[Most of the original writings of Epicurus have been lost.] There are the elaborate refutations of Epicureanism by Cicero and Plutarch. These inevitably outline and sometimes even quote what they are attacking. There are hundreds of other references to Epicurus in the surviving literature of the ancient world. Some of these are useful sources of information. Some are our only sources of information on certain points of the philosophy.
During the past few centuries, scholars have been trying to read the charred papyrus rolls from a library in Herculaneum buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Some of these contain works by Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC. Much of this library remains unexcavated, and most of the rolls recovered have not really been examined. There are hopes that a complete work by Epicurus will one day be found here.
Above all else, though, is the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. He was a Roman poet who died around the year 70 BC. His epic, in which he claims to restate the physical doctrines of Epicurus, was unfinished at the time of his death, and it is believed that Cicero himself edited the six completed books and published the text roughly as it has come down to us. This is one of the greatest poems ever written, and perhaps the strangest of all the great poems. It is also the longest explanation in a friendly source of the physical theories of Epicurus.
Therefore, if anyone tries to say in any detail what Epicurus believed, he will not be arguing from strong authority. If we compare the writings of any extant philosopher with the summaries and commentaries, we can see selective readings and exaggerations and plain misunderstandings. How much of what Karl Marx really said can be reliably known from the Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars of the 20th century? Even David Hume, who wrote very clearly in a very clear language, seems to have been consistently misunderstood by his 19th century critics. For Epicurus, we may have reliable information about the main points of his ethics and his physics. We have almost no discussions of his epistemology or his philosophy of mind. Anyone who tries writing on these is largely guessing.
All this being said, enough has survived to make a general account of the philosophy possible. Epicurus appears to have been a consistent thinker. Though it may only ever be a guess — unless the archaeologists in Herculaneum find the literary equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb — we can with some confidence proceed from what Epicurus did say to what he might have said. Certainly, we can give a general account of the philosophy.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
May 13, 2018
QotD: The lost works of Epicurus
May 9, 2018
Comics and Hard-Boiled – Pulp! Noir – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 8 May 2018Many sci fi writers, especially in the United States, had backgrounds in reading and writing detective stories. They introduced to the sci-fi genre the action hero — no longer just scientific or philosophical protagonists.
May 8, 2018
Author dubious about students “analyzing” his novels
This is a most amusing little anecdote:
Ian McEwan, the award-winning author, has admitted feeling “a little dubious” about people being compelled to study his books, after helping his son with an essay about his own novel and receiving a C.
McEwan, author of works including Atonement, Amsterdam, and On Chesil Beach, said he remained unconvinced about the purpose of asking students to analyse his work.
“I always feel a little dubious about people being made to read my books,’ he told Event magazine, saying his son Greg was required to write an A-Level essay on Enduring Love several years ago.
“Compelled to read his dad’s book – imagine. Poor guy,” McEwan added.
“I confess I did give him a tutorial and told him what he should consider. I didn’t read his essay but it turned out his teacher disagreed fundamentally with what he said.
“I think he ended up with a C+.”
Asked for his thoughts on the literary landscape of 2018, McEwan suggested he was sceptical.
“Literary fiction is in a curious nosedive saleswise, down about 35 per cent over the past five years,” he said.
“Everyone’s got a theory: TV box sets, some sort of fatigue, who knows. Maybe it’s not just good enough.
“When people ask me who are the amazing writers under 30, I’m not in a position to judge. I start a lot of modern novels and don’t find myself compelled to continue.”
May 2, 2018
Lovecraft & Howard – Pulp! Weird Tales – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 1 May 2018Weird Tales was a pulp magazine that started out as a collection of detective stories before getting taken over by writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, whose fantastic tales instilled both good and bad tropes that we still see in modern sci fi.
May 1, 2018
QotD: The work of Epicurus
According to Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus himself was the most prolific of all the main ancient philosophers. His total original writings filled 300 papyrus rolls. If we take one papyrus roll as containing the equivalent of 30 printed octavo pages, his collected works would fill 30 modern volumes. His longest single work, On Nature, filled 37 papyrus rolls, which makes it about as long as Das Kapital.
To these original writings, we must add the various writings of his followers, both during his life and during the following six centuries or so. These also were substantial. Taken together, they must easily have filled a library.
