Episode 326 - Who Cares About Infinite Divisibility? And Why?

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This week we start are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective. We are focusing first on what is referred to as Book One, which provides an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and gives us an overview of the philosophical issues being dealt with at the time of Epicurus. This week will will continue in Section 7

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackam translation here:

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to episode 326 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@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we’re back in Cicero’s academic questions. We’re going through this of course from an epicurean perspective. We’ve gone through already a brief introduction of the ethics section, and this week we’re dealing with questions of nature. When we left off last week, there had been an interlude about the importance of being able to understand this material for yourself, which for them meant translating Greek into Latin and for us means translating Greek and Latin into something that we today can understand.

One of the things we emphasize on this podcast is making this philosophy understandable to someone of ordinary intelligence, which means avoiding - to the extent that we can - technical jargon and other words that are not in regular use that stand in the way of a practical understanding and application of epicurean philosophy. We’re still in an introductory phase to this work, but as we get into today’s material on nature, we’re not going to go tremendously deep into all of the many things that could be discussed, but we’re going to go deep enough to show how important it is and how starkly different these views of the universe are between the schools and how those differing positions factor into the ultimate conclusions about how to live. As we mentioned last week, the epicureans would generally combine their discussion of nature with a discussion of canonics - or how to take a position on whether you know something or not - but it’s essential to keep in mind that simmering beneath the surface of this discussion of nature is the question of how confident we are in taking a position one way or the other: Whether we should be confident, Whether we can be confident about anything we’re discussing here in terms of the way nature really is, Is it possible to know the way nature really is?

And before I turn it over to Joshua, I’ll repeat what I think is becoming a theme of this analysis: that if you set yourself up at the very beginning to require, before you say that you know something, before you say that something is true, if you’re going to require the equivalent of religious omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, if you’re going to say that in order to know something to be true, you have to visit every inch of the universe not only in space but also in time from the beginning of time to the end of time - if you’re going to say that you don’t really know something is true unless you have that kind of power, if you’re going to take that position, you’re setting yourself up for a dramatic failure that you can never achieve by even discussing it. It’s clear that you cannot achieve that level of certainty, and if that is unachievable by definition, by human experience, then is it even legitimate to talk about that kind of a standard of knowing something or considering something to be true?

Epicurus considers certain things to be true. He considers it is reasonable to know certain things, but he also knows that he’s not been to every corner of the universe. He has not been in existence from the beginning of time to the end of time, and so the epicurean standard of saying that we know something or that something is true rests on the senses and the processing of the senses through the mind, but does not require that kind of absolute omniscience or omnipotence that is simply impossible to obtain. An impossible to obtain standard of truth is a fantasy as much as any myth or noble lie that’s ever been invented. So as we go through this material on nature that’s what is beneath the surface. It’s going to very quickly pop out again as we reach even the end of this section today, which takes us back to the question of whether there is a supernatural God or not. But for the time being, we’re launching into an overview of the Socratic / Platonic / Aristotelian view of nature without resolving at the moment what it means to know something or what it means to say that something is true. We’ll get to that very quickly, but for the time being, let’s go back into section seven and Joshua will lead us into that.

Joshua:

We ended last week in the middle of section seven with this sentence and then I’ll keep reading into the rest of section seven today. We will venture then, said Vero, to employ new terms if it be necessary. Armed with your authority, Cicero and your sanction of these qualities then said he, some are principle ones and others arise out of them. The principle ones are of one character and simple, but those which arise out of them are various and as it were, multiform, therefore, air, fire, water and earth are principle ones and out of them arise the forms of living creatures and of those things which are produced out of the earth. Therefore, those first are called principles and elements from which air and fire have the power of movement and efficiency and the other divisions - I mean water and the earth have the power of receiving and as it were of suffering.

The fifth class from which the stars and winds were formed, Aristotle considered to be a separate essence and different from those four which I have mentioned above. But they think that there is placed under all of these a certain matter without any form and destitute of all “quality.” For we may as well by constant use make this word “quality” more usual and notorious destitute of all quality I say from which all things are sketched out and made, which can receive everything in its entirety and can be changed in every manner and in every part, and also that it perishes not as to become nothing but so as to be dissolved with its component parts, which again are able to be cut up and divided ad infinitum since there is absolutely nothing in the whole nature of things which cannot be divided. And those things which are moved are all moved at intervals, which intervals again are capable of being infinitely divided.

