Episode 154 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 10 - Chapter 7 - The Canon Reason and Nature 01
Date: 01/02/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2799-episode-154-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-10-the-canon-reason-and-nature-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 154 opens Chapter 7 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, “The Canon, Reason, and Nature,” marking a shift from the historical and biographical focus of earlier episodes to the deep philosophical questions of Epicurean epistemology — what DeWitt calls “canonics.” DeWitt’s key opening point is that the Canon was not an afterthought but occupied the first place in the Epicurean triad of Canon, Physics, and Ethics, because both physics and ethics are subject to the test of the Canon. Cassius explains that the Canon refers not to a list of conclusions but to the instruments of truth — like a builder’s ruler, plumb line, and straight edge — by which we measure reality: the three legs are the five senses, the anticipations (prolepsis), and the feelings (pleasure and pain, from the Greek pathae). A central question is whether Epicurus was a pure empiricist; Martin offers a physicist’s perspective that even modern science is not simply empiricist, since sophisticated measuring instruments (electron microscopes, black-hole imaging) require theoretical frameworks to interpret the data — and he argues that the theories of scientists parallel the role of anticipations in Epicurus’s Canon. DeWitt’s conclusion is that Epicurus was not a pure empiricist, because he made room for anticipations and feelings alongside the senses. The episode contrasts Epicurus with Democritus (who held “truth is at the bottom of a well”), Pyrrho the Skeptic (who concluded that nothing is knowable), and Plato (who, DeWitt argues, also ranks as a skeptic since he belittled the senses and declared phenomena deceptive, leaving only abstract reason as the contact between man and reality — illustrated by the Cave allegory). Joshua adds a pointed comparison to Scientology as a modern parallel to systems claiming the senses lie and only a special elite method reaches true reality, while Epicurus takes the opposite view: truth is near the surface, not at the bottom of the well. The episode also covers prolepsis etymology, the Latin/Greek roots of “norm” and “canon,” and Philodemus’s On Methods of Inference as a further source on Epicurean canonics.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll 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 you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 154 of Lucretius Today. We are continuing in our series going through Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy. We’ve spent the last several episodes reviewing the background of Epicurean philosophy, the formation of the school, and now we’re turning to Chapter 7, which is entitled “The Canon, Reason, and Nature.” From here on out, we’re going to be talking about deep philosophical questions as opposed to the more historical and chronological focus that we had in the first couple of episodes of this series. And the way to start this morning would be to start with the opening words of DeWitt in this chapter. He says, quote: “The canon was not an afterthought as the Stoics asserted, but occupied the first place in the triad of the canon, physics, and ethics. This arrangement is unalterable because the ethics were deduced from the physics and the truth of both physics and ethics was subject to the test of the canon, which includes sensations, anticipations, and feelings.”
So maybe one of the most important things for us to talk about today and get started with as we go into this chapter is that we have to decide what the canon is before we can even discuss it. We talked in last week’s episode about the issue of what it means to know something, what it means to use the word “certain” or to be confident of something. It might be tempting, if you’re comparing Epicurean philosophy to Catholicism or another religion, to think that the axioms or the foundations of Epicurean philosophy are the 40 doctrines of Epicurus or his 12 fundamentals of physics — that those are the canonical statements of Epicurean philosophy by which you judge everything else. And what DeWitt is pointing out here is something more basic.
He says, quote: “The word canon denotes a rule or straight edge, but metaphorically includes all the instruments employed by a builder. A perspicuous account of it is presented by Lucretius, who mentions the square and the plumb line.” And then there’s an analogy that DeWitt uses to get us started: it is a mistake to confuse the tests of truth with the content of truth — that is, the tools of precision with the stones of the wall. So the takeaway appears to be that when we’re talking about the canon of truth, we’re not talking about a list of conclusions or a list of principles derived after a lot of thought or observation. We’re talking about the instruments by which we gather data and then assemble in our minds into conclusions or opinions that we can decide are true or false. We’re talking about a pre-conceptual level of gathering data — using the equivalence of yardsticks, rulers, straight edges, plumb lines, compasses, things we use to measure. The hammer, the screwdriver, the tools of precision do not contain information within themselves. They are things we hold up to reality — to the things we observe — and measure them using that.