Moreover, unlike its main rivals, Epicureanism was a proselytising philosophy. There were no hidden teachings — no mysteries too complex for the written word. There was no need for long preparatory studies in logic and mathematics and rhetoric before the meaning of the Master could become plain. No one was too old or too young to embrace the truths taught by Epicurus. He accepted slaves and even women to the courses he ran in the Garden. He wrote in the plainest Greek consistent with precise expression of his doctrines. He discouraged his followers from poetry and rhetoric.
For those able or inclined to study his doctrines in full, there were the many volumes of On Nature. For those not so able or inclined, there was a still substantial abridgement, and then a shorter summary. For the less attentive or the uneducated, there were collections of very brief sayings — whole arguments compressed into statements that could be memorised and repeated.
Nearly all of these works have vanished. Of what Epicurus himself wrote, we have three complete letters and a list of brief sayings known as the Principal Doctrines. Of other Epicurean writings, we have the Vatican Sayings, which is another collection of brief statements, some by Epicurus. We have a biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius, which summarises his main doctrines and also contains the only extant whole works already mentioned. We have more of the brief statements and a partial summary of the whole system inscribed at the expense of another Diogenes on a wall in Oenanda, a city in what is now northern Turkey.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 26, 2018
April 25, 2018
Hugo Gernsback – Pulp! Amazing Stories – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Apr 2018Sci fi “pulp” stories sometimes have a reputation for being cheesy and over-dramatic, but they were extremely important for building up the sci fi genre as something *anyone* could write for AND get paid for — not just famous authors.
April 22, 2018
The Lament for the Rohirrim – Lord of the Rings – Clamavi De Profundis
Clamavi De Profundis
Published on 31 Mar 2018Here is our version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem, “The Lament for the Rohirrim!” We hope you enjoy it:)
A note on our interpretation:
We approached this piece more “organically”. The melody was composed by singing the lyrics, seeking to be true to the notion of vocal folk tradition. Therefore, the feel of this song is more rhythmically free and more focused on simply dwelling on the questions and answers of the text. There are two sections of the piece: the melody is sung first in a “contemplative” setting, and then repeated in a more “epic” setting, to explore varying sentiments drawn from this beautiful text.
We hope you enjoy this as much as we did creating it! Thanks very much for listening and for your support!
We are unable to get permission to sell this song so we are posting it here free for your enjoyment. If you want a copy of the mp3, we are offering it to those who support us on Patreon!
My brother composed and arranged the piece. My family sang it.
Please no bad language in the comments. We want this to be family friendly:)
Lyrics:
Where now the horse and the rider?
Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk,
And the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring,
And the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest
And the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain,
Like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?
April 19, 2018
Lord Dunsany – The History of Sci Fi – Extra Sci Fi – #6
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Apr 2018Dunsany is arguably the “father of fantasy,” bringing to life the classic worldbuilding tropes that inspired so many authors, from H.P. Lovecraft to Ursula K. Le Guin. But his short stories and novels have sadly fallen out of memory…
April 17, 2018
Storm of Steel – Author And Officer Ernst Jünger I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 16 Apr 2018Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) by Ernst Jünger is one of the most harrowing German accounts of World War 1. The author was an officer on the Western Front and fought with the assault troops and stormtroopers until summer 1918.
April 16, 2018
Mass extinction or mass genesis? “The net result is that many more species are arriving than are dying out”
We often hear laments for the addition of another species to the endangered list, but that’s not the whole story as evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas explains:
Animals and plants are seemingly disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs died out, 66m years ago. The death knell tolls for life on Earth. Rhinos will soon be gone unless we defend them, Mexico’s final few Vaquita porpoises are drowning in fishing nets, and in America, Franklin trees survive only in parks and gardens.
Yet the survivors are taking advantage of new opportunities created by humans. Many are spreading into new parts of the world, adapting to new conditions, and even evolving into new species. In some respects, diversity is actually increasing in the human epoch, the Anthropocene. It is these biological gains that I contemplate in a new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, in which I argue that it is no longer credible for us to take a loss-only view of the world’s biodiversity.
The beneficiaries surround us all. Glancing out of my study window, I see poppies and camomile plants sprouting in the margins of the adjacent barley field. These plants are southern European “weeds” taking advantage of a new human-created habitat. When I visit London, I see pigeons nesting on human-built cliffs (their ancestors nested on sea cliffs) and I listen out for the cries of skyscraper-dwelling peregrine falcons which hunt them.