And since the power which we have called quality is moved in this way and is agitated in every direction, they think also that the whole of matter is itself entirely changed. And so that those things are produced, which they call qualities from which the world is made in universal nature, cohering together and connected with all its divisions and out of the world. There is no such thing as any portion of matter or any body. And they say that the parts of the world are all the things which exist in it and which are maintained by sentient nature in which perfect reason is placed, which is also everlasting, but there is nothing greater than it that can be the cause of its dissolution. And this power they call the soul of the world and also its intellect and perfect wisdom; and they call it God - a providence watching over everything subject to its dominion and above all over the heavenly bodies and next to them over those things on earth which concern men, which also they sometimes call necessity because nothing can be done in a manner different from that in which it has been arranged by it in a destined, if I may say so, an inevitable continuation of eternal order. Sometimes too, they call it fortune because it brings about many unforeseen things which have never been expected by us on account of the obscurity of their causes and our ignorance of them.

Cassius:

Okay, Joshua. There are many things going on in this section and what strikes me to talk about and say before we dive into particulars is I think this is the kind of thing that we really have to be careful about, not letting it turn us off to try to understand what these people are saying. It comes across as difficult for many reasons, including the language and the unfamiliarity of the arguments to most of us today. But in the end, I don’t think it is all that difficult to pull out the major themes of what they are saying. So that’s what I would try to focus on as we go forward here today - is that despite all the tangled syntax and the obscure Latin and Greek, there are some major themes that pop out of this material that we can clearly see are very different from Epicurus’ view of the universe and the things that we need to understand.

Many of them are going to be right at the end when they start talking about providence and God and fortune and so forth. But let’s go through a couple of the other sections as well to set the stage for that because where you start with your premises about the nature of the universe is extremely important for where you’re going to end up. And we can see the beginnings of that as soon as they start talking about qualities. Now, we could spend the whole episode comparing this to what Lucretius says that Epicurus held about qualities and properties. But to just introduce the topic, it’s clear that when Vero is talking about qualities, he is basing his analysis on categorizing the universe into air, fire, water, and earth, which we’re familiar with as a primitive method of talking about the nature of things. But what’s important here is that he’s dividing even those into those which have the power of movement and efficiency versus those which have the power of receiving or suffering.

He’s dividing the universe into an active section, a moving section, and a passive receiving section. And by doing so, he sets us up to consider the active section of the universe to be the divine - to be as Aristotle eventually goes into the direction of being a prime mover, being a godlike supernatural force that organizes everything else. And then after that he’s going to talk about infinite divisibility and we’re going to want to pay special attention to that. But before we go to infinite divisibility, any thoughts Joshua on the division of the elements into active and passive categories, which is a method of analysis that is foreign to Epicurus view where he divides everything into atoms constantly moving through the void?

Joshua:

Yeah, it’s an important distinction for these thinkers because that seems to be the method by which they add causation to their understanding of things. You’ve got elements that are passive and don’t cause things in their own right, and then you’ve got elements that are active and that make things happen to the passive elements. And this I think partially relates to this discussion in the ancient world about the particular structure of our world, the earth as we might call it now, and how things happen and are done to the earth. One example of that would be earthquakes. Thales thought that water was the foundation of the world and that the earth, the solid part that we live on was sort of floating on this world ocean. And it was ripples in the world ocean, caused presumably by the movement of air above it, that transferred that energy to the earth and caused earthquakes. Because without an understanding of tectonic plates, you can imagine that a rock doesn’t just throw itself into motion, but fire will continue to dance and move and twist and burn so long as there’s fuel in the absence of intervention of the outside.

So it’s not an entirely unreasonable way to proceed if you’re looking for a very neat and tidy division like that, but it does carry with it a number of problems, and one of them is related to this issue of infinite divisibility, directly antithetical to Epicurus’ atom is the idea that you can take matter and cut it forever and forever and forever into smaller and smaller pieces.

Cassius:

Yes, let’s talk about that for a few minutes. There are all sorts of directions we could take that, but what I would suggest might be the most basic way of looking at it though is: Obviously we understand what divisibility means, that you’ve got one thing that you can break apart into more than one thing. The issue is whether that can be done infinitely or not, and the word infinite implies that you can break things down without limit, that you could go forever and continue breaking things down. To me, that kind of a position is very close to a religious mystical claim that despite all our observation and sensation at our plane of existence, there is some power that could continue to divide things down without limit.