So getting back to the issue of what it means to know something or to be confident of anything: there are people who assert that the standard of truth is whether it’s in the Bible, or what God tells us; if you’re a Platonic philosopher or even an Aristotelian to some degree, you’re going to take the position that it is abstract logical analysis that turns observations into syllogisms and allows you to come up with a formula — and only if you can do that will you have confidence in the truth of any particular conclusion. Since Epicurus holds that there is no supernatural God to deliver divine revelation, and since Epicurus holds that there is no true universe beyond our senses — no realm of forms like Plato was suggesting, or essences like Aristotle is associated with — since those things don’t exist in the Epicurean universe, where ultimately at the bottom of things only atoms and void exist, you’ve got to come up with another method of determining what is true, what it means to have confidence in something, what it means to consider anything to be true or false or certain or doubtful.
And so what Epicurus was doing, according to DeWitt, is suggesting that rather than look to things that don’t exist — like supernatural gods — you look to the faculties that nature has given you for the evaluation of things. And what nature has given you, according to Epicurus, are primarily the five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Lucretius goes into this in great detail in Book 4 of his poem — how ultimately those five senses cannot be looked behind. But Epicurus also suggests that in addition to the five senses there are two other legs of his canon of truth: the feelings — pleasure and pain — a term that derives from the Greek pathae; and then something called anticipations, which is a very difficult subject that we’ll evaluate in coming weeks. DeWitt implies that it’s sort of an intuitive faculty of assembling concepts that you might not otherwise be able to assemble. He uses justice as an example of something known through anticipations, and I believe he also uses the concept of divinity — the issue of gods — as something subject to this faculty. Some translators just use the word “concepts” for anticipations. If you go to Diogenes Laertius and read his background about the Epicurean Canon, he appears to be saying that you see several oxen, you assemble in your mind a concept of “an ox,” and that’s what an anticipation is — which would equate it to some type of conceptual reasoning. For purposes of our general discussion in this chapter, the three legs of the Canon are: the five senses, the anticipations as this conceptual faculty of some kind, and the feelings themselves.
And a closely related issue is whether Epicurus was an empiricist or not. Let’s start the conversation with that question. Joshua, when people talk about Epicurus as an empiricist, what does that mean?
Joshua:
Yeah. Happy New Year, by the way.
Cassius:
That’s right — Happy New Year to everyone. This is our first episode of 2023.
Joshua:
It was funny — I was actually watching QI last night, which is a British quiz show, and they were talking about potatoes. When they were trying to get potatoes introduced, they were having some difficulty because potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible. So people didn’t think they were good to eat. So something you mentioned — getting your truth from the Bible.
So the question here is empiricism. As you were just describing, Epicurus himself has three legs for his canon of truth. Empiricism would be a system of thought that focuses really just on sensation as the test of how we know what is true. My understanding — and we were talking about this before the recording — was that science as a discipline was mostly in this mode of empiricism, ruling out things that didn’t come to us through our senses. In fact, there was a talk — I think it was Richard Dawkins — where he was trying to highlight some of the interesting issues of how creationism and intelligent design work, and he would put up a slide with ludicrous titles of imaginary scientific papers. It would be something like: “Professor J.S. Haldane has been vouchsafed a secret revelation that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.” The point, obviously, is to get people thinking in a way that doesn’t take divine revelation into account — there’s no way to verify or falsify that. But Martin has more to say about this. Martin, let’s talk about whether Epicurus was an empiricist or not. We were discussing before we started recording today whether most scientists today consider themselves to be empiricists. What is the case about that?
