This is cool. I didn't know about its existence. Thank you Eikadistes . It reminds me of something I wrote to myself some time ago. I rarely share my personal scribblings with anyone but I'll make an exception on this occasion:
Radiate, pulsate and be alive.
Face your fears and smile.
Embrace the passage of time.
It is worth your while.
The best online resource on Cyrenaics I'm aware of:
The Cyrenaics Resource [The Lucian of Samosata Project]
As we seem to read a lot of the same things, here is a list of Epicurean books I have read so far, is there anything I have missed that you (or anyone else) would like to recommend?
Hi Cleveland Okie. Good to hear from you.
You've read a lot of secondary material on Epicurean Philosophy already so recommending you another contemporary book would make you read the same, rehashed ideas all over again. I'll try something more interesting. May I interest you in a book written in 1866 by Frederick Albert Lange called 'The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance'? It's a huge volume dedicated to the development of philosophical materialism over the past 2 millennia but you absolutely don't need to read the whole thing. Antiquity is covered within the first 150 pages or so and this material will allow you to put Epicurean Philosophy in context to better understand what made the philosophy possible at the time it was conceived. If you chose to continue reading past the first section, you probably won't be disappointed. The history of materialism is quite intriguing after the classical period as well. And since the book was written in 1866, it's in public domain and freely available on archive.org:
Thank you Eikadistes . To read something completely new so close to the source is a real treat.
I especially like this part: 'and [we will] forever [live] having remembered [them] exactly as during [their] time living, [thoughtful] of the natural end, [...]' but this line also made me pause when I first read it. I know 'forever' here is not to be understood literally and it's just an expression but taking into consideration the context of a dead friend, this 'forever' made me stop and ask: 'wait, what?'. If I may suggest something, I think translating ἀεὶ as 'always' instead of 'forever' might be more fortunate here. 'Always' retains permanence but is free from implying infinite amount of time dedicated to living and remembering.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing this translation. I appreciate it.
Aristippus' anecdotes about sea voyages he took. Both come from Gnomologium Vaticanum (link below).
Aristippus the Cyrenian philosopher was shipwrecked sailing into Athens, and having been taken in by the Athenians and asked what he intended to tell his friends back home after returning to Cyrene, said: “to procure the sorts of travel provisions, which will float together with a shipwreck.”
[Aristippus] had taken a lot of money from Dionysius when sailing back and because of this the sailors were plotting against him, so he moved from the middle of the boat to one side and ordered them to empty the money out onto the benches as though they could immediately count the money, but instead he turned around and threw it into the deep; and with the sailors being furious at this, he said: “Better to lose the money because of me than to lose me because of the money.”
Source:
The reason I agree that the article was needed is that I perceive many articles about Epicurus by Academics in the last hundred years tend to go exactly in the direction of holding Epicurus to be trying to solve every problem by thought ALONE.
Correct me if I'm wrong Cassius but I think it's widely accepted position that Hellenistic Philosophy was largely practical. And this applies not only to Epicureanism but to all main philosophical schools of that period. The main focus was how to live the Good Life and not how to think about the Good Life.
That's why I find the claim somehow strange that many articles were published in the last century which paint Epicurus as someone focused exclusively on theory ('solving every problem by though alone', as you put it). In fact, it's hard for me to recollect any publications making such claims. If such works exist, please point me to them because I am very curious how such position could be defended.
Instead of repeating my slightly incoherent attempts to discuss this topic, I'll leave you with Ricky Gervais' quote which sums up the thing pretty neatly:
… Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years' time, that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.
Ok so you're focusing on the title rather than the content.
I couldn't care less about the title. I'm trying to make people aware that calling fear of dying and fear of death the same thing is misleading. I'm not saying Emily Austin wrote a bad article - she didn't. It's a very interesting article but for people who are new to Epicurus' concepts it will not be as clear as it is to you, Cassius .
