Posts by DaveT

Joshua Thanks for the research above. So how do you think the Romans who were not literate in Greek learned Epicureanism in the Gardens in Italy? Historically I understand that the southern portions of the Italian peninsula and perhaps Sicily had been been colonized by the Greeks. So perhaps the common people in the south were still speaking or understanding some Greek, if not being bilingual, for verbal learning of Epicurean philosophy. What do you think?

Quote from Don

I've heard the estimates are that we only have about 1-5% of ALL texts from the ancient world. (One source example)

Astonishing that the single copy of Lucretius was found. Another thing this made me think about was that probably the number of illiterates who learned by someone reading the texts or booklets decreased when Epicureanism moved to the Latin language of Rome. Unless they were translated into Latin, probably only the few educated elites were privy to the teachings of the Garden. Do you or anyone have knowledge of how that went in the Roman language areas?

Kalosyni Thank you for the history of papyrus and writing tools etc. Very interesting. Although the topic of the literate and illiterate probably can't be resolved, I'm curious on your source materials on Epicurus' financial holdings and his income and the bearing they had on copying his work? If I remember DeWitt, in the beginning of his work he said Epicurus' father was an elementary school teacher, a profession that was looked down upon before and after the family was evicted from Samos. I'm thinking he was not wealthy, but I don't know. Also, if I remember DeWitt, he indicated that at the time handbooks were written and disseminated by him, as well as perhaps copied by his students for us to prosyletize new converts. Assuming they were on papyrus, and they were short lessons so to speak, I can understand why they didn't survive.

But the fact that we have so many examples of Cicero, and Plato and Aristotle's work has me puzzled still. I guess I can buy into the hypothesis that the Christians burned the copies, except that they had no real influence in the Roman empire until the end of the 5th century.

As I thought about this question, I remembered that the only way of sharing written scrolls was to have someone manually copy it. Since this likely was an expensive proposition done by skilled scribes (No Jeff Bezos types) there were probably rather few copies made.

So, if the most exact method of teaching from his letters etc was to read off a copy and open the meeting to discussion, I'm thinking it didn't matter whether the students could read or write.

However.... I think an absolute necessity to the teaching and learning process had to be frequent, (dare I say more than weekly) meetings for both the illiterate and illiterate to learn and adopt the lessons from the Garden(s) into daily life.

In addition, if teachings were also done through memorized lessons, a certainly less exact method of passing on the doctrines, etc. repetitive reinforcement was also absolutely necessary.

As an aside to the original question, I'm guessing that only those who were free enough and rich enough to attend, and learn several times a week had the time to spare. Am I wrong to conclude that women were not free to navigate the cities alone so perhaps the enslaved were members of those households where women were free enough from their other duties to attend.

I'm also wondering if the cost of copying was one of the reasons so few of Epicurus' writings were preserved.

Quote from Elli

Today, many people say they cannot find a partner to have children with. But Epicurus would smile gently and say: you cannot find friends. You cannot find philia (friendship). You cannot find the human warmth that makes love possible. What you call “a crisis of relationships” is simply a crisis of friendship - a crisis of intimacy that leads to loneliness, desertion, and depression.

Elli I enjoyed reading your posts. I'm not sure whether friendship is a subset of intimacy, or intimacy is a subset of friendship. But your statement above made me think of the old saying that to have a friend, you must be a friend. And perhaps to have an intimate (or loving?) relationship you have to love and be open to intimacy.

Quote from Raphael Raul

Marriage and children seem less and less pleasurable today, burdened by financial worry, relational problems, and high rates of divorce. Is it worth the pain, given the tarakhē (τᾰραχή) it entails for young men and women?

Raphael Raul Yes, as Cassius said, there are a lot of issues worth discussing in your original post. Not the least one being that Epicurus seemed to discourage creating children within the marriage contract except if you were one of the rare Wise Men. But that is not my main point.

I think the angst, if I can call what you described with that word, is nearly unknown for most of the world's population. The pleasure/avoidance of pain effects involved in childbearing within marriage are not the most basic. Those who desire pleasure, dare I say unnatural and natural/unnecessary ones that are available within western Industrialized educated, rich societies rather than fulfilling some biblical originating duty to procreate are minorities even among that overall group.

