Episode 333 - Epicurus Disputes the Stoic View Of The Senses And Anticipations
Welcome to Episode 333 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we 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 continue in Section 7
Transcript (Unedited)
Section titled “Transcript (Unedited)”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 333 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. Before we get started, it’s worth making a special note of something that came to our attention on the forum this past week. In the month of March of 2026, professor Martin Ferguson Smith has released a new edition freely available of all of his work on the inscription of DIY of Olander that’s been available on the internet for a number of years, most accessibly at a site devoted to the inscription out of Spain.
But Dr. Smith has now released a full free PDF version of a book, which he’s entitled IBI at Orbi, and it contains over 50 years of work on the inscription. It’s a tremendous benefit to Epicurean study everywhere that Dr. Smith has made this available, and the best place to find it will be to go to his page, martin ferguson smith.com, and if you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see a section on Endogenize of Orlander and there will be a direct link which will allow you to download this most recent edition. So as we get started, just going to call that to everyone’s attention because of the value of this inscription and it contains a lot of good information about Epicurean philosophy. So this week we’re continuing in the podcast back in section seven of book two of academic questions. We are examining the issue of knowledge and the debate between the stoics and the academic skeptics about whether knowledge is possible and how Epicurus dealt with the same issues.
We’re going slowly through this section seven because there is so much in it, but as a general reminder, the person speaking is Lu Solus who is speaking for the stoics and what he’s doing is advocating the stoic position as to knowledge with the three main categories of positions being debated here in regard to the sensations with Les on behalf of the stoics, arguing for what they call this catalytic impression that some impressions are so clear that they are reliably true in themselves. The importance of that is that the academic skeptics totally deny the position that any impression can in and of itself be reliably true, and as a result, they totally oppose the idea of the stoic catalytic impression. As we discuss this, we need to keep in mind that Epic’s position does not agree with either of those two schools. Epicurus holds that the senses are neither right nor wrong, that judgment always is in the mind itself.
Now, this can appear to be superficially similar to the stoic position, but the essential thing to keep in mind is that the stoics are looking for some method of holding that a certain sensation, a certain impression is so clear that it cannot be mistaken for something that is false. That is not the conclusion that Epicurus reaches about the senses because Epicurus is saying that no matter how close you are to an object, no matter how much you may have eliminated obstructions between you and that object, the senses are never giving you an opinion about truth. They are giving you raw perceptual data that your mind must process to determine what is true or false, such that truth and falsity are always in the mind and not in the sensation or the thing itself. The stoics are trying to find something within the thing or within the impression because they think that the universe was designed by an intelligent designer, that there is a universal reason, that there is a purpose behind everything, and that under certain circumstances you can grasp this purpose because it is written in the stars, so to speak.
It is written inside the thing itself and it’s our job through dialectic and through the study of logic and syllogisms and the like to find methods to identify when these impressions are true versus when they are false. Epicurus, of course, rejects and intelligent design orientation. He rejects the idea that there is anything behind the atoms causing them to form into bodies in a particular way other than the atoms themselves. And so Epicurus is never going to look for some kind of truth within the impression itself. In the epicurean perspective, the senses are always necessary to test under the circumstances that are involved at a particular time in a particular place, exactly what is going on. You cannot look behind the phenomenon, the circumstances of your world for some kind of organizing principle that came from somewhere else, that came from a supernatural force, that came from an intelligent design.
That entire approach is wrong from the epicurean point of view, but the argument can get confusing and that’s why we’re going through it now to see what the stoics were trying to do and why they were right in defending the idea that knowledge is possible, but why they were fatally wrong in the method they chose to go about defending knowledge. When we finished last week, we had just begun Section seven and dispensed with most of what we had as the first paragraph of that, and we were about to turn to the parts of les’s argument where he was citing the example of those people who through their expertise, are able to grasp things very clearly such as the flute player who can from the first note, recognize a song and he’s going to transition from that into defending the importance of memory, both of which are things that Epicurus would endorse, but not from the direction that Lou Solus is going. So let’s get back into the discussion where we left it last week. I know Joshua had some things on his mind to say that we did not have time for last week. So Joshua, where are your thoughts on section seven at the moment?