The conclusions like that:
I have argued that Epicurus does not believe all forms of the fear of death are irrational and eliminable. At least one fear – the fear of violent death caused by others – is brute and must be managed politically. [...]
or that:
In sum, I argue that Epicurus believes there is a fear of death that does not disappear, which we can control with due care and with close attention to the social environs. Though my thesis might render Epicurus less of a radical with regards the fear of death than heretofore believed, and though it may even make him seem a bit less than perfectly brave, I maintain that it is a good way to make sense of the text. [...]
are perfectly fine when you understand she's talking about fear of dying and not fear of death. There are no different forms of the fear of death in Epicurus' system. Epicurus was as radical about fear of death as it's humanly possible - we can't experience death so there's nothing to be afraid of. This radical claim is crucial to his system because it slams the door shut on supernaturalism, heaven, hell, eternal punishment, reward etc., and it leaves no backdoor option to get back to such concepts.
So you are agreeing with her? Or are you saying that her article is what is misleading?
What is misleading is calling fear of dying and fear of death the same - fear of death. This article should be called 'Epicurus on the Politics of Fearing of Dying'
This article conflates and equates two different concepts: the fear of death and the fear of dying. Emily Austin provides four varieties of the fear of death at the beginning of the article but only the first one is an actual fear of death. Remaining three are variations on fear of dying.
(1) the fear of being dead;
(2) the fear that one will die, that one’s life is going to end;
(3) the fear of premature death; and
(4) the fear of the process of dying.
She then proceeds with her article and continuously describes fear of dying as fear of death.
I find it quite misleading because to my understanding Epicurus tried to remove (1) the fear of being dead. He never tried to remove fear of dying (2), (3), (4) because process of dying and everything connected with it belongs to the living and is painful and human beings can't switch off pain at their will. If they could, the whole Epicurean philosophy would make no sense and pain and pleasure could no longer be considered canonical. People can, however, minimise the fear of dying by the means described in the article. People can also be unafraid of being dead. These two things shouldn't be put in the same basket under 'fear of death' label.
I think a similar model of the human perception, experience, knowledge, and intimation of nature can be useful in the study of Epicurean physics. In the Epicurean view, this Middle World is defined by the limits of what we can perceive with our senses. When we venture into the lower or higher levels of reality, it becomes apparent that a veil has fallen over our eyes, and that the methods by which we attempt to penetrate that veil must necessarily be limited, too.
Fascinating post, Joshua . I would argue, and it's partly a speculation on my behalf, that ancient Epicureans suggested a way to get to the truth behind the veil by introducing what some call a fourth criterion of truth - image perceptions of the mind. I tried to explain the purpose of these to Little Rocker some time ago by describing image perceptions of the mind as 'the ability to know truth about our surroundings outside of the direct contact.'
Here's the link to my post (#65), if someone is interested. I gave an example of distance there but it can easily be changed to scale to reflect indirect levels of reality. As I mentioned above, it's just me thinking out loud about the forth criterion so I give no guarantees that anything there is correct but here it is, nonetheless:
Side-by-side translations of Lucretius created by TauPhi
This needs to be corrected. I've only created side-by-side Laertius' Book X. Lucretius was prepared by Cassius , as far as I know, and his book/intermediate/detailed views added on top of all the translations makes this resource spectacular. Do yourself a big favour and bookmark this page if you haven't already:
The formatting looks excellent as well. Do you mind sharing what intermediate programs you used to produce the final PDF? did you use some kind of Latex generation or something else that is accessible to others. I can imagine that others here might tackle similar projects in the future and it would be good to know if you've got a particularly useful methodology that others can duplicate.
Programs:
pdftotext - extracting a text layer from pdfs
neovim - text processing and spellchecking
typst - typesetting and pdf compiling (similar to Latex but I prefer this markup system)
zathura - pdf viewing
Methodology:
I instruct Neovim to send the file I work on to Typst to generate pdf and show the end result in Zathura. This way I can instantly see the end product with one press of a button.
This is an obscure book but it can be valuable for anyone interested in the studies of Epicureanism. On top of that, the book is historically interesting as it was published at the very end of the 17th century when Epicurus' philosophy was being introduced into the English-speaking world.
Until now, there were two ways of reading the book:
1) 200MB pdf scan of a 300-year-old book printed with a typeface containing an archaic, long s via archive.org - not much fun there
2) digitized but unformatted and incomplete transcription containing random OCR conversion artifacts - even less fun there
I decided to remedy the situation so I cleaned the transcription, filled in the missing bits, corrected any errors I could find and typeset the whole thing creating a new edition of the book.