In our world, we observe limits and boundaries that Lucretius and Epicurus talk about at length probably for this very reason. Unless we speculate that there is some power beyond our ability to understand, it is evident to us that everything that we ever come into contact with has some kind of a limit. Where you go when you start talking about infinite divisibility, when you mentally mark out a position that there is a power that is sufficient to divide things forever and without limit, you end up in these logical traps whereby you decide that motion is impossible, that movement across a room is impossible because you’re always having to, as Vero is talking about here, traverse over an infinite number of divisions, both of particles and of the spaces between. This is where Varro indicates when he says that there is absolutely nothing in the whole nature of things which cannot be divided. “And those things which are moved are all moved at intervals which intervals again are capable of being infinitely divided.” This is a mental projection of a power that is totally unverifiable by our senses, totally beyond our personal experience to say this makes sense, and is adjacent to if not identical, with the postulation of a supernatural power.

Joshua:

The classic example in antiquity of the application of the question of divisibility and intervals is in one of Zeno’s paradox, Zeno of Elea was an Eleatic, pre-Socratic philosopher and probably a student of Parmenides, another Eleatic philosopher, and just as you had someone like Heraclitus who says that all matter is in a constant flux, and you can never step in the same river twice, Zeno went in the opposite direction, but he was led there by a very particular logical argument. He arrived at the position that motion was impossible by this thought experiment that I’m about to explain. And the core of it is we are to imagine that swift footed Achilles, as Homer frequently calls him in the Iliad, is in a foot race with a tortoise, and the argument is if you give the tortoise any amount at all of a headstart, Achilles will never be able to catch up to him, much less surpass him and reach the finish line in the race before him.

And that’s because when the race starts, the tortoise starts moving forward, but Achilles has to get to where the tortoise started before he can start moving to where the tortoise is. But before Achilles can even get halfway to where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have moved on some distance from where it was and by the time Achilles gets to where the tortoise was, the tortoise will be in a different place. So now Achilles has to start moving toward that place, but before he gets halfway there, the tortoise will have moved on and so on. So Achilles proceeding by these halfway degrees will approach the tortoise and the distance between Achilles and the tortoise will get smaller and smaller and smaller and it will approach zero, but it will never reach zero and it will never go negative in the sense that Achilles will actually surpass the tortoise.

I mean this is a kind of a silly thought trap mind game, but this particular thought experiment was used to justify the conception that it wasn’t just that the world of sense perception was an illusion, as Plato thought, but that the very sense perception that we and objects in the same space as us that we are moving, that is an illusion and motion is impossible. Heraclitus had gone far in the other direction that everything is in motion and everything is in motion at such a fast speed and a constant jumble of things all moving together and in opposite and perpendicular directions and so on that you can’t really ever gain knowledge about anything because by the time you’ve developed a concept of something, it’s already different. He said that you can’t step in the same river twice.

It’s just as true though that you can’t sit in the same chair twice because the moment you give it that word chair, you’ve tried to freeze it in time with a concept, but the chair itself isn’t frozen. It’s continuing to flow and change and move, and so you can never really grasp it with a word because a word is a static thing. It’s an attempt to sample something or take a snapshot of it and to hold it and make it rigid. But Heraclitus thought that that would always be an illusory and fruitless attempt to try to understand what was happening in nature. Zeno goes in the direction using the argument of these intervals, that motion not only is it not happening too fast, it’s not happening at all. That was not Aristotle’s position. We’re talking here about Aristotle’s views of nature according to his three divisions of philosophy, the divisions of ethics and nature and what you might call logic or epistemology. Aristotle did not arrive at the conclusion that motion was impossible, but it does give you a sense of where some of these other Greeks were going in their account of things.