Joshua:
Section seven, as we saw last week, Lucullus says some things about sense perception that actually quite admire. He says, let us begin with the senses, the judgments of which are so clear and certain that if an option were given to our nature and if some God were to ask of it, whether it is content with its own unimpaired and uncorrupted senses or whether it desires something better, I do not see what more it could ask for. When you’ve got sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell, you’ve got these faculties and they’re working in good order. You can see as well as any human can see when you can hear as well as any human can hear, it’s hard to see what more we could add to our compliment of sense faculties in order to expand our perception of nature. Obviously Lucullus is living in a time long before our modern sensors and spectroscopes and everything that we can do to get a sense of how much data is truly out there that we in feeble human way can’t interact with or can’t appreciate.
It’d be great if we could sense radiation and stay away from it. That would be if I was going to ask the Gods for one thing from sense perception, something like that would be on my list. But I think for the first century BC and Lu Solis is saying, we’ve got sense perception, it’s reliable enough for our needs, at least when it is unimpaired and uncorrupted, what more could we ask for? And I think that’s a pretty reasonable take coming from someone who I probably disagree with on most other things. He does go on to say as we talked about last week, that he’s not going to try to explain away every edge case, right? He’s not going to be looking at the bend ore in the water or the neck of a dove. He’s not a man to say that everything which seems is exactly of that character of which it seems and that Epicurus, if he wants, can deal with that idea and with many others.
But in his own opinion, at least there is the very greatest truth in the senses. If they are in sound and healthy order and if everything is removed which could impede or hinder them, and we can manipulate things in our environment to improve our grasp, our catalytic grasp or impression of what we’re observing, we can change the light, we can change the position of the objects or the distance between ourselves and the object. So he’s got a very high appreciation for the aesthetic you might say, and actually goes so far as to say that if he were asked by a God what more he would want in terms of a sense, faculty, there’s nothing he could think of to add. And in the second paragraph he says, but when practice and skill are added, so that one’s eyes are charmed by a picture and one’s ears by songs, who is there who can fail to see what great power there is in the senses, how many things do painters see in shadows and in projections that we do not see how many beauties which escape us in music are perceived by those who are practiced in that kind of accomplishment?
Men who at the first note of the flute player say that is the entirety or the androy when we have not even a suspicion of it, there is no need for me. He says to speak of the faculties of taste or smell organs in which there is a degree of intelligence, however faulty it may be. Why should I speak of touch and of that kind of touch which philosophers call the inner one, meaning the touch of pleasure or pain in which alone the cics think that there is any judgment of the truth because pleasure or pain are felt. Can anyone then say that there is no difference between a man who is in pain and a man who is in pleasure? Or can anyone think that a man who entertains this opinion is not flagrantly mad? So as I read through this, Cassius Luli is saying quite a lot of things that coming on the heels of quite a lot of Cicero as we’ve been going through in the course of this podcast, quite a lot of academic skepticism.
We are now encountering the stoic position on some of these matters. And I have to say at first brush, a lot of what I’m reading sounds quite reasonable. He is not saying what Socrates says in Plato’s Republic and the allegory of the cave, that sense perception is a lie and that the only thing it shows you is the flickering shadows on the wall in this ever-changing world of constant flux and that the only way to get to the truth of things is to ascend to the realm of pure being to the realm of these ideal forms. Luli is not going to anything like that kind of extreme. He’s saying the senses are reliable when they’re healthy, when they’re in good working order. And even though I’m not trying to solve every case presented by the senses, and I’m not trying to resolve every problem for most of us, most of us going about most of our days in most situations, the senses are fine, they work. And when you talk to people with even greater skill in some things, you find the senses work even better the more you train them. So compared to some of what we’ve read from the hardcore skeptics, the stoic position on this is sounding pretty reasonable. That’s my first impression.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, and it’s kind of funny to discuss it in those kind of terms because impressions are exactly what is in controversy here. The stoics correctly sensing that you have to have some ability to rely on your senses if you’re going to come to anything firm in this world. By the time that the debate we’re reading was written, we’d had over a hundred years of additional experience in the rise of skepticism and the stoics properly understand the disaster that radical skepticism leads you into. If you know nothing if is ever true or false, the implications of that are so profoundly negative and destructive that they have to be beaten back. You have to be able to rely on some aspect of the way you relate to the world to live effectively at all to live happily at all. The stoics sense, the need for confidence in knowledge.