Climate change has brought tree bumblebees from continental Europe to my Yorkshire garden in recent years. They are joined by an influx of world travellers, moved by humans as ornamental garden plants, pets, crops, and livestock, or simply by accident, before they escaped into the wild. Neither the hares nor the rabbits in my field are “native” to Britain.
April 14, 2018
QotD: Plato’s ideal society
This [controlling the poor to protect the wealthy] is a problem addressed by Plato in at least two of his works — The Republic and The Laws. The first is his description of an ideal state, the second of a state less than ideal but still worth working towards. I do not claim to be an expert on Plato, though am dubious of many of the claims made against him. However, his general solution to the problem was to stop the enlightenment and to reconstruct society as a totalitarian oligarchy.
His ideal society would be one in which democracy and any degree of accountability would have been abolished, together with married life and the family and private property. Poetry was to be abolished. All other art and music were to be controlled. There was to be a division of society into orders at the head of which was to be a class of guardians. These would strictly control all thought and action.
His workable society would be one in which some property and some accountability would be allowed to remain. Even so, there was to be the same attempt at controlling thought and action.
The stability of these systems was to be maintained by a new theology. A single divine being would take the place of the quarrelling, scandalous gods of mythology and the Homeric poems. The common people could be left with a purified version of the old cults. But these gods would be increasingly aligned with the secondary spirits through which the One God directed His Creation.
People were to be taught that the Platonic system was not a human construct, but that it reflected the Will of Heaven. Rebellion or disobedience would be punished by the direct intervention of God through His Secondary Spirits. Before then, though, it would be punished by the state as heresy. At the end of the fifth century, Anaxagoras had been exiled from Athens for claiming that the sun was a ball of glowing rock. This had been an occasional persecution — indeed, it is hard to think of other instances. In the Platonic system, there was to be a regular inquisition that would punish nonconformity with imprisonment or death.
Thus there is at the heart of the Platonic system a “noble lie” — though Plato may have believed much of it himself. This is of a religion that looks into the most secret places of the mind, and dispenses rewards and punishments according to what is found there. In the old theology, Poseidon had no power beyond on land. Apollo had none in the dark. Zeus had no idea who was thinking what. The Platonic God was just like ours. No sin against His Wishes could go undetected or unpunished.
And so the people were to be kept in line by fear of hellfire, or by fear of everything short of that.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Englightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 13, 2018
“…it is possible to complete an entire degree in anthropology without hearing any criticism of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa“
Margaret Mead’s reputation has run the gamut over the last nearly 100 years after her career-making visit to Samoa in the mid-1920s:
… my journey did leave me with a newfound and abiding respect for the anthropologist Margaret Mead. At the same young age of 23, Mead travelled to the Samoan Islands to the east of the Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean to study the islands’ Polynesian people. On a cloudy Samoan day in August of 1925, she stepped off the S.S. Sonoma in Pago Pago Bay, Tuttuila, and began her research. By the end of her career, she was celebrated as the mother of anthropology, both revered and despised for the image of humanity she presented to the world, and for her conclusions about the Samoan people, in particular.
At first, her conversations with the Samoans did not go especially well:
Mead: When a chief’s son is tattooed they build a special house, don’t they?
Asuegi: No, no special house.
Mead: Are you sure they never build a house?
Asuegi: Yes. Well, sometimes they build a small house of sticks and leaves.
Mead: Was that house sacred?
Asuegi: No, not sacred.
Mead: Could you take food into it?
Asuegi: Oh no. That was forbidden.
Mead: Smoke in there?
Asuegi: Oh no, very sacred.
Mead: Could anybody go into the house who wished?
Asuegi: Yes, anybody.
Mead: No one was forbidden to go in?
Asuegi: No.
Mead: Could the boy’s sister go in?
