Episode 349 - Navigating Questions of Knowledge With Ships and Heaps

Listen to “Episode349 - Navigating Questions of Knowledge With Ships And Heaps” on Spreaker.

Welcome to Episode 349 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 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 will continue in Section 15 of Book Two.

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

Summary

Continuing Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, Cassius and Joshua move into Section 15, where Lucullus lays out the skeptics’ two central objections to the possibility of knowledge: that people fail to attend closely enough to the evidence right in front of them, and that they are misled by fallacious, captious arguments they cannot answer. Joshua reads Lucullus’s presentation of the first objection — that a god could implant false visions (dreams, oracles, entrails) indistinguishable from true ones — which leads to a detour through Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great on William of Ockham’s argument that God could cause us to perceive stars that have long since ceased to exist. Cassius ties the objection specifically to the Stoics’ own belief in divination and fate, which Epicurus rejected outright, so the skeptical attack lands on the Stoics but never touches Epicurus’s non-supernatural gods. The second objection turns on cases — a person trembling from real danger versus from a bad dream, or the wise man’s withheld assent when enraged — where perceptions seem impossible to tell apart; the hosts trace the roots of the Sorites (“heap”) argument here, to be developed further in Section 16, and close with Joshua’s application of the ship-of-Theseus puzzle to the skeptics’ broader strategy of arguing that anything hard to distinguish must be impossible to distinguish.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to episode 349 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.

As we’ve been doing for many weeks now, we are in the middle of going through Cicero’s Academic Questions, which is not focused immediately on happiness or pleasure, but takes us back to the even more foundational argument of how we know anything, how we can be confident in any opinion being correct, how we know that there’s a difference between true or false in the first place. And although lots of modern writers don’t spend much time talking about this, Epicurus had a lot to say about this issue, and it’s probably among his most important contributions, because he split away from the predominant teaching in his time as it continued to get more and more skeptical. Epicurus, along with the Stoics to a certain degree, realized that that was going to be a big, big problem and it needed to be addressed.

So we are talking through Cicero’s record of how the fight was being conducted within the different parts of the Academy. At the end of last week’s episode, Lucullus, the Stoic, had mentioned Epicurus and said dismissively of Epicurus that he had not come to any particular assistance to the cause of knowledge, because he still left it entirely unclear how to separate true from false opinion. We’re going to come back to that many times as we go forward. But for today, we’re going to go further into Section 15. Here Lucullus is going to lay out what he describes as two of the largest objections that people in general have to the idea of knowledge — to the idea that we can be confident that anything is true versus false. This is going to be extremely interesting. But today he’s not giving the response — he is basically listing out or stating the skeptical position that the Stoics were fighting against. So as we go through today, keep that in mind as you listen to Joshua reading it, because this is a position that Lucullus disagrees with, even as he describes it. But in order to discuss something, you’ve got to state the opposite position, and that’s what Lucullus is going to do here as he identifies for us these two obstacles that the skeptics want to throw in the path of confidence in knowledge. I think you’ll find that Lucullus actually does a fairly clear job of stating what these two obstacles are, very early in what Joshua is about to read. So rather than go into any more extended commentary right now, I’ll suggest that Joshua has something else to add before we get started, and then we’ll read Section 15 and take it from there. So Joshua, it’s all yours.

Joshua:

Yeah, as we move into Section 15, Cassius, it looks to me like Lucullus is going to spend the whole section presenting the opposing argument, and then as we move into Sections 16 and 17, we’re going to find out what his response to them actually is.

“Wherefore, he begins, as there are two causes which oppose what is manifest and evident, it is necessary also to provide oneself with an equal number of aids. For this is the first obstacle, that men do not sufficiently exert and fix their minds upon those things which are evident, so as to be able to understand how great the light is with which they are surrounded. The second obstacle is that some men, being deluded and deceived by fallacious and captious interrogatories, when they cannot clear them up, abandon the truth. It is right, therefore, for us to have those answers ready which may be given in defense of the evidentness of a thing, and we have already spoken of them, and to be armed, in order to be able to encounter the questions of those people and to scatter their captious objections to the winds. And this is what I propose to do next. I will, therefore, explain their arguments one by one, since even they themselves are in the habit of speaking in a sufficiently lucid manner.”

