Posts by Little Rocker

Yeah, as I remember it (ever so vaguely from a long time ago and I could be wrong), Descartes didn't initially have the 'ergo,' but he does take it to prove something, so it might as well be there. I can't help but wonder whether Epicurus would consider Descartes' skeptical exercise a bit precious. Makes me think of GE Moore's proof of the existence of the external world--'Here is one hand. And here is another. Hands exist!'

Late to this conversation, but there do seem to be some people who try to argue that psychological hedonism is empirically falsifiable by establishing empirically that altruism is possible (with the buried assumption that if possible, altruism is good and recommended). I have been as yet unconvinced, but the main people trying to establish this from a psychological perspective are Daniel Batson and (more recently) Paul Bloom. In the Philosophy Bites interview with Bloom, the blunt British hosts sort of reassert that it's not falsifiable.

Quote from Don

Looked at it this way, "happy" is a mushy, ill-defined word that can take on any number of meanings in context. It's like the English word "love"... "I love you" to "I love ice cream." At least Greek had different words for different forms of "love."

One thing that I think can get lost in this discussion is that the same is true of eudaimonia to the average Ancient Greek non-philosopher, the 'man on the street.' Philosophers have never had a particularly intuitive account of happiness.

I find Don's list of different ways of taking the question of 'Are you happy?' super helpful.

I heard an interview with Rucker last week and bought the book, but I haven't started it yet.

Quote from Cassius

But my expectation would be that if we had more of the "point in issue" we would see that this is a very abstract debate being stated in very philosophical, rather than practical, terms.

I agree that for practical intents and purposes we can set the question aside. Epicurus inherited a debate and he definitely intends to situate himself within that debate using (roughly) the established terminology, but it seems to me that the most important thing to know is: 'we say pleasure is the goal.' That doesn't settle other important questions, like whether pursuing pleasure is far more about removing anxiety than walks on the beach at sunset, but it's pretty clear that pleasure is the goal.

For all their fussiness about making pleasure the goal, the anti-hedonists insisted that you weren't living well unless your life was a source of pleasure and that virtuous people have the best, most durable pleasure. For Aristotle, 'pleasure completes the activity,' and happiness is a life of excellent activity. They're all just a hop, skip, and jump from hedonism. Sometimes I think it just makes them uncomfortable to share a goal with animals.

Me: Pleasure (artfully chosen)

Host: So, you think the answer is 'pleasure (artfully chosen).' Interesting, and is that your final answer?

[silence, silence, audience squirms because so much is at stake]

Me: Yes, that's my best and final answer, at least for today.

O'Keefe's review seems spot-on. I've read most, though not all, of the book. None of the chapters offer a deep dive into the philosophy itself, but they all explore features (and criticisms of) Epicureanism that, it seems to me, continue in the current discussion of Epicureanism as somehow the weak inferior to Stoicism's 'active life of pursuing power and money.' The book is also filled with interesting historical tidbits. And, like O'Keefe says, she doesn't try to make too much of the evidence we have. I think another strength of her book is that she doesn't get lost in contemporary theory, instead doing what strikes me as old school classical research.

Don, I love how you produce posts like the ones above and then say you're no good at such things.

To add to the hopper, Inwood and Gerson render it as: 'There is also a proper measure for parsimony, and he who does not reason it out is as badly off as he who goes wrong by total neglect of limit.'

Long and Sedley: 'There can be refinement even on slender means, and one who fails to take account of it is in a similar position to someone who goes astray through ignoring limits.'

I initially had some misgivings about Smith's translation using 'miraculously,' since the more literal translation is definitely something like 'by divine hand,' but using 'miraculously' manages to express what is only suggested/entailed in the other translations. As Cassius put it, most translations imply the 'or by any other means.' But 'miraculously' might better capture both a divine and non-divine hand.

What irritates me most about the Leonard passage, actually, is the 'yet.' (Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.) Like, what, but it might start happening soon?

Damn, that's a beautiful book! I knew someone whose graduate adviser (securing consent, of course) asked her students to write a check to an organization that represented something they greatly disliked as an incentive to finish a research task. Otherwise, she mailed the check. Are there any Stoic organizations that take donations? Asking for a friend.

I grew up in an evangelical household that for some unknown reason also contained a copy of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. I'm not joking when I say I would take it down when my parents were asleep, read some of it, and put it back, worried that it would be found in my possession. Russell was so smug, but I didn't really care because the ideas were like crack cocaine to my teenage mind.

Quote from Don

Gimme that old time subversion! It's good enough for me!

Everybody sing along!!

OMG! As the kids say, 'I feel seen.' Howling with laughter.

The weirdest part of the commentary that Don kindly posted (and there's a wealth of weirdness) is the claim about 39: 'all through, the neuter really implies persons.' In other words, the fact that Epicurus uses neuter plural means he could be talking about people or things. But in this case I agree, so at some point my efforts yielded the following very literal rendering, which I certainly won't fight for to the death:

"The one who best contrived against a lack of confidence about external threats made those he was able kin, while those he was unable, he did not make aliens. Those with whom he was not able to do even this, he avoided and banished so far as it was advantageous to do so."

The 'with whom' gives away my decision to go with 'persons,' but basically, you would have reason to translate it either way. That said, the opening construction is loosely the same in KD 40, and it does seem pretty clear there he's talking about people. So who knows, really?

The truth is that Epicurus tends to just sort of make up grammar and new uses for prepositions, and people are always like, 'why in the world is this genitive' or 'to which of three possible antecedents does this use of 'these' refer.' I love Epicurus, but I stand by my verdict that translating him is like a steady diet of burnt toast.