Also, the pleasure urge, expressed as sex leading to babies, of the non Industrialized part of the globe, comes from the basic, human (animalistic based desire) to find pleasure in the sex act.

I want to say that sex scratches the urge for pleasure far better than unnatural/unnecessary things. Note that I don't say sex is absolutely necessary, but (fill in the blank) sure is pleasurable and available to anyone in every station in life.

As a fellow senior citizen, I respectfully suggest that concern over population ebb and flow in the future is not worth the time spent on it. It is for those elite in every society who enormously profit from the labor of the populations who need to worry. For me, relief over these issues comes from to the teaching: Do not fear death. In a sense, we should not fear the future that will unfold slowly after we are gone, it means nothing to us. And the kids will do fine.

I'm with all the comments so far. Perhaps looking beyond the language of the Epicurean and the Stoic we need to consider the hegemon(s) of most ancient Greek philosophy recognized only the very deepest thinkers, Plato's and Aristotle's elites, and perhaps Epicurus' Wise Man can aspire to achieve the perfect life.

In any defense of Epicurus, I'm happy to rely on the first four Doctrines plus the letter to Menoeceus, especially the explanation of Prudence in the letter.

If the Stoic interlocutor with Matteng is neither an elite student of Stoicism as it has evolved, nor an attentive listener on Epicurean explanations he can't understand that philosophers believed hardly anyone is a perfect practitioner of any philosophical belief, and therefore hardly anyone can live a perfect life in an imperfect world. (For me, no one can)

For the student, for the people working to preserve our best understanding of Epicurus' teaching, the battle is a worthy engagement. For the rest of us the choice of words usually has ideosyncratic meaning as he/she is seeking a happy life and trying to understand the world around us. If the word "flourishing" is such an important word choice for the Stoic to make an argument with the Epicurean, I'd nod my head and say, "Have a nice day." (I say tomato, you say tomatoh)

I was re-reading this interesting thread and would like to make a couple of observations. I have no trouble accepting that avoiding pain can be a prime method, even a goal, of finding pleasure. This would be true either by an isolated act, or concurrently with a pleasurable one.

In his letter to Menoeceus Epicurus said: "“When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”

The point about anyone killing themselves to avoid pain if it was as simple as that to be Epicurean needs some attention for two reasons. First, I think killing oneself is not an option for Epicurus outside of hastening death when death is naturally imminent. Killing oneself outside of that circumstance as a means to seek pleasure, as Epicurus meant it is impossible. It is impossible because you can never experience pleasure if you are dead. Therefore to kill oneself is a violation of Epicurus' teaching of how to attain happiness. You cannot say killing yourself to avoid pain is ever consistent with Epicureanism (with the exception I stated above) either in attacking Epicurus or in ignorantly believing such an act is consistent with Epicureanism.

Quote from Cassius

The point I think needs to be made is that you can't just say that your whole goal is to avoid pain. If so, then you can just kill yourself. Your goal is to live pleasurably, which requires that you live, being alive being a good/pleasurable thing unless you are in a situation where you are guaranteed more pain than pleasure). Treasuring life in such a way is a positive activity.

Secondly in the thread here, as far as the virtues go; I think Epicurus said pursuing one virtue, Prudence is enough.

"Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy: for from prudence are sprung all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, (nor, again, to live a life of prudence, honor, and justice) without living pleasantly. For the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life, and the pleasant life is inseparable from them.” Letter to Menoeceus.

As a subset of the virtue of Prudence, then, I have no real issue with saying "do no harm" since refraining from harmful behavior is prudent.

Quote from Cassius

I'm not trying to seed this just to start conversation but I can predict who among us might have some interest in this topic so I am going to go ahead and prod:

Pacatus ? Patrikios ? DaveT ?

These are just three that come to mind, but I think this is a basic question that most all of us need to be prepared to answer (if we're not already).

Nice try Cassius but NO. I listened to part of the "debate" and came away with a yawn. I checked out the Wiki pages of both men, too and decided they both prove why many Hellenist philosophers denigrated rhetoricians :). It looked like they were performing to their own followers.

Due respect to anyone taking the question seriously but to me it is not a serious question when as a general proposition. Of course life!