Let me interrupt once again just to point out that the “they” in this passage is Antiochus and the other leading lights of the New Academy, I think, specifically. Are you in agreement on that, Cassius?

Cassius:

Yes, I think you’re definitely going in the right direction there. And since we took a brief interlude here, I want to just repeat — this first paragraph impresses me a lot because it seems to be so very clear. There are two obstacles, two main arguments that people use against the idea of knowledge. One of them is that people just don’t sufficiently focus their minds to see how evident things are. The second is that they are misled or deluded by fallacious questions which they can’t answer, and so they abandon the truth.

I would have thought that you could add many more objections than that, but it’s interesting that he singles those two categories out as the way of analyzing the whole question. And I guess it makes sense — you can argue that people don’t pay attention to the evidence which is there, and then the second is that they get confused by ridiculous arguments from people who are trying to deceive them. So I find that very interesting to start off with, that we have a way of looking at this that divides the problem into these two categories and then goes from there.

And especially the part where he says, since there are these two objections, it’s necessary that we equip ourselves with an equal number of responses, so that we can be prepared to scatter their captious objections to the winds — I don’t think I could agree more strongly with this attitude, that we know these objections are out there and we’ve got to be prepared to meet them.

Joshua:

I feel the same way. And, you know, the one that really stuck out to me here in the opening paragraph is the first obstacle he’s talking about. I think what he’s saying there is exactly the same thing Lucretius says when he says that life is one long struggle in the dark. It’s not that there’s no light — it’s that we don’t have the tools. People don’t develop the tools to see the light, and we’re surrounded by it. The way forward is to return to what is right in front of you, return to the evidence, return to the conclusions that follow from the evidence, and don’t allow yourself to get swept up in these logic-chopping arguments that come from the other schools, and particularly from the Academy.

Cassius:

Yeah. Far be it for me to go easy on the Stoics, but I do like to say something good when I can. And, of course, I would accuse the Stoics of being among the worst who engage in this kind of captious, fallacious argument that mixes everybody up. But be that as it may, the general point — that you have to come at these questions with the intent to find the truth, and to, as you say, Joshua, accept the light that is there, accept the tools that are available to you, and attack the problem given the faculties that you have. You don’t make things up along the way. You take what you’re given by nature, and you’ll find that that is more than sufficient to do the job. So, again, this is a framing of the issue that I think an Epicurean would be proud to embrace.

Joshua:

I agree. So, going forward, he’s going to be dealing with these two objections — these captious objections, as he calls them — that come from the Academy. This is his explanation of the first objection:

“In the first place, they” — again, these members of the New Academy, which is more skeptical than what came before — “endeavor to show that many things can appear to exist which in reality have no existence, when minds are moved to no purpose by things which do not exist, in the same manner as by things that do. For when you Stoics say, as they put it, that some visions are sent by God, as those, for instance, which are seen during sleep, and those also which are revealed by oracles and auspices and the entrails of victims” — for they say that the Stoics against whom they are arguing admit all these things — “they ask how God can make those things probable which appear to be false, and how it is that he cannot make those appear so which plainly come as near as possible to the truth. For if he can likewise make those appear probable, why can he not make the others appear so too, which are only with great difficulty distinguished from them? And if he can make these appear so, then why can he not also make those things appear so which are absolutely different in no respect whatever?”