Asuegi: Oh no. That was forbidden.Mead later recalled that she could have “screamed with impatience.” To make matters worse, the native Samoans would often take her belongings and redistribute them according to ceremonial obligations. But, eventually, she began to make progress. Mead developed close friendships with a small and dedicated group of young girls who became her chief informants. She was made a taupou, a ceremonial virgin, despite having a husband back in the United States. Before long, Mead was considered a respected honorary member of the society, and her research project blossomed. A few months and a tropical hurricane later, Mead returned to the United States, and in 1928, she published the results of her research, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
Her work was widely accepted and praised but by the 1960s, there were some signs challenging her research and conclusions, especially the research of New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman. Although he held back the publication of his work until after her death, she was aware of his criticisms and received one of the chapters of his book in advance:
Countless readers had formed a romantic image of the Samoan people from Coming Of Age in Samoa, but now Freeman had broken the spell. The people most blindsided by Freeman’s book were those anthropologists who had stood in front of lecture audiences and fed students Mead’s image of Samoa. Some of them immediately attacked the book. Anthropologist Laura Nader, sister of independent US politician Ralph Nader, called Freeman’s book a “Right-wing political backlash” for questioning the influence of culture on human behavior, and a vote by American Anthropological Association condemned the book as unscientific.
Over the next few decades, Mead’s reputation hung precariously in the balance as anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists battled it out in the nature-nurture controversy. However, the cruelest blow to Mead would come from anthropologists themselves.
It turned out that the young girls Mead apparently depended upon for many of her concepts about Samoan life were far from truthful about their lives:
Unlike the American anthropologists who preached Mead’s findings, Samoans themselves tended to look upon Mead’s work negatively. Some of the Samoan elders burned copies of Coming of Age in Samoa when they realized what Mead had written, and for some time libraries in Samoa didn’t stock the book. Samoan anthropologist Unasa L. F. Va’a called it “one of the worst books of the twentieth century.”3 One of the questions that preoccupied Freeman was how Mead arrived at the erroneous conclusions she drew in her book. He decided that Mead’s own research came mostly from interviews with women, particularly young women, who are hardly the best informants when it comes to matters of historical warfare and violence. On the subject of promiscuity, Freeman conjectured that Mead was the victim of a hoax by her young female informants: “All the indications are that the young Margaret Mead was, as a kind of joke, deliberately misled by her adolescent informants.” In 1987, a few years after Margaret Mead and Samoa was published, it was discovered that one of Mead’s close informers in 1926, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu, was still alive, and wished to swear on the Bible to clear the record on what she had told Mead all those years ago about sexual relations among the Samoans:
We said that we were out all night with the boys; she failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretenses… She must have taken it seriously but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true.…Yes, we just lied and lied to her.
But was she totally wrong? Doubts exist here, too:
Although Mead’s analysis is obviously highly questionable, the degree to which her work misrepresented Samoan society remains an open question. In 2009, the anthropologist Paul Shankman published his book The Trashing of Margaret Mead in which he reconsiders the evidence. Shankman describes Freeman as an unruly character marked by mental instability, a vindictive desire to ruin the careers of other anthropologists, and plain rudeness (Shankman recalled a nightmare experience when he gave a lecture at ANU and Freeman sat behind him opening and reading his mail so loudly that Shankman had to ask him to stop). This ad hominem attack on Freeman might seem like a desperate effort to evade his refutation of Mead, or to seek revenge on Freeman, but Shankman does succeed in raising some important questions. For example, although virginity is prized in Samoa, it is much more prized among the taupou, the ceremonial virgins of higher status who go on to marry the chiefs. Among the lower status girls, sexual mores were more relaxed and some of these girls did sleep with men before marriage as even Freeman’s data found. Other aspects of Shankman’s belated defense of Mead are more contentious. For example he dismisses Fa’apua’a Fa’amu’s testimony about lying to Mead as irrelevant due to her advanced age and sometimes contradictory statements. He also speculates that Fa’apua’a Fa’amu’s testimony was probably not influential on Mead’s wider conclusions because she was only one of 25 informants. These are important qualifications to what is often presented as Freeman’s decisive refutation of Mead’s work.
April 12, 2018
“Bernier was accused, variously, of naivete, hypocrisy, vanity, divisiveness and sour grapes”
Andrew Coyne covers the “revelations” (that anybody who’d been paying attention already knew) about how the federal Conservative leadership race was won and lost from Maxime Bernier’s upcoming book, Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada.
You would think this would be something of a scandal. The leadership race was hijacked by members of a vested interest who not only had no prior involvement with the party, but most likely wished it ill: what in civilized countries are called “entryists.” The winner of the race, the party’s current leader, sold himself and the party, not just to the highest bidder, but to a particularly venal bidder at that, with a direct financial interest in the outcome.