Martin:
At least for the physicists, I think the mass majority who understand what they’re doing do not consider themselves to be empiricists, because empiricism means just producing a collection of data with no understanding. So in order to do measurements beyond the five senses — or experiments as extensions of the senses — we need theories already. For example, if we use a magnifying glass we look at something bigger, we see something which is very similar, so it’s credible. Then when we go to the optical microscope, say 1000x magnification, the things look already very different from what we see with the bare eye. There are a lot of additional effects in there. So we need a theory of the optical microscope to properly interpret the images. That means in order to collect empirical evidence from the microscope and make factual statements, we need a theory of the instrument — so there is a tight interaction between theory and experiment, and this goes way beyond what empiricism would allow. The next step: if you use electron microscopes — the earlier ones, operating in a mode analogous to optical imaging — it’s still some sort of an image. But the most sophisticated ones nowadays, which show individual atoms, are no longer imaging in this traditional sense. What they do is compare what is captured by a two-dimensional sensor with a simulation, and then the result is calculated. That means an image from an electron microscope showing an atom is calculated — so it’s not an image in the conventional sense. There you really have a fusion of experiment and theory even more tightly. And at the most extreme end, when pictures of the black hole were shown, it’s very similar — what was shown was basically a fusion of theory and experimental data. We can see this in analogy to Epicurus: anticipations correspond to the theories of scientists, and those measurement tools are extensions of the senses. What is different between Epicurus’s idea and what a lot of scientists see is that people still think there is truth. But from a scientific perspective, truth is argued about. What matters is that models are adequate — whether there is a reality within which that model is true doesn’t matter.
Cassius:
There’s so much there, but I’ll comment on the very last thing you said. From a scientific perspective, truth doesn’t matter. But I think Epicurus would probably say that from a living-your-life perspective, truth and falsity do matter — that you have to decide in your life what you’re going to consider true versus false if you’re to decide anything about how to live your life, if you’re going to have confidence in your decision-making processes. So there’s definitely a different approach and perspective between being a scientist and just being a human being living your life.
But also what you said, Martin, is fascinating. You raised the analogy that all the senses can provide you is a collection of facts or data unless you have some type of ability to organize that data in your mind and make use of it. It’s just like a collection of photographs on the table in front of you. And the word “collection” is interesting in itself — how do we decide what is a collection versus just a random heap of unrelated things? How is it that in your mind these individual observations are brought together into any kind of thought process or concepts or opinions at all, much less whether they’re true or false? Because if you just look around you and look at the trees and the flowers and the sky and the grass, why are you different from any cat or dog or insect — in terms of being able to see things but make no use of that information? Whether that is all just a process of logic — what is the best way to describe what is going on in your mind as you take that data? It does appear that Epicurus didn’t just say “everything comes from the senses is true,” which is one of the things we’ll discuss as we go on. You have to understand what it means to be true or false. And as Martin said, you have to understand how your instruments work. You have to have a theory of operation — you have to understand as you go from a regular optical microscope to an electron microscope to other types of measuring devices how they work. If you don’t understand how the instruments work, you might as well just be putting the Bible in front of yourself and reading it, because if you don’t understand how the instruments work you have no way to judge whether they are operating correctly, whether what they’re providing you is distorted or accurate. And so you have to have a theory or an understanding of how all this operates — which I think is the general topic we’re addressing here in this whole issue of the canon, reason, and nature.
Martin:
Okay, again resuming on truth. Even in our daily lives we can take the scientific position that truth doesn’t matter — we just go for what is adequate. So we can attribute adequacy of a model as analogous to truth; for simplicity, we can just think of it as true, but knowing that basically we just have an adequate model. It’s enough that we have, say, a high percentage of probability that what we expect will happen if we do a certain thing. That is simply enough. It doesn’t matter whether there is truth behind it or not. So where truth comes in is more in a trivial sense, like that a singular incident actually happened, or that the protocol of an experiment records true numbers. But this is a trivial sense of truth — it doesn’t refer to the truth of the theory in the sense that it’s true in reality.