Now, before we move on to the second objection, I want to interject here with a passage from a book by Christopher Hitchens called God Is Not Great, because he deals with kind of the same problem — this question of whether a God could implant in your mind the perception of something that isn’t really there. This will hopefully give us some insight as to how these ideas have morphed over time as they’ve been taken up by Christianity. He talks about one medieval philosopher and theologian who continues to speak eloquently across the ages: William Ockham, sometimes known as William of Ockham, a Franciscan whose radical approach to poverty brought him into collision with the papacy. Hitchens goes into the background of this, but then he gets to the next part, and he says: Ockham was interested, for example, in the stars. He knew far less about the nebulae than we do, or than Laplace — the great mathematician and physicist who wrote a great work on celestial mechanics and presented it to Napoleon. When Napoleon asked him why he had not included any reference to a creator in his work, Laplace said, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Hitchens is saying that Ockham knew far less than Laplace did — in fact, he knew nothing at all about the nebulae — but he employed the idea of the stars for an interesting speculation. And this is the speculation: assuming that God can make us feel the presence of a non-existent entity, and further assuming that he need not go to this trouble if the same effect can be produced in us by the actual presence of that entity, God could still, if you wish, cause us to believe in the existence of stars without their being actually present.

Hitchens quotes William of Ockham: “Every effect which God causes through the mediation of a secondary cause, he can produce immediately by himself.” However, Hitchens says, this does not mean that we must believe in anything absurd, since — quoting Ockham again — “God cannot cause in us knowledge such that by it a thing is seen evidently to be present, though it is absent, for that involves a contradiction.”

And Christopher Hitchens responds: “Before you begin to drum your fingers at the huge tautology that impends here, as it does in so much theology and theodicy, consider what Father Copleston, the eminent Jesuit, has to say in commentary: ‘If God had annihilated the stars, he could still cause in us the act of seeing what had once been, so far as the act is considered subjectively — just as he could give us a vision of what will be in the future. Either act would be an immediate apprehension, in the first case of what has been, and in the second case of what will be.’”

Hitchens responds by saying this is actually very impressive, and not just for its time — it has taken us several hundred years since Ockham to come to the realization that when we gaze up at the stars, we very often are seeing light from distant bodies that have long since ceased to exist. It doesn’t particularly matter that the right to look through telescopes and speculate about the result was obstructed by the church — that’s not Ockham’s fault. There is no general law that obliges the church to be that stupid. And moving from the unimaginable interstellar past, which sends light across distances that overwhelm our brains, we’ve come to the realization that we also know something about the future of our system. However, and crucially, we can now do this while dropping — or even, if you insist, retaining — the idea of a supernatural God. In either case, the theory works without that assumption. You can believe in a divine mover if you choose, but it makes no difference at all, and belief among astronomers and physicists has become private and fairly rare.

Now, I don’t want to endorse everything he said there in the end, Cassius, and I’m sure you, listening to me read that, are not going to endorse it either. For example, when he says you can believe in a divine mover if you choose and it makes no difference at all — I think we would both agree it makes a huge difference whether you believe in a prime mover. But I wanted to read this today because there’s some connection here between the argument William of Ockham is presenting and what we’re reading in Lucullus. I’m not entirely sure I have it down sufficiently to make the connection, but I wanted to take a moment to talk through it, if you have any response.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, I find this very interesting myself. Of course, I have a very high regard for Christopher Hitchens, and in general I’ve had a high regard for William of Ockham. But the first thing that jumps out is that William of Ockham must have been reading Cicero to have pulled out this exact question in almost exactly the same phrasing we’re seeing here from Lucullus. Maybe there are other Stoic sources where this would have been available to Ockham, but at any rate, as you say, it’s a striking parallel that they’re both talking about exactly the same thing.

Like I say, I have a very high regard for Christopher Hitchens. I don’t know that I’ve read that section myself that you just quoted from, so I’ll probably refrain from too much commentary on exactly the point he was making there. I would say, however, that there are many things among the so-called new atheists, or more recent commentators, that leave me a little cold in trying to determine exactly where they’re going or what their conclusion is. And I’m not sure you have to read Christopher Hitchens as saying that it makes no difference whether you believe in a supreme being or not — he could be saying simply that under this particular question, it would make no difference, because the result would be the same anyway. So nothing I’m about to say implies any criticism of Christopher Hitchens here.