Quote from Cassius

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

Quote from Don

Epicurus' fundamental pivotal importance to me is, at its heart, the firm knowledge that the universe is material, governed by natural laws, not created by supernatural beings, and gods (which are NOT supernatural to him) have no interest in us. I don't need to believe in intermundia, cosmoi, gods, etc. to be an Epicurean living in the 21st century of the common era.

I enjoyed your overall post in which you ended with the above thought. 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.

I appreciate all the comments made on my original questions and observations. I often look for similarities in teachings before and after Epicurus.

I hope this doesn't stir up a hornets nest from this thread (which everyone is probably fatigued over) But, I've begun learning about Plotinus' birthing of Neoplatonism; the eternal One, the Intellect, and the Nous. It seems like some of the arguments made here, supporting Epicurus' righteous belief in the existence of any or all gods got a bad rap from Plotinus who rejected Epicureans.

I don't know if anyone else will chime in, so thank you Cassius . 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, nor could know by prolepsis since no one had ever sensed them by experience.

But since he was acclaimed for speaking frankly, when he says there are gods, to me, he believes they exist without evidence.

If he is being inconsistent in his methodology of discovering the reality of the gods, it does not weaken his reasoning and his reasons to teach careful pleasure is easy and pain is fleeting and avoidable. Those being true, Happiness is achievable. In a way, the apparent inconsistency of methodology illuminates Epicurus' common humanity.

P.S. So, to recap my thoughts underlying the subject here: Epicurus says nothing comes from nothing; atoms are eternal building blocks of all other matter; the soul and the body are one material being; the gods are corporal. So, he thinks they are composed of matter; and they exist blessedly.

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

Titus, @Brian, Cassius Thank you for the input to my question of whether or not Epicurus truly believed in the Greek gods' existence.

I still don't understand how Epicurus actually believed there were Greek Gods from the Chat GPT dialogue, or the statements or citations you've provided above.

If no one had ever actually seen the Greek Gods how could Epicurus have believed they actually existed? To rely on their existence because everyone believes in them doesn't seem consistent. Can this question be answered in two, or three or four sentences before being supported by authorities?

Quote from Titus

This ChatGPT dialogue was fun to read. Since I lack deep insight to all of Epicurus' teachings or familiarity with various commentaries' supporting for his belief in the existence of Greek gods (the only ones he knew of, perhaps?) I wonder if the following quote from it is correct.

Quote from Titus

This is why, in Epicurean theology, the argument for the gods is not merely "people have a conception of gods." The stronger claim is that there is a universal and persistent prolepsis of blessed and imperishable beings that survives beneath all the false cultural additions. Whether that argument succeeds is another question, but it is more subtle than simply inferring existence from a concept.

Viewed this way, LLMs may actually illuminate the Epicurean distinction between prolepsis and opinion.

The model's internal representations resemble prolepses.
Its generated outputs resemble opinions.
What it lacks is sensation, the corrective mechanism that Epicurus regarded as essential for separating true opinions from false ones.

At first I thought, well he never experienced a god, so how could he say he knows of them from prolepsis. So I tucked that away and kept reading hoping for an answer to a question I've had for a long time. That is, did he really believe in the gods, or did he know the Greeks would have shut down his school if he disclaimed their existence and not support by evidence from the senses.

And then I came to the ending of the ChatGpt where it said: "For example, all peoples possess some prolepsis of blessed and imperishable gods. Epicurus regarded this as evidence that the gods exist, even if many false opinions are attached to them.

An LLM's internal representations do not have this status. They merely reflect statistical patterns in its training data. If a society collectively believed dragons existed, an LLM would develop a strong representation of dragons without dragons being real."

Did Epicurus then possibly or probably not believe in the Greek gods, but allowed that false opinions of the existence of gods do no harm since they only exist as opinions, and not fact?

Display More

This type of discussion is so interesting to me, but I always need to unpack the definitions of words being used. Here's what I got from Google:

AI is generally classified into three main capability levels:

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): AI trained to accomplish specific, highly specialized tasks, such as speech recognition, image classification, or playing chess. This is the only type of AI in widespread use today.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): A theoretical form of AI that would possess cognitive abilities entirely equivalent to a human, allowing it to perform any intellectual task a human can.

I see that there is no AI existing today that can create anything in the sense of human creativity. AI can repeat what humans have created, and loaded into AI data bases. That is all.