Cassius:

Yes Joshua - Aristotle of course famously is not an atomist, so he did not believe that motion was impossible. He was bracing his analysis of the nature of the universe on the four element or five element paradigm that Varro is discussing here. Let me step back for just a second and suggest we talk about this for just a moment. Cicero is a man of action. He’s a statesman. He is interested in practical benefit for the Roman republic and making sure that virtue is enshrined at the center of everything and that people act as virtuously as possible. But Cicero has not devoted his life to philosophy. He is not an egghead intellectual. When he wrote what we are reading right now, he was summarizing what he thought was really important about the philosophical schools that had come before and why they were superior to Epicurean philosophy. So why did Cicero, the man of action and statesmanship decide that it was important to include a section in this work about infinite divisibility? What is it about infinite divisibility despite its apparently absurd conclusions? What is it about this theory of infinite divisibility that made it valuable to the platonic view of the world? What did they see in it as an implication that made them talk about it so much and why did Epicurus therefore see it as important to swat down? Could Cicero have left out this section on indivisibility entirely without any damage to his argument?

Joshua:

Yes, infinite divisibility is important for Plato because he is prioritizing the abstract mental space of Euclidean geometry over the world of sense perception, which is as we all know from Plato, is a deceptive representation of the flickering images or the shadows cast by the ideal forms that what we’re seeing with our eyes. What we’re perceiving with our senses is not real. We can’t rely upon that. Instead, we need to rely upon geometry because as Cicero said in Plato’s Republic, the knowledge at which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal and the matter that makes up this world is not to be regarded as eternal. The matter that we perceive to make up this world is not to be regarded as eternal because it’s in this world. It’s in the world of becoming. There’s nothing in this world that is static and unchanging. Those qualities only apply to things that exist in this realm of ideal forms in the world of pure and perfect being.

Cassius:

I think you’re going in the right direction there, Joshua, in a way that I’m not sure we’ve stated it in the past. These guys want to find the eternal in something that’s open only to the mind, and if they allow that there is any aspect of the elements or the atoms or any other words you want to use here in this reality that is eternal and cannot be changed - in this case by division - then they’re blasting a hole in the side of their argument. And so they cannot allow that. They insist on infinite divisibility as a buttress to their argument that the power of the mind over matter is what’s important.

Joshua:

And we saw in Tusculan Disputations a bit of Cicero’s own views when it came to things like death. What happens when you die? What happens to the soul when the body dies? The soul according to Cicero, lives on after the body dies and it ascends up into the ether that is being talked about here in these five classical elements - ascends up into the ether. And in this upper world, the upper region is able to look down upon the earth and to study the things that are on the earth in all different parts of it in minute detail, but eventually it’s going to subsume back into the ether and we know from another work of Cicero’s De Senectate or On Old Age.

There he has the character of Cato say the following, which is, if I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be rested from me while I live. But if when dead I am going to be without sensation as some petty philosophers think, then I have no fear that these seers, when they are dead will have the laugh on me.

In other words, if when I die I’m cut off from senses, perception as Epicurus thinks I will be, epicurus will also be cut off from sense perception so he won’t be able to perceive that I’m cut off from it and he won’t be able to mock me for being wrong about it. Right? It’s kind of a version of Pascal’s wager in a sense about belief in the afterlife, but that’s wrapped up in all of this as well, that we have to have this particular understanding of nature with its five classical elements. We have to have this particular understanding of the mind of God, and we have to have this understanding of the distinction between the world of becoming and the world of being, and that when all of that locks into place, it secures for Cicero a belief and a version of the afterlife that he can tolerate because we also saw in Tusculan Disputations Cicero openly mocking the ideas of Greek mythology. The idea that when you die, you go to the underworld and you cross the Styxx and you go before the judge’s Minos and Radamanthus, and then you have to face the three-headed dog Cerberus. He thinks those ideas are ridiculous, but this, the platonic view has given him a view of immortality that he can tolerate. And of course, in Epicureanism atomism, neither Democritus or Epicurus held the belief that there was any life for the soul beyond the death of the body.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, to repeat, I think the direction you’re going in is very helpful. Speaking for myself as we are talking through this, I think this is deepening my understanding of the importance of the issue involved. Because I have a tendency to think about this infinite divisibility issue as a total diversion from anything that’s really important in how to live your life - that it is more just an intellectual game that could be pretty much dispensed with, and that it’s not important to understand why the argument is being made or to have an answer to the argument. But seeing it as a part of the larger pattern that you’re talking about of focusing everything on this issue of whether what is real, what is important is the mind, the spirit, this higher realm of existence that goes beyond and is above and transcends - any words you want to use to imply that that’s what’s really important and that our world is not important.

