purposes for Epicurus (which is a positive use of the term ideal), just as reverencing the sage is of great benefit to him who does the reverencing). IN ADDITION I think Epicurus thought such beings of such a class really exist in the universe, both because we receive "images" of them and because it makes sense that such beings do exist in an infinite and eternal universe. I think these "real" and "ideal" aspects go hand and hand and there's no conflict between them. To the extent that those that hold the "idealist" position also hold that these gods do *not* exist in reality, but solely as mental constructs, I don't agree with that aspect of the "idealist" view. Sorry to interrupt the flow of the discussion but this is for any lurkers who might be confused by my earlier comment.

Quote from Cassius

If this keeps up we're going to have to appoint Tau Phi as Moderator-Pro-Tem of the SUAVITY forum!

To supplement my brilliant humor, I am hoping that some of our "idealists" like Don will weigh in on the objection Tau Phi is raising to what Titus has suggested. I personally don't consider that the two camps on this topic are really in conflict, as I think Epicurus thought "both" were correct. But very possibly someone coming more from the psychological perspective (ie Don or others) might have something more to say on how to separate the good uses of "aiming for the best" from the "bad uses" of idealism.

Quote from TauPhi

I do differ in some areas but I also love Epicurean philosophy. It has benefited my life enormously and it still does. Even if I don't accept the philosophy in its entirety, I agree with most of it. It may look sometimes that I'm picking a fight but I really, really don't. I don't argue because I want to become the Internet troll of the month. I hope exchanging ideas is beneficial to all parties involved. And the truth is, I agree a lot with you Cassius as well. It's just we usually don't discuss things we agree upon.

If this keeps up we're going to have to appoint Tau Phi as Moderator-Pro-Tem of the SUAVITY forum!

I meant to say this previously but I believe I got cut short of time and deleted it.

In general I often find it surprising how much I agree with Tau Phi's perspective on Epicurean philosophy despite the fact that he is very clear that he differs with Epicurus on certain key issues (such as issues of skepticism and as we see in this thread, physics).

I think I understand where he is coming from on those and I respect his opinion as a matter of disagreement.

On the issue of "gods" the subject is loaded like a nuclear bomb. I understand that here it is particularly hard to put away preconceived notions of what the term "god" must necessarily mean. I think those terminology issues lead to 90% of the disagreement that people in general have about Epicurus' views of gods.

But on Tau Phi's comments on Titus' post as to "ultimates" I think we may eventually be able to close the gap.

To me it's pretty clear that seeing things "on a spectrum," and seeing that there are clear differences between the higher end of the spectrum and the lower end, does not constitute "idealism." As I am reading Tau Phi's view he is arguing outside of BOTH the "idealist" and "realist" perspectives, even though most readers of Epicurus find themselves gravitating towards one or the other.

So I am thinking that talking through this further will be helpful and does not need to end with just a statement that the views are irreconcilable.

On each of these points I agree with Titus and completely see it differently from Tau Phi. We are not talking idealism, we are talking about recognizing scales of measure just as we would see longer living as better than shorter living. There's no specific definition of how long is ultimate outside of a context, but we can still recognize some attributes as better than others.

We've discussed many of these issues many times in many plaves, but Just for the sake of having fun with the last post here is an example of how I would push back at the contention that Epicurean physics is obsolete. Ironically I would also expect that an AI engine would probably do a better job of laying out both sides of these arguments and how they might be reconciled than some of us are able to do.

These are several of the most fundamental issues on which I contend Epicurus can and should be defended:

1. It cannot be true that matter and space are "infinitely" divisible. If that were true then movement would truly be impossible, because you would always have to traverse infinite distances of space to move at all. Further, dividing bodies infinitely would amount to their ceasing to have any real existence. If all things were infinitely divisible then all things would have long since ceased to exist, because they could not have been replaced (as our experience tells us that things do not come from nothing). Epicurus makes no specific claim about any step along the way other than that there is an ending point to divisibility. "Atom" means nothing other than that end-point - uncuttable. Whether we today call that point some kind of subatomic particles makes no difference - the only issue is that division cannot be continued without end. At some point division must stop and you must arrive at a particle that has size, shape, and weight (motion).
2. The empty space in the universe and the part of the universe that is material and not empty are both infinite in extent. If bodies were infinite in number but space was limited, everything would be filled up with bodies. If space were infinite but bodies were not infinite in number, bodies would never come together to form combinations, just as the wreckage of a ship drifts further and further apart and does not reassemble itself into a ship.
3. The universe as a whole had no beginning because nothing can come from nothing. The universe as a whole will never have an end because no thing can go to nothing. These are logical positions that make perfect sense and require nothing specific about how the matter and space are arranged in any locality within the universe as a whole.
4. Epicurus' essential claim about images is that we do not perceive the world around us through some kind of magical or divine communication, but because particles flow constantly in all directions. Our senses react to contact with those particles. Call those particles photons or waves of electromagnetic emissions or whatever, the information we receive comes through particles interacting with each other between us and the object of our attention.
5. Epicurus' only specific claims about gods are that we should think of them as blessed and imperishable. This is an opinion, and like all opinions they originate from our minds processing our contacts with the outside world. Our five senses and two feelings receive stimulations from outside us (including non-visual images, and our anticipations pick out patterns from among them from which our minds generate opinions. Among the concepts we form from those patterns are "blessedness" and "imperishableness." These conceptions are formed from real patterns, but we are often mistaken when apply those conceptions to specific phenomena. Many of these errors arise because we presume that a blessed and imperishable being would be like us and reward friends and punish enemies, but we can correct these false opinions by rejecting opinions that are inconsistent with true blessedness and imperishableness. (I am using "imperishableness" rather than "imperishability" because I am convinced DeWitt is correct that Epicurus held that gods are not by necessity deathless, but that they must act (and do act) to maintain their continued existence.)

Also for kicks, this is what Claude did with those five points.