The problem with the stoics is not that they sense the need for confidence and knowledge, it’s that they place their confidence in the wrong location. And what we’re going to see is this is kind of like book one of own ends where Cicero allows quata to speak. He places the epicurean argument out there in the hands of an advocate of Epicurus just as he’s placing the stoic argument here in the mouth of an advocate for stoicism. But you can rest assured that Cicero allows himself the last word in these arguments and he’s going to follow up on what we’re reading now with a devastating attack on the Lou Solace stoic position. So as we prepare for that, we can appreciate the direction that the stoics wish to go, but we have to keep in mind the inadequacy of their argument when they argue that pleasure and pain are so clear that only a lunatic would deny that there’s an ability to distinguish between the two. They’re absolutely right when they argue that the expertise of a flute player allows them to grasp things much faster than someone who has not practiced in it. They’re right and they haven’t finished the arguments that they’re largely correct about because as we move further in seven here, the next arguments relate to logic and memory and I think you have some comments about those as well.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s right. So the next paragraph we’re talking about, he says, but such as those things are, which we say are perceived by the senses, such also are those things which are said to be perceived not by the senses themselves, but by the senses after a fashion. That’s a very important expression and that’s going to color our reading of this short paragraph here. He says, as these things such as that is white or this is sweet or that is tuneful, this is fragrant, that is rough. We have these ideas he says already comprehended by the mind again, for example, this is a house that is a dog. You have to have the idea of a house or a dog comprehended by the mind in order to be able to apply that language to what is coming into the senses. That’s my understanding of what he’s saying.
He then moves on to combining sensation with language to make logical syllogisms. He says the rest of the series follows connecting the more important links such as these which embrace as it were, the full comprehension of things. If he is a man, he is a mortal animal, partaking of reason from which class of arguments, the notions of things are impressed upon us without which nothing can be understood nor inquired into nor discussed. But if those notions were false or you seem to me to translate the Greek word an noia notions, if I say they were false or impressed or perceptions of such a kind as not to be able to distinguish from false ones, then I should like to know how we were to use them and how we were to see what was consistent with each thing and what was inconsistent with it. So we’ve been talking about sensation here and he immediately moves then into a discussion of things that are adjacent to sensation but are not really sensations themselves, right?
The impression or understanding that something is white or sweet or tuneful or fragrant or rough or that such a thing is a house and this other thing is a dog. The ability to apply linguistic labels onto things is connected with sensation but does not really seem to proceed from sensation. It seems to proceed from the mind itself. And then we combine that language and logic to form these kind of argumentative syllogisms. His example here is giving a definition of a human. If he is a human, he’s a mortal animal partaking of reason. This he thinks proceeds from the ability to label and distinguish things and prior to that the ability to sense things at all, right? So first comes the sense perception, then we add a label and once we’ve applied the label, this linguistic tag onto a thing, now we can start talking about the ways that these different sense perceptions and the objects associated with them can be combined in our mind to form logical arguments. I hope I’ve understood the point he’s trying to make here and haven’t misread his approach. What do you think Cassius about that procedure?
Cassius:
I think you’re on the right track, Joshua. Let me emphasize it this way. We’ve seen already that the stoics share the epicurean viewpoint of the importance of the senses. What they do not share is the epicurean understanding of the nature of the senses and how they operate in that the stoics think that some sensations are false and some sensations are true. Epicurus denies that there are not true or false sensations in the way the stoics are talking about them. From the epicurean perspective, all sensations are reported reliably and without opinion so that there is not truth or falsity in the sense at all as the stoics are advocating. That’s the first point that is important to remember in distinguishing these positions. The second point that you have just gotten into there is in relation to what Epicurus would describe as prolapses and as we will learn as we read more about the stoic position, the stoics also use the word prolapses.
The stoics also endorse the idea that the mind is able to produce notions of things and these notions of things are then used in the future as anticipations as things to compare new phenomena against. And so again, there’s a superficial relationship that both Epicurus and the stoics talk about prolapses anticipations formed in the mind here. The distinction is really important as well though because for example, in this paragraph that you read, here’s a quote pulled out of that quote, if he is a man, he’s a mortal animal, partaking of reason from which class of arguments, the notions of all things are impressed upon us without which nothing can be understood nor inquired into nor discussed. Now that sounds an awful lot like Lucretius talking about the fact that the gods could not make universes because they would’ve had no pattern to go by. But the critical distinction is that the stoics are arguing that these proleptic ideas, these proleptic notions come from the class of arguments such as defining a man as a mortal animal, partaking of reason.
The stoics are arguing that their proses come from dialectic, come from logic, come from the analytical processes of the mind. Epicurus argues that prolapses come from repeated exposure of the human to the same thing over and over in an automatic type of way, just as the sensations do not have opinions with them. We’ve discussed this numbers of times on the forum and I think we generally agree on this as well. Proses anticipations from the epicurean point of view are also not containing opinions. They also are not true or false. Just as Epicurus talks about in terms of prossies of the divine nature, there are true and false opinions that arise from prossies of the divine nature. It is a true opinion that the gods are blessed and imperishable. It is a false opinion that the gods have friends and enemies, enemies who they punish and friends who they reward.
