Posts by Cassius

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. 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.

That last bullet may be the most important one for the forum post — it's what makes Epicurus's organizing genuinely distinct and not just a biographical accident.

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.

Quote from TauPhi

Cassius , please don't take my post as an attempt to pick a fight - I'm just presenting my opinions about the concep

Fully understood and no problem. And we will go merrily along our way because I know you understand that I disagree with every significant statement of fact you have made in that post as to Epicurus having been "proven wrong." Out terminology is not his terminology but the ultimate logical conclusions he reached have not in my opinion been proven wrong on any significant issue, including that of "images."

I just saw what Patrikios wrote and i agree with it - seems consistent with what Joshua said.

Beyond that I want to go further, because I think there's a direct analogy between the problem we face today in explaining Epicurus' views of the gods and the problem we face explaining Epicurus' views of Pleasure.

We have SIX LONG thousand-line chapters of an extensive poem that's really nothing more than a literate restatement of a through text on Epicurean philosophy.

When you read methodically through the great detail in which Lucretius explains what Epicurus had to say about the nature of the universe, and his regular complaints about supernatural religion and imputing to the gods anything except deathlessness and blessedness, there's no reason in the world to go any further than Joshua did in this thread, or Velleius did in explaining to Cicero the fundamentals of the nature of gods. There's no reason in the world, and every reason NOT to, infer that Epicurus held that Zeus of Apollo or Venus were anything more than conceptual personifications of what a blessed and imperishable being would be. Anything further --- and you can go somewhat further using the isonomia / eternal / infinite universe theory that give us confidence that life on earth is neither the only nor highest in the universe, is very much beyond what Epicurus was telling people was essential to believe.

AND YET DESPITE THAT people look at a couple of lines in the letter to Menoeceus that say nothing of the sort and conclude "Epicurus held that Venus was the goddess of love and emerged from the ocean at Cyprus and wrestles with Mars to stop wars and they can't get it out of their minds that Epicurus was likely sacrificing bulls to Zeus every week.

Same goes for Pleasure. Lucretius makes very clear over the better part of 10,000 lines explaining that pleasure is the goal of life, and that if we pursue pleasure intelligently we can be happy, and yet people look at similarly-brief passages in the letter to Menoeceus which are incorporated within the same Pleasure-focused orientation as Lucretius, and still they say: "NO! PLEASURE IS NOT THE GUIDE AND GOAL! NO - THE GOAL IS "Tranquility" and "Absence of Pain" so stop talking about Pleasure - That makes us look bad!!"

So this is one place where I depart somewhat from the reading recommendations that Professor Sadler recently gave. It is terrible advice to tell a new student of Epicurus to start with the letter to Menoeceus and imply that they can stop there. Granted there are worse examples - Nietzsche comes to mind because it's hard to understand ANYTHING Nietzsche says without lots of background.

But much the same warning goes for Epicurus as with Nietzsche. If you read only the letter to Menoeceus and stop you're likely to be hopelessly confused about gods and about the relationship between pleasure and absence of pain. You'll probably be OK on the issues of death and determinism, and you'll know that Epicurus seems to like pleasure, but you won't have a firm idea of what Epicurus means even about something so basic as happiness.

I'd have to think about what percentage to assign, but I'd bet well over 70% of the disagreements people have about Epicurus is that they refuse to go further than the letter to Menoeceus. The truth is that the complete picture still does largely exist, but it requires consideration of Lucretius and Diogenes of Oinoanda and the other surviving secondary sources.

---

After checking back on the title of the thread to remember what we are supposed to be talking about. , I want to add this:

ironically, I think many of the issues we are debating are handled handled better by LLM's than they are by people who have focused only on the letter to Menoeceus and the collected sayings. The LLM comments in this thread on prolepsis, and now with Patrikios' LLM on the gods are far more balanced and perceptive than what a lot of people get out of the letter to Menoeceus. The LLM's seem to be taking into account a much wider context than can be gleaned only from Menoeceus.

I wouldn't prefer to take the side of AI in a debate, but at this point I could easily argue that AI is more likely to be the salvation of Epicurean philosophy than its death. Anything that opens up the discussion beyond Menoeceus to include Herodotus and Pythocles and Lucretius and Diogenes of Oinoanda has the potential to revolutionize the study of Epicurus for the better.

Quote from DaveT

. It's so sad that the extent fragments, the letters, and Lucretius are all we have to resolve the issue of how he could believe in gods that neither he or anyone had ever sensed with the five senses

He could believe in them in exactly the same way he believes in atoms, which he has also never perceived with his five senses.

Quote from DaveT

king frankly, when he says there are gods, to me, he believes they exist without evidence

Again, he had the same level of evidence he had as to atoms - all inference, no direct evidence - yet fully "believed" in atoms.

Quote from DaveT

Yet, still scratching my head: Under this, his gods being immortal are coexistent with eternal atoms, even though the gods are composed of atoms

Because the gods must act to maintain their deathlessness. forces exist which tend toward dissolution and will cause that if not counteracted, but there is no "fate" which prevents counteracting forces from being sustainable without definite limit.

Quote from DaveT

In a way, the apparent inconsistency of methodology illuminates Epicurus' common humanity.

And as for the last part I am not saying this to be contentious but to say what I think and Epicurean from the ancient world would say even if they were alive today and have access to the same science we have:

You have every right to disagree with Epicurus and think that the error you think he committed proves his humanity. An ancient Epicurean would say that the error is yours for not agreeing with Epicurus' argument as to proof from circumstantial evidence. Although I am not an ancient Epicurus, I would say that I would agree with their position even given all the additional science we have today, which I don't think touches in any way the essence of Epicurus' logical argument.

This week we will continue around line 734 discussing ideas of what the universe is fundamentally made.

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Quote from DaveT

I still don't understand how Epicurus actually believed there were Greek Gods

At least as for me, I don't mean to say that Epicurus believed in the "Greek Gods." He may have spoken loosely at times about one or another of them, but I interpret him as never straying from the point that "gods as a class" exist - not that any individual Greek god has any individual characteristic attached to him or her.

The images and prolepses we are talking about are generic perceptions of classes of things, as the chatgpt model referenced. As for the physical existece of such beings, you also have the conclusions that derive from how atoms work and lead to the formation of real entities over an eternal and boundless universe, such as those forces led to life here on Earth. And you have the "isonomia" in which we observe the spectrum of things from "lowest" to "highest," which means that what has happened here has happened a countless number of times elsewhere, and has led to the formation of beings much smarter and more successful and long-lasting than ourselves.

I personally have no problem constructing from those various observations a firm belief that there is a class of being called gods. But anyone sassert to me that jehovah or Zeus or any other PARTICULAR god has done something or said something has an extremely high burden of proof which is going to be extremely difficult and likely impossible to meet given the observations that led me to conclude that they exist in the first place. Yes there will be aliens who are smarter and long-lived than we are, but even smart aliens doesn't get you to true "godhood" unless you're fully successful in those attributes.