Joshua:
Yeah, I can see why scientific disciplines have their own approach. And you’re extending that, Martin, to how we live our lives. Epicurus is doing something very different. He is holding forth as a philosopher in a city famous for its philosophers, in a culture that prides itself on its culture including philosophy. To be in that position and not have an account of truth and of how we know what is true would have been very unusual. And for Epicurus, I think even beyond all those issues of being a philosopher and being an Athenian and a Greek — there was something about that that made him feel like the understanding of where we derive truth is very important. It colored, I expect, all of his conclusions.
There’s a quote by Democritus — his surviving works, or more like very fragmentary quotations. What he says is: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of a well.” There’s a translation of Lucretius by Ronald Latham in 1951, and in Latham’s introduction he says: “Epicurus was consciously and deliberately superficial. He believed that truth was not at the bottom of the well, but very near the surface, scarcely veiled in the outward appearance of things.” For this reason his language was pictorial, and in the hands of a poet easily became picturesque. It’s the kind of approach Epicurus is taking — not only is truth knowable, but we’re constantly facing it every day, bumping up against it all the time. This seems to have been his view because it comes in through the senses, through the feelings of pleasure and pain, through the anticipations or prolepsis. So it seems to have been quite important to him to have truth at the center of the conversation.
Cassius:
One of the things we’re discussing as part of this aspect of things would involve Principal Doctrines 22, 23, 24, and 25, where Epicurus does seem to address these issues explicitly. Just because we think truth is possible in certain situations, Epicurus is not saying that he is able to tell you the truth of every particular question. But what he does say is that if you reject the senses, then you have no standard to judge between things that are true versus things that are false — that these senses are ultimately your tools of precision, the tools of measurement, which will allow you to do as best you can to determine what is true or false. By no means does the Canon guarantee you that you’re going to reach some conclusion — just because you’ve got a hammer and a screwdriver and a set of tools doesn’t mean you can build a house. But if you don’t use those tools of precision that nature gave you, what have you got besides those? What are you going to suggest is more reliable than the tools that nature herself gave you through the senses to judge reality? Because Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers would allege that there are ways through syllogistic logic and other approaches to see a true reality beyond the senses — that the senses are by definition inadequate to judge reality and we must have something higher. So much of this comes back to that question: is there anything higher than the faculties that nature has given you by which you can determine truth?
And one important thing I don’t want to go past: Principal Doctrine 24. Epicurus is very clear that the data you get through your senses is not itself some kind of divine revelation telling you what is true. The data has to be assembled in your mind into an opinion as to what’s true or false. And the constant struggle every human faces is deciding whether you have enough information through these senses, whether that information is accurate, whether it’s repeating itself consistently over time, whether you have enough data to form a conclusion about something being true or false or certain or uncertain. And that’s where the issue of “waiting” comes in, which is discussed in Principal Doctrine 24. “If among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm that which both awaits confirmation and that which does not, you won’t escape error, since you’ll be preserving the whole cause of doubt in the first place” — which I think means simply that unless you keep clear in your mind the difference between the doubtful and the certain and how you’ve assembled them, you have no way of ever reaching any conclusion, because you haven’t understood what it means to be right or wrong, true or false, doubtful or certain in the first place.
Joshua, when you’re talking about Democritus saying that truth is at the bottom of a well — this is apparently where Epicurus was differing from Democritus in a number of issues. Epicurus was taking the position that you can sit around and debate probabilities to the end of time or till you die, but in the meantime you’ve got to live. You’ve got to eat and sleep and work and decide how to conduct your day-to-day activities. For purposes of your day-to-day activities — kind of what Martin was saying a minute ago — you have to decide what’s good enough, what’s probable and what’s not probable. If you’re the type of person who decides that it’s probable there’s no heaven or hell, and that satisfies you, there are certainly people who think in terms of probabilities and find that satisfying. But Epicurus was addressing basically everybody, not just scientists. And if you are plagued with doubt and indecision and anxiety every moment of your life thinking you’re about to go to hell and be tormented in flames for eternity, then you’ve got a different set of problems that has to be addressed, and you’re not going to accept some abstruse scientific probability reasoning as the basis for getting rid of that anxiety. You need something that’s understandable to you about how thought processes work and how you’re not at the bottom of a well — you’re at the top looking down into it, and you’ve got to decide whether you’re going to jump in or go in a different direction. Everybody takes action at some point to remain alive, and you’ve got to get comfortable with whether the information and the opinions you’re using to take action are sufficiently well-founded or not. The person who says that nothing can be known is saying something that’s nonsensical because they’re taking certain positions. What are you ultimately going to look toward to give you confidence to live your life?