But I think the point that jumps out at me as important nowadays is that this whole method of analysis — supposing that God does X, Y, or Z — is so bogus and so rife with difficulty from the very beginning. And I think we see that difficulty in what Cicero is saying here, in what you’ve just read from Lucullus, because he — at least as Yonge translates it — parenthetically inserts the statement that the skeptics say the Stoics against whom they’re arguing admit all these things. That’s the point I would not have picked up on in the past, but I think it’s very important. We haven’t gone through Cicero’s own works on fate or divination, but it’s important for people to understand that the Stoics believed in divination and in fate caused by a supreme being. So the skeptics are right to use this kind of argument against the Stoics. Epicurus, of course, would have none of that, and none of this makes any sense from an Epicurean point of view, because the gods are not supernatural. The gods are not creating illusions for men to be confused by. The whole argument doesn’t touch Epicurus at all, but it does touch the Stoics. And people who are so convinced that Stoicism is the way, the truth, and the light will run as fast as they can from the Stoic view of fate and divine revelation — much less the predictions of the future, the entrails and auspices and oracles that Cicero is correctly recording here as beliefs the Stoics held and Epicurus rejected, hook, line, and sinker.

So again, the first point that jumps out at me here is that it is such a waste of time to set up logical syllogisms based on “well, God could do this, and God is all-powerful, so why don’t we presume God does X, Y, and Z” — it’s all just nonsense, a waste of time.

Now, we’re going to go further into another part of this, but I think you’re right too, Joshua, that embedded in this paragraph about the gods is not just the “let’s suppose God does this, that, or the other,” but also — as we’re going to see expanded further — this Sorites argument, this issue of expanding the argument incrementally, step by step, as if that’s going to get you to the conclusion. We’ve discussed this in some recent podcasts, and we’ll discuss it further as we go forward. But I would say both of these types of arguments, whenever they come up, ought to be setting off major warning bells for anyone looking at this from an Epicurean perspective. When you start talking about “God can do this, well, why can’t he do that,” that’s nonsense. And when you start talking about adding incrementally onto the argument until all of a sudden it becomes clear — that’s also a dead end.

One more thing before you continue, Joshua — this is what also concerns me a little bit about Lucullus’s reference to people not understanding how great the light is with which they are surrounded. I hope Lucullus is not referring to any kind of divine light or divine inspiration. I have no reason at this point to be concerned that he is, and I think you’re right in what you said earlier — Lucretius makes the same point, that we can pick up the evidence we do have, focus on it, understand it, and then things will become clear through that. Lucretius, of course, uses the example of the torch lighting the way step by step, and so forth. So absolutely, there’s no problem with analogies to light. But in this context of pointing out how much the Stoics were into divine revelation — and it’s so easy today to talk about “divine light” as the way we understand things, so many people like to talk today about divine light — a caution there is probably worthwhile as well.

Joshua:

And Lucretius does use the imagery of light in a variety of ways. He talks about newborn infants being thrown up by nature onto the radiant shores of light, and so on — that they’ve come into existence and are now subject to all of the perceptions, all of the impressions, all of the experiences that all of us are subject to. But unlike a lot of grownups, the newborns, the young, haven’t yet imbibed a particular epistemology or a particular set of rigid ethics that colors their perception of everything they see and causes them to reach conclusions that differ from what is actually presented to the eyes. So when he says that life is one long struggle in the dark, he doesn’t necessarily think that’s true for infants — it’s true for people who are clouded by false opinion and don’t see a way to get out of it.

Anyway, I think your point about the potential supernatural effect of the light in Lucullus is relevant and important to keep in mind. And going back just one more time to William of Ockham — I don’t know if it makes a difference that Lucullus’s interlocutors suggest that the gods make many things appear to exist which in reality have no existence. William of Ockham won’t go that far. He says, “God cannot cause in us knowledge such that by it a thing is seen evidently to be present, though it is absent.” That’s probably going much deeper into the weeds than we have time or interest for.