I think it becomes more visible why they are concerned about this. If you find in the real world any source of unchanging qualities, any source of what amounts to being eternally the same, then you are blasting away at the idea that nothing in this world is eternal, that you have to go outside the world to find the eternal. I would say that’s what epicurus saw in the atomism of Democritus. You find that there is in this world a source of regularity and the laws of nature that we see. You don’t have to go outside this world. You can stick with what nature has given us through the senses and our intellectual power to understand the senses and realize that the unchanging guideposts that will allow us to determine how to live happily do exist here in this reality and not in some other dimension. The proposition that matter can be infinitely divided is essentially the proposition that there is a non-natural external power that brought matter into existence that can destroy matter at any moment that it chooses. And as a part of that power of creation and destruction also has the power to infinitely divide it. It’s the same kind of supernatural, superimposing of a level of importance that they wish to give to the spiritual divine realm as opposed to the natural realm.

Joshua:

In the first book of On Ends, Cicero is in conversation with Torquatus and makes a number of the same points that we’ve been talking about here. He points out that Epicurus derives his atomism from Democritus, but complains that he makes very few modifications to it, saying that Democritus believes in certain things, which he terms atoms, that his bodies are so solid as to be indivisible, moving about in a vacuum of infinite extent, which has neither top, bottom nor middle, neither center nor circumference. The motion of these atoms is such that they collide and cohere together, and from this process result the whole of the things that exist and that we see. Moreover, this movement of the atoms must not be conceived as starting from a beginning, but as having gone on from all eternity. And Cicero says there is a great deal in both Epicurus and Democrat with which I disagree, he says, but especially in the study of nature, there are two questions to be asked.

First, what is the matter out of which each thing is made? Second, what is the force by which it is made? Now, Democritus and Epicurus have discussed the question of matter, but they have not considered the question of force or the efficient cause. In other words, epicurus dispenses with efficient causes when it comes to the atoms, the same complaint that Cicero and Varro were making in the very beginning of Academic Questions. If we wanted to proceed like Amus and Rubious, the first to bring epicureanism to the Latin language, and if we wanted to dispense with efficient causes like Epicurus does, we could write when such and such a way and so on. That was almost the first thing he said in this book. But he goes on in on ends to say that the mere movement of atoms could not possibly result in the ordered beauty of the world we know. And he says this, he says, again, it is unworthy of a natural philosopher to deny the infinite divisibility of matter, an error that assuredly Epicurus would’ve avoided if he had been willing to let his friend Polyaenus teach him geometry instead of making Polyaenus himself unlearn it.

So he’s going so far there as to say that not only is Epicurus ignorant of geometry, but he doesn’t even deserve to be called a natural philosopher if he denies infinite divisibility,

Cassius:

He’s arguing that geometry - the existence of geometry - is proof of infinite divisibility, which leads to his conclusions about the universe. But the truth is the opposite: that geometry assumes infinite divisibility without any proof of its existence. The practical result that geometry can be useful does not prove that the presumption on which it is based is correct. There are many claims to all sorts of mystical healing properties of all sorts of herbs and mixtures and things that different tribes of the world come up with that do in fact work, but the claims that those tribes make for why they work are totally false, and we reject them out of hand. Geometry works to make predictions in the real world, but to assume from the fact that it works that its premise is exactly correct is the equivalent of accepting a claim without proof of sensation, which is what they want you to do. They want you to abandon the criteria of nature as proof to accept something that they have themselves no ability to prove through nature. It’s a huge difference of perspective that begs the question and doesn’t really prove what they think it proves. They’re out over their skis, so to speak, in claiming a theoretical premise that is not necessarily so.

Joshua:

Yeah, and Plutarch in his Life of Marcellus in Parallel Lives suggests that Plato himself goes even further. This is the section I’ve quoted recently talking about Archimedes helping in the defense of the city of Syracuse. Archimedes was known for his ingenious machines and engineering feats far in advance of a lot of what was happening in the ancient world, and Plutarch in his life of Marcellus says this, he says:

For the art of mechanics, now so celebrated and admired, was first originated by Eudoxus and Architus, who embellished geometry with its subtleties and gave to problems incapable of proof by word and diagram, a support derived from mechanical illustrations that were patent to the senses. For instance, in solving the problem of finding two mean proportional lines, a necessary requisite for many geometrical figures, both mathematicians had recourse to mechanical arrangements adapting to their purposes certain intermediate portions of curved lines and sections, but Plato was incensed at this and enveighed against them as corruptors and destroyers of the pure excellence of geometry, which thus turned her back upon the incorporeal things of abstract thought and descended to the things of sense. making use moreover of objects, which required much mean and manual labor.