The result was to leave the party hitched to what is widely acknowledged as an indefensible policy, one that takes food off the table of the country’s poorest families for the benefit of a dwindling number of wealthy quota-owners. That the policy — combining internal supply quotas, sky-high external tariffs, and heavy doses of government regulation — makes a mockery of every principle for which the party allegedly stands is probably worth mentioning as well.
So naturally the response of party supporters, on being lately reminded of all this, was fury … at the guy who pointed it out.
That would be Bernier. In his forthcoming book, the plangently titled Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada, a chapter of which was released this week, the former industry minister recalls how Scheer’s campaign courted the dairy industry’s “fake Conservatives,” who were “only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges.” He notes the ballooning of party membership in Quebec just before the vote, from 6,000 to 16,000, and its collapse back to 6,000 shortly afterward.
And that’s about it. He does not attribute his defeat solely to his stand on supply management: indeed he thinks he won more votes than he lost over it. Neither does he question the legitimacy of Scheer’s victory — indeed he acknowledges that Scheer’s tactic is “fair game in a democratic system.” He merely points out that this sort of squalid trading of votes for favours is “why so many people are so cynical about politics.”
April 10, 2018
New Year’s Day in 2019 will be a big day for works finally entering public domain
The US government messed around with the copyright laws so that from 1998 until the end of this year, very little material was allowed to slip out of copyright protection and into the public domain. (Many people point their fingers at the Disney corporate lawyers and their pliable friends in Washington DC for this oddity.) In The Atlantic, Glenn Fleishman explains some of the legal issues that will finally begin to allow works to enter public domain status in the US normally next year:
The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019 — quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be joined by hundreds of thousands of other books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923. It’s the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It’s also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.
This coming January, Charlie Chaplin’s film The Pilgrim and Cecil B. DeMille’s The 10 Commandments will slip the shackles of ownership, allowing any individual or company to release them freely, mash them up with other work, or sell them with no restriction. This will be true also for some compositions by Bela Bartok, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay, Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Pigeons, e.e. cummings’s Tulips and Chimneys, Noël Coward’s London Calling! musical, Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, many stories by P.G. Wodehouse, and hosts upon hosts of forgotten works, according to research by the Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
Throughout the 20th century, changes in copyright law led to longer periods of protection for works that had been created decades earlier, which altered a pattern of relatively brief copyright protection that dates back to the founding of the nation. This came from two separate impetuses. First, the United States had long stood alone in defining copyright as a fixed period of time instead of using an author’s life plus a certain number of years following it, which most of the world had agreed to in 1886. Second, the ever-increasing value of intellectual property could be exploited with a longer term.
Here’s a graphical representation of how the copyright laws interact with Amazon’s ability/interest in stocking or otherwise making available older still-in-copyright works (graphic from 2015):
So, what’s the Disney connection?
The details of copyright law get complicated fast, but they date back to the original grant in the Constitution that gives Congress the right to bestow exclusive rights to a creator for “limited times.” In the first copyright act in 1790, that was 14 years, with the option to apply for an automatically granted 14-year renewal. By 1909, both terms had grown to 28 years. In 1976, the law was radically changed to harmonize with the Berne Convention, an international agreement originally signed in 1886. This switched expiration to an author’s life plus 50 years. In 1998, an act named for Sonny Bono, recently deceased and a defender of Hollywood’s expansive rights, bumped that to 70 years.
The Sonny Bono Act was widely seen as a way to keep Disney’s Steamboat Willie from slipping into the public domain, which would allow that first appearance of Mickey Mouse in 1928 from being freely copied and distributed. By tweaking the law, Mickey got another 20-year reprieve. When that expires, Steamboat Willie can be given away, sold, remixed, turned pornographic, or anything else. (Mickey himself doesn’t lose protection as such, but his graphical appearance, his dialog, and any specific behavior in Steamboat Willie — his character traits — become likewise freely available. This was decided in a case involving Sherlock Holmes in 2014.)
The reason that New Year’s Day 2019 has special significance arises from the 1976 changes in copyright law’s retroactive extensions. First, the 1976 law extended the 56-year period (28 plus an equal renewal) to 75 years. That meant work through 1922 was protected until 1998. Then, in 1998, the Sonny Bono Act also fixed a period of 95 years for anything placed under copyright from 1923 to 1977, after which the measure isn’t fixed, but based on when an author perishes. Hence the long gap from 1998 until now, and why the drought’s about to end.