All right, so now we come to the second obstacle, or objection, coming from the New Academy:

“In the next place, he says, since the mind is moved by itself, as those things which we picture to ourselves in thought, and those which present themselves to the sight of madmen or sleeping men, declare — is it not, say they, probable that the mind is also moved in such a manner that not only does it not distinguish between the perceptions as to whether they are true or false, but that there really is no difference between them? As, for instance, if any men of their own accord trembled and grew pale on account of some agitation of mind, or because some terrible object came upon them from without, there would be no means of distinguishing one trembling and paleness from the other, nor indeed would there be any difference between the external and internal alarm which caused them.”

I’m going to read Yonge here: “Lastly, if no perceptions are probable which are false, then we must seek for other principles. But if they are probable, then why may not one say the same of such as are not easily distinguished from one another? Why not also of such as have actually no difference at all between them? Especially when you yourselves” — meaning the Stoics — “say that the wise man, when enraged, withholds himself from all assent, because there is no distinction between his perceptions which is visible to him.”

Cassius:

Okay, Joshua, thank you for reading that. This is considerably more difficult than the first part of this section, and we’re talking through it as we’re conducting the podcast today, so we’re probably going to have to take some time before we come to a final conclusion about what this means.

But the first comment I’d make is, of course, we need to remember this is Lucullus stating the argument of the skeptics. So it’s important to realize that what you’ve just read in this last part, about whether some perceptions are probable which are false, is an argument being presented by the skeptics. He started off by pointing out the example of people who tremble and grow pale on account of some agitation, and he’s pointing out that simply from the fact of trembling or growing pale, you don’t know whether the person is being impacted by some real danger or real obstacle, or whether that’s something that’s come to them through a dream — something that’s not real at all. The reaction a person has to a perception that they’re in some kind of danger doesn’t by itself tell you whether the danger is true or not. That part, I think, is probably fairly clear.

But again, this last section — “lastly, if no perceptions are probable which are false” — is more difficult to sort out. So we’ll need to spend a few minutes deciding what exactly we think about that last part. Let’s talk for a few minutes about these last couple of sentences in Section 15 and see where they lead us.

Joshua:

Yeah, because when I first read this, Cassius, my thinking was — he says, “lastly, if no perceptions are probable which are false, then we must seek for other principles.” My reading this whole time has been that when Cicero says “it’s probable that such and such a thing is one way or another,” that’s a judgment Cicero is making. Meanwhile, truth and falsity are out there in the world. It’s not in our perception of a thing — our perception of a thing can be accurate to its qualities, to its properties, but the truth is bound up in the thing itself, not in our perception of the thing or opinion about the thing. Maybe the confusion is in me, Cassius, I don’t know. But I did want to make it clear that we’re struggling even as we go through this ourselves — if people listening are having some trouble with this, you’re certainly not alone.

Going back to the previous paragraph — this is where he presents the second objection by the skeptic to the Stoic claims about knowledge. There are some interesting parallels again to Lucretius. In the next place, he says, since the mind is moved by itself — in the previous paragraph we were talking about the mind being moved by the influence of the gods, that when you’re asleep, or when you consult an oracle, or when the priest is chanting in the incense-laden air and digging through the entrails of a bird or something, the movements of the mind in those circumstances are accomplished by some kind of supernatural entity. In this objection, we’re talking about the mind being moved by itself. And the direct parallel I see to Lucretius is his reference to the racehorse.

Lucretius is talking about the question of free will and determinism. He first uses the example that not only can people choose to move, we can also choose not to move when acted upon by an outside force — in a deterministic universe, the blow that strikes us should move us, but the motion is different when we brace ourselves for the blow. That suggests there’s some will there resisting the outside force. But the second reference he makes is to a racehorse at the starting gate: “Do you not see too how, when the barriers are flung open, yet for an instant of time the eager might of the horses cannot burst out so suddenly as their mind itself desires? For the whole store of matter throughout the whole body must be roused to motion, that then, aroused, every limb it may strain and follow the eager longing of its mind.” So you see, in this brief moment, a start of movement brought to pass from the heart — or, as we would say now, from the brain, from the central nervous system — a start of movement that comes forth first of all from the will of the mind, and then afterwards is spread through all the body and limbs. In that glimpse we see so clearly the evidence for free will. I mean, we’re not talking about free will in Lucullus here, but the images are very, very similar.