For this reason, mechanics was made entirely distinct from geometry, and being for a long time ignored by philosophers, came to be regarded as one of the military arts. And one of the best examples of this was an engineering project on the island of Samos, Epicurus’ home island, in which for the first time anywhere in the world, a tunnel - basically an aqueduct for transporting water - was dug through a mountain from both ends using geometry to ensure that it met in the middle. And this largely had to do with laying out a triangle so that if you could measure two of the sides, you could calculate the third using the Pythagorean theorem and from either end know the angle that you needed to pull in order to just start digging in the direction that you needed to go. But this is the kind of thing, this is mere utility, which required years and years of digging to get this finished.

And it’s exactly the kind of thing that Plato would’ve intensely disliked, taking something as pure and noble as geometry and putting it into the service of human needs in this world. And what Polycrates, the leader who commissioned the aqueduct, what he was doing in that case was trying to provide a water source for his city, should it be surrounded by a siege. So what he was doing was attempting to save human life, but this is exactly the kind of thing that Plato despises about the engineers and the mechanics, and sometimes they’re called the wonder workers of antiquity, people who took the principles of geometry and applied them to mere utility in this world.

Cassius:

I think you summarized the important point there, Joshua, that the angle of actual digging and actual construction is what’s important to us in the real world. It’s one thing to talk about infinite divisibility and theories of geometry, but in the end, what we want are practical, real world instructions, directions, motions in our reality to produce the tunnel meeting perfectly underneath the mountain after a long distance. It’s not the theory of infinite divisibility that proves to us that our practice with angles is correct. It’s the fact that it meets after you follow these particular angles that proves to us that the result is what we want.

We’re going to come to the end of today’s podcast here without getting to the final section of part seven, but perhaps that’s for the best because that’s where we bring all of this discussion of the elements and infinite divisibility into the conclusion that the world is governed by an intellect and perfect wisdom and that there’s a supernatural God that controls everything. But that paragraph in particular probably justifies us lingering over almost every sentence. So we’ll come back next week and get into that final section, and the final conclusion that you reach about nature when you start off with this idea that it can be divided into categories of active versus passive.

We obviously have not even attempted to go into Lucretius and talk about the sections in which Epicurus gives his explanations of qualities and properties and how they translate into our real world and are important for our decision making. We may get into that as well next week, but the level at which we’ve been discussing it today is really the foundation and the prerequisite for understanding why Lucretius and Epicurus even talk about these things. Any final thoughts for today?

Joshua:

Well, on the further subject of geometry, if people want to follow that up, you’re going to want to look at Plato’s Republic and you’re going to want to look at Book seven. Book seven contains the allegory of the Cave, and it also contains the advice of Socrates that the way to get out of the cave is by the use of geometry. And as I quoted earlier, he said that the knowledge at which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal. And I know when I first got interested in Epicurean philosophy, I sort of struggled and we’ve had conversations well in the past now about why Epicurus was so critical of geometry, why did he dislike geometry? And I didn’t really get it at first. And part of what has helped me to clarify all of this in my mind is a video that I produced last January called the Deep Set Boundary Stone that’s on the forum, and I will try to remember to link that into the thread for this episode because that is my attempt to explain why Epicurus is critical of the way that geometry was applied by these other thinkers.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, the video you put together last year was very helpful on this. It’s a fascinating and important subject, and I agree with what you said. It’s taken me a long time to begin to understand the relevance of some of these issues involving geometry and what’s really going on behind the scenes. Not that I understand it fully now, but certainly most people when they first start reading Epicurus, they’re going to find this to be a very difficult subject.

Because of course we’re all taught today that we wish to be science-minded. We wish to be up to date with the latest discoveries, and we do wish to be up to date with those things. But the issues involved in staying up to date were exactly what confronted Epicurus as well. Technology is constantly moving, but our lives are short. We have to make decisions on a day-to-day basis about how to live, so we have to have an understanding of what the movement of technology means for those things that are of lasting importance to our lives.

We’re going to come back next week and finish section seven with the real heart of the argument about nature, and we will give you the epicurean response to this intelligent design argument, which Barrow is going to conclude with at the end of Section seven. Okay. Let’s stop there for today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean French 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.