During the process of typesetting I tried to be as faithful to the original as possible. Every chapter, paragraph and even inline text highlighting is exactly as in the 1699 edition of the book. I just got rid of an archaic, long s. so the text is easier to read by modern audience. That said, I'm just one guy and this is a 400 pages long book, so it's highly probable that I missed some errors or even created some of my own during typesetting. If anyone notices anything off, please let me know and I'll make sure to fix the problem.
I also added a new title page and an interactive Table of Contents which can take the readers directly to every section of the book.
Cassius Every resource used in the creation of the document is in Public Domain. I listed the sources at the very end of the book. My work is also in Public Domain as indicated at the end so if you find this worthwhile, feel free to add the pdf to the 'Files' section of the forum so the book is easily accessible to anyone interested.
Without further ado, after a short period of 325 years or so, here's the unofficial, second edition of Bernier's "Three Discourses".*
[*) The third edition is scheduled for release in year 2350 - stay tuned.]
So this little exercise indicates well of the paraphrase but also indicates the hazards of following Gassendi too closely.
Pierre Gassendi lived and worked in the 17th century. This is historically very important period for the revival of Epicureanism as the philosophy started to get some traction again but at that time everything got filtered through Christianity. Gassendi, Le Grand and Charleton are Epicurean heroes in disguise. They tried to put Epicurus back on the map but the map was still firmly stomped by a Christian boot. Their works are really interesting and they should be investigated closely even if they can't be treated as authoritative sources for the study of Epicureanism. I'll make separate post about Le Grand in few days as I'm currently restoring one of his works.
Proper English translation from 1699 containing 'Happiness':
Transcription of the book (not perfect but workable - click 'View entire text' to see the whole book):
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A42442.0001.001/?view=toc
Every picture you care to share here makes me bigger and bigger admirer of your work. This one is my favourite so far. Please keep it going, Raphael Raul.
It's an exceptional resource.
I second that. It was one of the first books on Epicurean philosophy I've read and to this day I don't regret it. The amount of information there is extraordinary.
Actively constructed subjective imagination cannot be confirmed nor contradicted. 'I imagined it therefore it is', is not compatible with Epicurean system.
I think it can. Dreams are real. We don't choose our dreams, they just happen.
Dreams are real in the sense that they happen to us but what we dream about does not automatically become true in Epicurean system. 'I imagined it therefore it is' is not compatible because it's a simplification that can easily produce errors. For Epicureans, the claim that we create our own gods to represent our ideals therefore such gods are real would fail under the scrutiny of their theory of knowledge. Epicurus explicitly talks about this here: (Letter to Herodotus, section 51, Yonge's translation)
In fact the representations which intelligence reflects like a mirror, whether one perceives them in a dream or by any other conceptions of the intellect, or of any other of the criteria, can never resemble the objects that one calls real and true, unless there were objects of this kind perceived directly. And, on the other side, error could not be possible, if we did not receive some other motion also, a sort of initiative of intelligence connected, it is true, with direct representation, but going beyond that representative. These conceptions being connected with direct perception which produces the representation, but going beyond it, in consequence of a motion peculiar to the individual thought, produces error when it is not confirmed by evidence, or when it is contradicted by evidence; but when it is confirmed, or when it is not contradicted by evidence, then it produces truth.
My current understanding of the issue is as follows. Feel free to point out any problems you see with my line of thinking.
Non-evident things must be proved by means of apparent things. To do this, confirmatory testimony and lack of contrary testimony is required to claim that something is true. The lack of confirmatory testimony and contradictory testimony indicate that something is false. That's, in a nutshell, an Epicurean theory of knowledge for non-evident phenomena.
Epicureans, as far as I'm aware, claimed that gods existed because:
1) images of gods could be detected directly by human mind
2) principle of isonomia
3) pre-conceptions of gods were incorporated into human nature
To Ancient Epicureans these were confirmatory testimonies of non-evident gods and these testimonies were not contradicted in ancient times (at least not contradicted according to Epicureans).
If "we actively construct our own conception of a 'god' rather than discovering pre-existing beings." and "we naturally tend to imagine beings that represent our own ideals of happiness and tranquility", Epicureans wouldn't be able to epistemologically claim that gods existed. Actively constructed subjective imagination cannot be confirmed nor contradicted. 'I imagined it therefore it is', is not compatible with Epicurean system.