Proses is of critical importance to epicurus, but again, there are not divinely inspired, intelligently designed proses that are themselves opinions in and of themselves. True. And I think we’re going to find that that’s the key distinction here as well. Just as the stoics think that some sensations carry within them their own inia of truth, they are essentially true opinions given their intelligent design and ordered universe origin. The stoics are also saying that through the use of reason dialectic logical syllogisms, we know some prolapses are also intrinsically true and others are false and that they carry within them that nature of a true or false opinion that can be gotten to using dialectic and logic in a way very foreign to the way that Epicurus would use them. So lemme throw it back to you, Joshua, but I think the parallel is going to be clear.
The stoics hold that some sensations are true and some sensations are false. The stoics also hold that some proses are true and some proses are false. In both cases, Epicurus does not throw out truth and falsity. He just says that truth and falsity don’t come to us divinely handed down through the senses or through the prolapses. Our minds have to process our circumstances on a continuous basis, continually checking our opinions against the data that we’re receiving through the paralysis and through the sensations and just as again, no matter how close we get to the tower, the sensations never tell us whether the tower is square or round. No matter how many times our proleptic anticipations process a particular situation, we do not evaluate that situation as being absolutely divinely true for all people, all places and all times sensations are not within themselves true or false and neither are proleptic notions and this is a major divide between epicurus and the stoics. On the face of it, there are many similarities and to both the stoics and the epicureans, you can arrive at confidence in your knowledge about these things, but the path that you reach that knowledge is very different.
Joshua:
Yeah, the connection Cassius between the epicureans and the stoics on this question of prolapses is certainly an interesting one, but there are a few things I notice here in this section seven that still stand out to me. I mentioned that he starts the section talking about how the senses may sometimes be reliable and that if a God were to ask him what more he could want in terms of faculties for perceiving the world, he couldn’t think of anything to say and then he talks about what practice and skill increasing the abilities of people who apply their senses to nature into the arts and he points to the painter and the flute player and only now as I’m reading this third paragraph, do I see, I think why he’s pointing to the arts for these matters. Because what he says in paragraph three here is he says such as those things are, which we say are perceived by the senses, such also are those things which are said to be perceived not by the senses themselves but by the senses after a fashion such as that is white, this is sweet, that is tuneful, this is fragrant, that is rough.
He says, we have these ideas already comprehended by the mind. This is where prolapses comes into the equation and the ability to apply labels to objects that we recognize because of the pattern resemblance that they share with other objects like how dogs look like other dogs. Then he says something that I think is very important and we shouldn’t overlook. He says, then the rest of the series follows connecting the more important links such as these, which embrace as it were, the full comprehension of things. If he is a man, he is a mortal animal partaking of reason. In other words, it’s this dialectic aspect, the ability to form a syllogism and make an argument. The ability to apply logic to a question. This is what gives us the full comprehension of things or what gives us access to the full comprehension of things. The senses themselves only get us so far.
And so I’m thinking back to the painter and the musician in the first and second paragraphs in section seven, and it occurred to me that he’s using the fine arts as kind of a well, isn’t all this lovely? What artists are able to detect in the shadows of their works or in the shadows of their subject that they’re painting? Isn’t it wonderful that musicians can tell the piece by the first note or the first chord, but if you want to get anything real done, if you want to gain a more perfect or complete comprehension of things, you don’t just need sensation. You also need logic. You need logic, which is how we gain access to the class of arguments from which the notions of things are impressed upon us without which nothing can be understood, nor inquired into nor discussed. It’s all very fine to talk about the painter or the poet or the musician with their interface with sensation and how that affects their art, but if you have anything actually worthwhile to do, if you’re building a bridge for example across the timer, you don’t just need sensation and you don’t just need musicians and painters, you need engineers and you need logic because logic is the key to the full comprehension of things.
And again, maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it seems to me that that paragraph for the musicians and painters was that was like a bit of a throwaway and in the young translation starts this paragraph with the word and as some people say, nothing that anyone says before the word but really matters that all his kind words about sensation and about how it relates to the arts, that that is a sideshow to his main point. And his main point is look too logic, look too dialectic, look to language and look to prolapses as the source of these things, but do not look to sensation really because unlike Epicurus, I’m not going to explain the straight ore that looks bent when it’s underwater. What lucilius is going to explain is the syllogism to define and deli what it means to be a human, a mortal animal partaking of reason.