On page 122, DeWitt says: “The institution of the canon reflects contemporary striving for an increased precision in all the arts — sculpture, architecture, music, mathematics — but the immediate provocation is to be found in the teachings of Pyrrho the skeptic and of Plato.” What do we think about that idea — the idea that Epicurus is developing the Canon in response to other philosophers, particularly skeptic philosophers? We know from Diogenes Laertius — I think I must be on the Peter St. Andre website, but I’m not sure — from the book on Pyrrho in Diogenes Laertius, it was said that Epicurus, who admired the conversation and manners of Pyrrho, was frequently asking about him, specifically about his travels. Epicurus was interested in what Pyrrho was discovering. What did you find out when you went to India? That kind of thing. But what Epicurus arrived at was completely different from — in fact, almost an opposite conclusion to — what Pyrrho arrived at. Pyrrho is a hard-line skeptic. “Skeptic” in the ancient world doesn’t mean what it means in the modern world — “I don’t believe your weird theory about this one thing.” Skepticism in the ancient world encompasses the belief that nothing is really knowable. That’s the position Pyrrho is putting forth.
Actually, DeWitt makes the claim that that same approach can also be applied to Plato. He says: “In the judgment of Epicurus, Plato also ranked as a skeptic because he belittled the sensations as undependable and phenomena as deceptive, the only real and eternal existences being the ideas.” So that’s probably enough to talk about for a little bit. Isn’t that the meaning of the parable of the cave that Plato is so associated with? That what we as ordinary mortals live in is a cave in which we’re chained and able to look only at flickering shadows on the wall in front of us? And that the only way to ever see the true reality is to find our way out of this cave and come to a new dimension, which apparently you can only do through logic and reason, as opposed to just relying on the sensations directly in front of you.
Joshua:
See, I’ve always thought that this was one of the major things I get productively from DeWitt — he’s pointing out that not only is somebody who’s an obvious skeptic and who says the senses are not reliable a problem, but Plato and even Aristotle, even though they are talking about the senses, are ultimately saying that the senses are not enough, that there is some higher plane of analysis that is superior to the senses.
Cassius:
Yeah, and not just that they’re not enough —
Joshua:
That they actively lie to you.
Cassius:
Right. If you want to get cynical, it’s a great manipulation and exploitation game, very similar to a religious point of view that priests have to tell you what God wants you to do. And these philosophers who have access to a means of knowledge beyond those available to mere mortals are the ones who interpret for you what the true reality is. The Platonic realm of forms is significantly an example of that. And to some extent, even Aristotle has not totally gotten rid of that background from Plato. It really took Epicurus to emphasize that truth comes through these canonical natural faculties, and not through a logic that can operate above and without the senses.
Joshua:
A way that this has been put — because this idea that Plato has about the cave, and the material world, the world of the senses being inherently deceptive — the way that people talk about things like this is that you need to “wake up from the dream of waking life.” That’s an interesting concept, but it always involves, doesn’t it, some rather skeezy amount of trust placed in one individual. I’m thinking of the Matrix as an example of this problem. But this is very much what Plato held to be true: that waking life, the life we’re living right now — when you look around you, what you’re seeing is a shadow of reality, a very limited outline of what’s true in very broad strokes, filled in with details that are deceptive to you. So if you want to know what’s really true, according to Plato, you have to fall back on “pure reason contemplating absolute truth.” If you want to dispel the shadows and see things as they really are, that’s the approach you need to take according to Plato — and to an extent Aristotle and some of these other philosophers. But Epicurus is taking a very different approach here. He does not hold the opinion that the world around us is inherently deceptive or that it’s trying to lie to us, or that our senses lie to us. He takes the opposite position — and it’s a position that I think has in some ways stood the test of time better than some of these other approaches.