Quote from Todd

I see PD39 as relating to the idea of justice as much as (or more so than) friendship. Based on the awkwardness of the translations, I doubt Epicurus even used the word for friendship there

I agree, though I admit that PD 39 gives me nightmares. Translating Epicurus is like eating burnt toast for every meal. FWIW, I think 40 also ties together justice and friendship.

Cassius, I suspect we agree about more than we disagree about. We agree that justice does not ‘exist’ in a Platonic sense and that it can vary by circumstance. We also agree that you simply can't get everyone to acknowledge or conform to a reasonable contract that involves, for example, not murdering your fellow citizens.

I think we might disagree about whether Epicurus thinks there’s a fact of the matter about whether particular political arrangements are just or unjust. I think there’s a core to justice that Epicurus takes to be objective, and he would not mind if most people disagreed because he often thinks most people are confused about what follows from basic grasps (see most people’s ideas about piety). I think he would be fine saying, ‘they think that’s just, but they’re mistaken.’

That said, I have a feeling that he thinks the objective elements of justice are pretty thin (exhausted perhaps by securing ‘confidence’ from your neighbors) and that many of the political matters that tie people in knots are of little interest to Epicurus because he thinks you shouldn’t get emotionally invested in things that are not necessary for fundamental security. So he might very well say, ‘They think that’s a question of justice, but they’re mistaken.’ But again, we have so little textual evidence.

But Cassius, surely it's more than simply my 'perspective' that Stoicism sucks! Isn't Stoicism, like, transcendentally bad?!

I admit that your Epicurus does sound uncommonly sceptical to me. At least on their surface, KD 36-8 suggests that there's a 'basic grasp' of justice that sets the standard. I find those justice doctrines inscrutable, but it seems that he thinks there's some objectivity at stake and that some laws and contracts are actually better than others.

I mean, at the risk of sounding too extreme, I suspect that Epicurus is even open to the possibility that drinking to excess can be beneficial under some bizarre, even common, circumstances. If, for lack of a better example, a tyrant says he will force the citizens with the healthiest relationship to alcohol to fight in an unjust war, I think Epicurus might recommend falling down drunk in public a few times. Or if the only way a person can motivate themselves to do something courageous is to opt for 'liquid courage,' then Epicurus might say, 'hey, better perhaps you didn't need it, but well, turns out you do. Let me refill your glass.'

Or, ruling out the genuinely bad behavior Euboulos mentions, if it turns out empirically that getting drunk on Friday and ending up at Waffle House with college friends creates long-lasting memories of pleasure, then those memories could justify the hangover. I guess I'm just saying that I'm willing to consider going a lot further into traditional hedonism than a lot of people might find comfortable.

While Epicurus calls all sorts of actions or agreements 'beneficial' or 'harmful,' I'm inclined to agree with Godfrey and Cassius that Epicurus would hesitate to call pleasures as such harmful because he insists that all pleasures are in themselves good and that pain exhausts the category of harm. So saying a pleasure *is* harmful is a contradiction--like saying that pleasure is pain.

Now, you could technically run pleasure and harm together via causation--if some pleasures always produce more pain than pleasure, then you could perhaps say those pleasures *are* harmful because they produce harms of necessity. You might think that move makes the most sense in the case of vice because he says 'it is *impossible* to live pleasantly' if we are vicious. So someone might reasonably ask, why not just say 'vicious pleasure is harmful pleasure'? Or, *it is impossible* to be tranquil without studying science, so that relishing scientific ignorance is a harmful pleasure.

But I again think Godfrey is right that running them together muddies important distinctions best kept separate and tidy, like between instrumental and intrinsic goods. More importantly, Epicurus almost always writes in conditionals about particular actions (which is what makes his Greek so freaking frustrating!), so I'm not entirely convinced you could establish a firm causal link for specific pleasures anyway. So he'll say, 'if it were not the case that X, then we would not object,' or 'if it were true that X, then we would approve...'

Consider, for example, politics. There is a lot of pain in politics, and generally that pain does not produce sufficient pleasure to justify the pain. But Epicurus makes it clear that in some cases the benefits might justify the pain. So we don't want to say that politics is in most cases a harmful pain, but sometimes a beneficial pain. Better to just say that sometimes pain is worth it, and other times its not.

I noticed that Conatus is open-access (hooray!), and the studies Yapijakis references in the introduction are contained separately in the issue:

Epicurean Stability (eustatheia): A Philosophical Approach of Stress Management

Philosophical Management of Stress based on Science and Epicurean Pragmatism: A Pilot Study

I admit to having on occasion approached the question of providence with kid gloves in the past, chiefly because many of the people I care about accept providence. Hell, they even accept petitionary prayer. But the denial of providence and the Epicurean approach to suffering is perhaps the thing that *most* draws me to Epicureanism and the thing I think the Modern Stoics are most disingenuous about (the second being 'preferred indifferents'). So while I applaud the authors who try to address the providential elephant in the room, my experience is that they: 1) lapse into Epicureanism without knowing it (see, for example, the Irvine passage attached, which is pretty much textbook Epicureanism); 2) say something like 'let's agree to disagree (see Pigliucci); or 3) just redefine providence to mean something it's not (like accepting that the past is fixed).

On the other point: I suppose the thing that intrigues me about the '[insert agreed upon swerv-ish term here]' is that these are, in my admittedly limited understanding, two places where stochastic processes are most commonly invoked at high levels of science--in particle physics and in the shocking amount of spontaneous activity happening in the brain.