This is a clear echo of a rather well-known episode in the life of Plato’s Academy when Plato gave a definition for humans. That man was a featherless, biped, andogenous. The cynic walks in with a plucked chicken and says, behold Plato’s man, he’s describing their diy. The cynic is displaying the kind of limitation that comes in and that is very easy to overlook when you restrict yourselves to language and logic and don’t continually check or compare your conclusions by the senses, right by sense perception that when you stray too far from sense perception into logic or dialectic or definition or geometry or whatever it is, you are more at risk. I think of making mistakes because you’re not checking yourself against nature and it’s really nature that we’re studying when we study all of these things, when we study humans who are natural beings that exist in nature, we have to return to the faculties with which nature has endowed us in order to appreciate what it is that we’re looking at. And language and logic certainly have their place, but the idea that the senses are somehow deeply deficient when compared with these and it’s only these that give us the fullest comprehension of the truth, I think that invites a lot of problems.
Cassius:
Joshua, I agree with where you’re going there as well. There’s definitely an aspect here where the stoics are placing far more reliance on logical constructions than Epicurus would agree is appropriate,
Joshua:
And it takes us right back to the presocratics like the EIC school for example, which is where we get xeno and his paradoxes of motion and so on. This strident focus on logic and language and geometry to the expense of things like sense perception leads one down a false path and that while the stoics seem to be because he’s praising sensation sense perception here as not just a great faculty but the greatest faculty almost, which it’s possible to imagine that he immediately defaults into this other track and therefore follows the same road that the academy had followed, that the Elliots had followed, that the Ians had followed, for example, in devising these absurd logical and linguistic paradoxes that were used not to explain, not to confirm our knowledge of understanding of something, but just to trap people and to prove what is evidently absurd. I think, I dunno if I’m explaining it very well, but I kind of interrupted you there too, so please continue.
Cassius:
Well continue is probably what I’m not going to be able to do much more of because we’re going to run out of time for this episode. Let me bring us to a conclusion and ask for your final comments this way. I think we’ve now seen that the epicureans and the stoics share a respect for the census and the importance of the proper use of the census, but there’s a major distinction in the way Epicurus understands the senses and uses them accurately. Epicurus doesn’t say that the senses deliver truth in a final form where the stoics think that some impressions are so clear that they are true of themselves. Similarly, Epicurus of the stoics share a respect for the process of the mind in forming notions from past experiences, but they have a very major difference in the way they understand that process taking place as we go forward.
We’re going to see next week when we get to the final section of part seven, that the stoics take a very unusual position about memory, even making the statement for what memory can there be of what is false. We’re not going to have time today to analyze that in full, but that’s going to take us back into this discussion of the stoics thinking that there’s something that they call a catalytic impression that is just very foreign to the epicurean way of analyzing things. Anything you’d like to add on what we’ve discussed today or any prelude to that? Before we conclude today’s episode, Joshua,
Joshua:
We opened the episode. You gave a brief announcement of this new text that is available from Martin Ferguson Smith, this Irby at Orbi, his latest translation of the inscription of Diese and loin, Wanda, and I just want to read here at the end of the episode a paragraph from this work on the importance of DGen as a transmitter of epicurean ideas. Dr. Smith writes, unlike Lucious who focuses most attention on physics and edemas who is more concerned with ethics, Diese gives a balanced summary of the whole system while making clear that physics is to be studied not as an end in itself, but as a necessary means to achieving the end, which is ethical. The inscription is a powerful witness to Epicureanism flourishing existence 400 years after its founder’s death as a philosophy for whose adherence it was a way of life, the advantages of which they did not keep to themselves, but were moved to communicate to others the philanthropic and cosmopolitan attitudes and motives of diy.
His firm faith in Epicurus as the moral savior of humanity and his fervent sense of missionary purpose are something special, as is his prediction of a time in the future when human beings living in a world free from war, social strife and slavery will enjoy an epicure in heaven on earth, characterized by righteousness and mutual love. We have already done our podcast reading of what was available of this inscription, and so we probably won’t have time anytime in the near future to return to it, but I do suggest that people return at least to Martin Ferguson Smith’s work on this question. I will post a link to this PDF into the thread for this episode. In fact, I’ll do that right now.
Cassius:
Okay, thank you, Joshua. That’s a good way to end the episode. That’s all the time we have for today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean Friends form and the listener if you have any comments or questions about our discussions on Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.