55 - The Constant Gardener: Epicurus and his Principles

Hi Sam,

Funny you ask, in my original script I had him being born in January and it said "you should clear a space on your calendar each January..." in the first paragraph. But then when I was revising before recording it I couldn't remember where I had this from, and couldn't find it in any of the books I had here... so I took it out. But I think it's probably January, I was just playing on the safe side.

Thanks,

Peter

Thanks Carol -- it's coming back to me now, there was some mention of the month Gamelion in what I read. So I guess I should have been brave and stuck to my original text! I suspect I found the date in the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism edited by James Warren (which is really good by the way, I found it helpful).

Peter

I think you must be right about Hobbes - at least the indeterminism would be one big difference. The question of whether the swerve can explain freedom is a much-discussed one in Epicurean studies; I think I might mention it in the Lucretius episode. One school of thought is that Epicurus introduced the concept just to explain how atoms become entangled in the first place rather than falling parallel to one another; and then Lucretius invoked it in the free will context. But as I say it's very controversial what theoretical role(s) it was intended to play.

It's not a fresco actually, it is a book manuscript. I lifted this from Wikipedia, to be honest, the entry on "Epicureanism," and the caption there says De rerum natura manuscript, copied by an Augustinian friar for Pope Sixtus IV, c. 1483, after the discovery of an early manuscript in 1417 by the humanist and papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini.

Maybe I misspoke when I did the recording but I just checked the book version and there it says "after Plato died," not "after Aristotle died". (And that date is correct I guess: he died 347.)

Those are great questions and I should start my answer by saying that to some extent this is all a matter of scholarly debate: in particular whole books have been written about the extent to which the ancients had a notion of "space" and what that would mean (see for instance Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought). Aristotle's position is fairly clear: void is impossible for a variety of reasons but maybe the most intuitive is that motion is for him (all else being equal) inversely proportional to the density of the medium. So a medium of "zero" resistance, i.e. void, would yield infinite motion which is absurd. As for the Pre-Socratic atomists you're right that they call void "non-being"; this is often seen as a response to Parmenides, so the idea would be that we embrace non-being in our metaphysics, as he refused to do, and being = atoms, non-being = void. But this is puzzling because, can non-being have "regions" or "parts" through which atoms move? Thinking about it from this angle it is useful to remember that Greek for void is "to kenon" meaning literally "the empty." So we're talking about something extended but not full, maybe on the analogy of an empty vessel. This seems to be Epicurus' idea too: and he confirms the reality of void on the grounds of sensation by arguing that our perception of motion shows that void is needed otherwise everything would be totally full and nothing could move. Aristotle, as you rightly say, had already responded to this by saying that things can move around and redistribute to make space for each other; there can also be changes in density, but no emptiness.

Or maybe it would be better to say that they did work out views on this, but not ones we would find intuitive now. Void and emptiness are kind of the same concept here because the same Greek word means both. This isn't so weird for us conceptually, though. I agree that on the face of it emptiness doesn't sound the same as non-being, but if you imagine you are starting from Parmenides who thought that being is one, and is shaped like a single homogeneous sphere, you could imagine that the atomists could have thought "no, that's wrong - let's split up being into many fundamental things, which would need to be atoms to stop them from being split further." And then whatever separates them would be non-being, which Parmenides did not allow. So the point here is that a spatial arrangement is being equated with metaphysics: all of being together vs all of being disseminated into atoms. We find this odd because we think of "space" as a separate, independent thing, which is why you are saying that emptiness isn't non-being (for us it is empty space); but they don't really have a notion of space like that, it takes many centuries to develop.