Cassius:

Joshua, let me agree with you there. I think what we need to be looking at here is the mechanism by which you’re going to arrive at true versus false. You’ve just cited Lucretius talking about the will of the horse and how that factors into his reactions and his movements.

Let me point out, as we go further here — we’re having difficulty with the last several sentences, but perhaps the very last sentence is really not part of the problem. Maybe that’ll help us, if we can agree that the last sentence is pretty clear. There Lucullus says, speaking for the skeptics, “especially when you yourselves say that the wise man, when enraged, withholds all assent, because there’s no distinction between his perceptions which is visible to him.” So I think what that’s focusing on is that when you’re stimulated from outside, when you’re enraged — or, as Rackham says, when you’re in a state of frenzy — the Stoics say you withhold assent because your perceptions are mixed up at that particular time.

So, to repeat, he seems to be saying: Stoics, you also agree that when you’re enraged, when you’re in a state of frenzy, you’re not able to tell the difference between true and false, and therefore you withhold your assent. That leads me to think this argument is focused on the obstacle caused by emotion, or frenzy, or anger, to being able to tell the difference between true and false. The argument seems to be that there’s something about your emotional state that prevents you from seeing the difference between true and false. And if there’s something about your emotional state that can prevent you from seeing the difference between true and false, then who’s to say that that obstacle is not always there.

Joshua:

Yeah, we talk about the metaphorical red mist descending over a person when they become enraged. I don’t know the origins of that expression, but it seems to me the mist is a blinding factor — it blocks you from seeing things the way they really are. And if you can’t see things the way they are, you can’t distinguish between perceptions.

Cassius:

So if I’m a skeptic, I’m going to throw at the Stoics: hey, you agree that when you’re in a frenzy, when you’re emotionally upset, you have to withhold your assent because you’re not in a good position to understand the difference between true and false. If you Stoics agree that your emotions can prevent you from seeing true from false, then doesn’t that mean you’re always prevented from seeing the difference between true and false, because your emotions are always present? And if that’s the case, then control over your emotions is what’s really required to determine the difference between true and false, rather than any kind of light, or any kind of dialectical or other process, that allows you to find the truth. That’s far from a complete statement, but Joshua, that would be one direction to try to unwind this argument.

Joshua:

And there was a great example in antiquity of the effects of rage on perception, right? Because that word — mēnin, or menin in Greek, something like that — is the first word in the Iliad: rage, or wrath. “Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles, who sent so many souls of men down to the underworld.” It’s the theme of anger and blind rage throughout that wonderful poem. It’s a core driver of the plot, that people bumble and make mistakes, and it’s sometimes hard to walk back the things you said and did when you were in that kind of rage.

Cassius:

Clearly, there’s something going on here in the argument, that there are many things that are difficult to distinguish from each other. And if there are things that are difficult to distinguish, then maybe this is another Sorites-type argument: you Stoics admit that there are things that are difficult to distinguish, such as when you’re in a frenzy or when you’re enraged — so if there are things that are difficult to distinguish, why don’t you go ahead and admit that there are things that actually cannot be distinguished at all? And of course, we’re going to go into greater detail on this Sorites, incrementalist argument as we go further into Sections 16 and 17. So perhaps this is also setting up that.

Joshua:

Yeah, as we get into 16, which clearly is going to be next week, we’re going to run into the same questions, but through the lens of Lucullus’s interest in the Sorites syllogism. He says this in the second paragraph of 16: “If a vision is brought by God before a man asleep of such a nature as to be probable, why may not one also be brought of such a nature as to be very like the truth?” And the Latin word there is the root of “verisimilitude” — the appearance of truth. So I don’t know if we can exactly unpack what he’s saying about the relationship between perceptions which are probable and false, or perceptions which are probable and not false, but it’s going to be a continuing point of discussion going forward.