Cassius:
Joshua, as you explained that — when you say “pure reason contemplating absolute truth” — Plato is suggesting that you, Joshua, are a spirit or a mind imprisoned within the body, that the essence of Joshua is just chained as a slave inside this fleshly vessel that is just constantly our limiting factor and, as you say, deceptive — constantly lying to us — and that we’re just some spirit doing everything we can to escape this physical reality that is our enemy and not to be trusted, always looking to escape into this higher domain of absolute truth and ideal forms. And Epicurus is taking the opposite approach. He’s accepting this life, this body, and this world that we live in as the only one, and saying that you should engage with it, use it as best you can, appreciate it, and enjoy it. And since we conclude that ultimately the word pleasure is one of the best ways to think about the goals of life — you accept and engage with the nature that has been given to you instead of being constantly in revolt, trying to deprecate and degrade it and criticize it and accuse it of lying to you, as if there’s some truth beyond what nature has given to you.
Joshua:
Cassius, just the way you describe the Platonic position here, I can’t help but picture Scientology in my head — because it’s the same kind of thing. People want to convince you that if you could just cut away the illusions, if you could just get around the problems of the inherent falsity of the senses, if you could just see that your soul is being burdened — if you could escape that cage, you would reach a state of self-actualization or something like it that is so unlike your current living experience that it’s like you’re living in another world or another dimension. And you can have that for $399 for the first book. So Epicurus is saying: no, no, no — that’s not the way this works. Your senses are not constantly lying to you. Nature changes, but it doesn’t change so fast that we can’t perceive the change and derive information from it. Let that be your guide. “Nature furnishes the norm” is something that DeWitt is going to get into here a lot.
Cassius:
It’s interesting how approaches differ. Let me use DeWitt’s exact words. He says: “In the judgment of Epicurus, Plato also ranked as a skeptic because he belittled the sensations as undependable and phenomena as deceptive, the only real and eternal existences being the ideas. Thus, in his system, reason became the only contact between man and reality, and human reason was crippled by the imprisonment of the soul in the body.” In response to that, DeWitt says: “Epicurus denied the existence of Platonic ideas on the ground that the only existences are atoms in empty space. Thus, to his thinking, man stood face to face with physical reality and his sensations constituted the sole contact with this reality.” And then DeWitt goes on: “Had he stopped at this point, Epicurus would have been an empiricist, but he did not. He made room also for a kind of intuition which is incompatible with empiricism. He postulated that man was equipped in advance by nature for living in his prospective environment — and not only in his physical environment alone, but also in his social environment.” And then he goes on to talk about the role of anticipations and pleasure and pain.
Going back to what Martin was saying earlier, it would be totally wrong to say that Epicurus was just saying the senses are true and that’s where we get all we need to know about truth. That’s not at all where he stopped. If somebody were working on a future article on how all this fits together, I would like to see them also address this issue of the blank slate associated with Aristotle — whether that applies under Epicurean theory or not (it probably does not) — but you’ve got a whole series of fascinating questions about how Epicurus contrasts not only with Plato and Aristotle but with the whole of Greek philosophy prior to his time. It includes that summary: “Thus nature, having equipped man with a triple contact with his environment, becomes the norm, while the Platonic reason is eliminated along with the Platonic ideas.”
Joshua:
I thought it would be helpful to get some definitions in here. We’ve been talking a lot about the sensations but not so much about the feelings and the anticipations. “Anticipations” is the English translation of the Greek word prolepsis, and prolepsis, before it was taken up as a philosophical term, meant something like the anticipation of what an opponent will respond to in an argument. So the image you’re supposed to have in your head is that as you’re speaking — say to a courtroom — it will arise in your head almost involuntarily: oh, I know that opposing counsel is going to latch on to this idea and this idea and this idea. And it would be difficult to explain how you know that. I think that’s kind of the root of where this idea of prolepsis comes from. I’m not saying that definition is the one Epicurus is using, but it’s interesting to know where these words come from.