If people can enjoy Elvis Presley in full costume printed onto velour by a human and hung in their bedrooms, who am I to judge their taste? Same goes for anyone enjoying AI random art based on data bases, or short stories generated by random scene selections from data bases.

Will I ever want to use AI as it exists today to expand the germ of an idea I have as a novelist, and then claim the final product was my work alone? No, I can't do it. Pride perhaps but, no.

Can I judge anyone who takes pleasure from reading a novel written mostly by current AI, or any future AI? I think not. Who am I to deny anyone such pleasure? Would I read such a novel written in that fashion? I'd give it a shot, and who knows, perhaps I'd enjoy it.

TauPhi On being a Greek god. Hell, no! If they were considered corporeal and immortal, sooner or later existence would become a boring repetition of all their yesterdays. If incorporeal, same answer but only half the pleasures until boredom hits!

Quote from Todd

Epicurus didn't say anything about a "social compact". He talked about justice and laws. Justice is defined by agreement. Laws can be just (if they result from agreement), or unjust (if not).

Same Diff

Quote from Todd

Quote from DaveT

For example, me (hypothetically) paying a higher percentage of my income in taxes than (insert any billioniaire's name)? I never consented to that inequality.

Did you agree with this billionaire that you would pay equal percentages of your income in taxes?

Quote from DaveT

Should I worry about being unjust to my neighbors if I'm tempted avoid paying some of my taxes illegally?

Did you make some kind of agreement with your neighbors that you would each pay a certain amount of taxes?

Quote from DaveT

Should I not be anxious if I'm willing to do the time if I commit the crime?

Despite what people may say when they're angry, I think the sober answer is that most people would not be willing to do the time. It would mean risking your freedom in exchange for a few % more dollars. That doesn't sound very Epicurean.

Display More

Perhaps I could have written more clearly. My point is that in his wisdom, Epicurus may have not considered that most people in his time or ours don't negotiate the terms of the social compact. And then, perhaps that is the reason we see so many who secretly violate the pact, by minimizing their input into it, and then being willing risk the possibility they might be discovered.

Quote from Bryan

ΚΔ 32 "As many among the living beings as do not have the ability to make mutual agreements for themselves (those regarding not harming one another and not being harmed) regarding these things, in no way are they just or unjust, and likewise also as many among the ethnicities as do not have the ability or do not want to make mutual agreements for themselves regarding not harming and not being harmed."

I'm probably missing something here.

But in that case if we average folk are among what he called ethnicities, what are our obligations when it comes to dealing with others?

And how about obeying laws coming down from on high in modern day USA. For example, me (hypothetically) paying a higher percentage of my income in taxes than (insert any billioniaire's name)? I never consented to that inequality. Should I worry about being unjust to my neighbors if I'm tempted avoid paying some of my taxes illegally? Should I not be anxious if I'm willing to do the time if I commit the crime?

Perhaps an absurd question in the real world

Quote from wbernys

Did Epicurus claim that any single act of injustice (no matter how small) ruins a life through constant anxiety unless caught or turning oneself in, or is he primarily targeting those who engage in injustice as a recurring pattern or stable trait being filled with fear because they constantly violate the pact?

To your original question above: I'm concluding (perhaps from ingnorance) that these PDs and VSs as well as interpretations of Epicurus' meanings are generally focused on why you shouldn't do unlawful or unjust acts that are immoral is because you won't be able to live happily since the pain will outweigh the pleasure of feeling good about yourself.

I can't get away from a belief that laws and morals are not REALLY established by social compact. Obedience to laws is by social compact, but the laws are not created that way. They are established by those who have power withinof the community by lineage, or military or economic might. Is there an objection that in a democratic system that can't happen? I hope a comparative study of power politics today, will show that power was exercised in Epicurus' time too by virtue of power exercised by wealth etc in the same way. THEREFORE a discussion of just or unjust laws is missing the point within this discussion topic.

Lastly, I've always taken this PD 35 with a measure of salt. Our mental power of rationalizing allows us to violate every law we've ever violated. And our capacity to forget over time, allows us to suffer less and less over time. And don't forget the concept of self foregiveness which itself is a major factor in it's use or abuse. I'm not in favor of saying people are evil or stupid for thinking they can get away with it. But I think if you balance the real and potential pleasures of life actions against the real and potential pains of one's actions in life, that is still powerfully within Epicurus' message.