Cassius:

Joshua, I agree. Let’s not go forward into 16 today, but I think you’ve just hit on where this all unwinds, and hopefully we’ll be able to elaborate more on that next week, because 16 is going to be devoted back to this question of adding a little more, and a little more, and a little more. It could be that this last section in 15 is setting that up. If even you agree that things are difficult to distinguish, then why don’t you just go ahead and admit that things are impossible to distinguish?

It even reminds me of when Lucretius talks about the end of the world — the statement that the earthquakes and disasters that have happened in the past, if you admit that they have come close to destroying the world, then why not admit that at some point the world itself will be destroyed entirely? I don’t know if that was intended to be a Sorites-type argument or not, but clearly it’s a theme of argument — that you can provide examples that are close to each other, and if you can provide examples that are close to each other, how do you ever distinguish between them and say there’s a line between those that are true and those that are false? One thing is different from another — but is there a method of being confident in your analysis of what a particular thing is, versus another particular thing?

Joshua:

And the classic example, of course, is the ship of Theseus — if you start out with a ship, it’s got the hull, the hull planks, the rudder, the oar, the helm, the mast, the sails, the rigging, all of it. But over the years, if you replace all of these things as they wear down, eventually you get to a point where you’ve replaced the whole thing. Is it really still the same ship? At what arbitrary point — and I think that’s the key issue here, that it’s arbitrary — do you say it’s no longer the same ship? Heraclitus would say as soon as you’ve changed out the first screw, it’s no longer the same ship. You can never step into the same river twice, right? But the question of where you cut it, where you draw that line, informs the whole argument.

But it’s not an honest question, because really what these skeptics are doing here is not trying to get a better understanding of where you draw the line, not to get a better understanding of how you separate two things that look similar. Their point is to say, “you can’t know, you can’t know.” So all we have is this endless merry-go-round of syllogisms and arguments — what Shakespeare in Hamlet calls “chop logic,” or logic-chopping. This maybe keeps bread on the table for the professors, but it does nothing for people who are trying to make a way for themselves in this world, trying to get a grasp on things and figure things out. For that reason, the whole skeptic approach, and all of the arguments we’ve encountered in Lucullus’s presentation up to this point, fundamentally just feel dishonest.

That is a great place to end the episode today, Joshua.

Cassius:

It’s basically the same place we ended last week’s episode, and I really embrace your example of the ship of Theseus, because it sounds reasonable to say, “well, there’s a question — once you start changing the screws in the ship, once you start changing X, Y, and Z, is it really the same ship?” It sounds reasonable, and it’s very tempting to get caught up in that. But in the end, if you let yourself get carried away, you’re going to have a shipwreck for sure in your mind.

Just as Lucullus says here, at the start of the episode today, many people end up “being deluded and deceived by fallacious and captious questions, and when they cannot clear them up, they abandon the truth.” That’s what has to be prevented — you cannot abandon the whole idea of truth and falsity in the first place. One of the best arguments against these people is just to sit back and realize that somebody who is telling you emphatically, trying to beat you over the head with “you can’t know the truth,” is themselves asserting a truth. That is a self-contradiction. And when somebody is obviously contradicting themselves, they should not be looked to as the source of the correct way to go. Maybe they’re innocently mistaken, maybe they’re manipulating you for malicious reasons — it’s not necessary to know which of the two, or some other explanation. The bottom line is you have to have a confident ability to understand the world around you in order to live successfully. And if you’re going to maintain your life, if you’re going to live happily, you’ve got to have a sense of what true versus false is, and how to know the difference.

So that’s what we’re going to continue to attack next week. And hopefully, as we set out to do in each episode, we’ll not only talk about Epicurean philosophy, but assist people in applying it in their own lives. This question of knowledge and truth is clearly something extremely practical for everyone’s life.

Okay, with that, we’ll close for the day. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.