“Norm” is an English word that comes from the Latin norma, which comes from the Greek nomon — the part of the sundial that casts the shadow. In English it means standard, rule, precept, or carpenter’s square. So again it’s similar in some ways in its definition to that of the canon itself.
Cassius:
And Joshua, if we contrast it — I made a reference to this earlier — the word “canon” is one we’ve grown up associating with the Catholic Church. The Catholics consider the canon to be not an instrument of precision but a body of conclusions. They use it in a couple of different senses.
Joshua:
“The western canon of literature” would be an example of a very different use of the word — not a method of epistemology, but simply a listing of books that people think are worth reading.
You know — there, I used the word that we’ve kind of avoided today: “epistemology.” Always a word I’ve tried to avoid using because it’s just not a word normal people use in normal conversation. But it’s worth defining. When you take philosophy as a whole, there’s an interesting quality about Wikipedia: if you follow the first link on every article, eventually you will always be taken back to “philosophy” as the sort of ultimate article. Within philosophy you’ve got a number of different headings — politics, ethics, and epistemology. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the question of how we know what we think we know is true. Is knowledge possible, and if so, how do we know what we know? Those are the questions epistemology is trying to answer.
Cassius:
Well, maybe for this first episode on Chapter 7 we should begin to think about coming to a conclusion for today. I really do think that where you’ve just been talking, Joshua, may seem obvious to people who haven’t really thought about the issue. But again, we’re trying to appeal to a more general student of Epicurus — and certainly all of us have spent most of our time in reading Epicurean philosophy talking about pleasure and pain and the ethics side of things. As we’ve been going through Lucretius over the years, we get involved in the physics and talk about the swerve and other issues. But we really don’t ever seem to spend as much time as I think it deserves talking about this issue of canonics or epistemology. There’s a whole book — at some point I hope we can spend some time with Philodemus’s work, the title of which is translated variously as On Methods of Inference or On Signs. That is probably one of the most extensive sources we’ve got to go into this topic.
But this whole question of how you know what you know and what approach and what level of confidence you should put in things is extremely, extremely important. In relation to that, it’s always been interesting to me how Diogenes Laertius just makes the comment that the Epicureans tended to combine the presentations of epistemology or canonics with the physics — and that’s an interesting subject in and of itself. Kind of like what Martin was talking about previously in terms of your theory of how your instruments work: you can spend a lot of time talking about straight edges and things like that, but until you start talking about them in some kind of context it’s really hard to gain much meaning or profit from the discussion. You have to talk about how they’re used. So it appears that what the Epicureans would do was to combine physics with the canonics as a method of bouncing back and forth at a very basic level — to discuss not only what it is that we start out thinking is most important and true about the universe, but how did we get to that point? Which I think is one of the things you get when you read Lucretius — especially in the initial Books 1 and 2 — you see what his method of reasoning is, how it combines observation with deductive reasoning about those observations.
So let’s go ahead and talk about any closing thoughts on this general issue of the role of canonics in Epicurean philosophy. Martin, do you have any closing thoughts?
Martin:
No closing thoughts again.
Cassius:
All right. Joshua, any closing thoughts?
Joshua:
Not really, no — except for Happy New Year. Maybe that’s a profound statement. What we’re trying to do here is not simply exhibit our virtuoso knowledge — or lack thereof — of the specifics of Epicurean philosophy, but to come up with things that help us in our day-to-day lives to live better and understand what the goal should be. The instruments of precision in approaching that topic are an important part of it.
Cassius:
We’ll continue with it next week and go further into the question of how the canonics of Epicurus relate to reason and nature, and how all these come together as the norm through Epicurean philosophy. So we’ll get into that next week. Thanks for your time today. If anyone has any questions or topics they want to discuss or suggestions they want to make as this discussion proceeds, please come by EpicureanFriends.com and post in the forum, and we’ll incorporate anything there in our discussion next week. So thanks for your time today, and we’ll see you in a week. Thanks. Bye.