Sucking up...

We've given in and bought a Dyson. Lovely it is too. Younger daughter decided immediately it looks like a space ship, which I suppose is pretty cool for a hoover. I wondered for a while about the rechargeable, hand-held ones that look like a big gun from the Alien films*, but didn't succumb. Real willpower that.

I had to take old dead hoover to the WEEE recycling centre near Milton (great name; less exciting when you get there). I left it alongside a phalanx of other dead hoovers, including a number of formerly natty Dysons (mostly the older candy-coloured ones...). They looked quite sad, all in a row, but anything of them that can be salvaged and repaired will be.

* That reminds me. I would like to have the Alien films on DVD but they insisted on putting out a set of the four films under the name: The Alien Quadrilogy. Quadrilogy? WTF? There's a perfectly good word for a four-work sequence alreadys without the need to bastardise Latin and Greek like that. (Or perhaps, on second thoughts, the hybridity of the title is a deliberate nod to part of a motif of the films themselves... No, surely not: it was just a cock-up.) Anyway, as a result I can't buy them. Damn.

Springtime...

... in Cambridge.

Some Easter thoughts

Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday and today it is snowing. Aggressively. It's a nice feeling, though, as if this really is the last throes of Winter before we can get on with some warmer and sunnier weather.

Perhaps because it is the Easter weekend, there has been a lot on the news about the Catholic church's displeasure that the PM is reluctant to allow his MPs a 'free vote' on a new embryology bill which would include measures licensing the creation of 'hybrid' embryos. (It looks now as if he might give in.) Anyway, I certainly don't share the Archbishop of Canterbury's certainty that such a bill would be a 'monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life' (extracts from his sermon can be read here). But I did think it worth looking at the HFEA's consultation report, which seems to have been conspicuously absent from much of the discussion in the last couple of days. The full report can be read here, and it's rather interesting. In particular, it gives a clear and detailed account of the current state of scientific research and useful comparisons with similar legislation in other countries.

Also, Appendix D (p. 63ff.) gives data from written responses to the consultation. Now, I don't know who actually responds to these -- I imagine it is not an entirely representative slice of the population since people are more likely to reply if they have strong views one way or another and particularly wish to influence the process, but it's worth a look. Most respondents expressed the view that licensing such research would not be permissible and -- this is the most interesting bit for me -- many of them tried to offer a reason why.

The graph puts them in the following categories:

Life is sacred
'Yuck' responses
Human dignity
Slippery slope
Unconvinced by science
Safety risks
Potentiality of the embryo

Playing God

The first four tend to be the most popular. I'm not quite sure what to make of them, but I'm pretty sure that a 'Yuck' response can't really be a particularly persuasive argument against chaging scientific research (unless, I suppose, the people concerned were all emotivists...).

Philosophers behaving badly

Those classical types could certainly be rude about one another. Here's the latest gem I've discovered, perhaps paying back Epicurus for his cute aphorism about 'spitting on the good'.

The second-century Platonist Calvenus Taurus seems to have been particularly attached to anti-Epicurean anti-hedonist agenda of an extreme kind. Certainly, the terms of his attacks on Epicurus as reported by Aulus Gellius NA 9.5 are uncompromising:

Taurus autem noster, quotiens facta mentio Epicuri erat, in ore atque in lingua habebat verba haec Hieroclis Stoici, viri sancti et gravis: ἡδονὴ τέλος, πόρνης δόγμα· οὐκ ἔστιν πρόνοια, οὐδὲ πόρνης δόγμα.

But our own Taurus, whenever he made mention of Epicurus would have on the tip of his tongue this phrase of the Stoic Hierocles, a pious and serious man: ‘That pleasure is the goal of life is the dogma of a whore; that there is no providence is not even the dogma of a whore’.

Nice.

Saturday science...

Yesterday was fun. Cambridge was full of eager families joining in the excellent Science Week activities. Because of the kids' particular current enthusiasms we concentrated on the stuff in the Sedgwick museum -- real dinosaur bones (an allosaurus foot and arm were the highlights) and lots of fun geology stuff including a model erupting volcano. (Crowd pictured...)

This annual event really is excellent, and the volunteers -- many of them students -- were superb too. It's not east, I imagine, to field questions from toddlers, keen kids and pushy parents, as well as the familiar Cambridge eccentrics. But the ones we met managed still to sound enthusiastic and happy to share their interests. Our kids, anyway, loved it.

And it sets a very high standard for the first 'Festival of Ideas' -- the university's equivalent to the science week festival but concentrating on arts, humanities and social sciences, coming up 22 October - 2 November later this year.

Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Our former Dear Leader, 'Tony' Blair, is to teach a seminar at Yale next year on faith and globalisation. Here's the BBC report. Good grief. And here's the press release from Yale. The best part is here, quoting Yale's President:

"As the world continues to become increasingly inter-dependent, it is essential that we explore how religious values can be channeled toward reconciliation rather than polarization. Mr. Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas and is especially qualified to bring his perspective to bear."

I wonder what he is referring to as evidence of TB's outstanding leadership in these areas. I hope he's thinking more of Northern Ireland. Then again, TB strikes me as someone who seems not to be able to distinguish holding a belief sincerely from holding a true belief, so it might be just the seminar to enrol in. Say at the end of your paper that you really felt you were doing the right thing and you're bound to get an A.

RIP Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died this week, which reminded me of what a great hobby those games are. I must have spent a lot of time between the ages of about 8 and 14 playing RPGs: not just D&D, but also RuneQuest, Warhammer FRP, Traveller (that one was really good), one based in the US in the 1920s, Call of Cthulhu etc., and I had a great time. Yes, it was a bit geeky. Yes, perhaps we should have been outside kicking footballs or each other rather than rolling odd dice and pretending to be other people, but it was creative and sociable and it involved all sorts of numerical and linguistic skills. I don't think it can quite be matched by the more recent online variants. There was a brief unfortunate incident when an RE teacher at school tried to claim that it was a form of satanism, but we got over that relatively quickly...

Heracles and the kids from Fame...

Some more thoughts about ponos and pleasure. I've been looking again at Xenophon Mem. 2.1, the bit with Prodicus' story of the choice of Heracles. It seems to me that in his attempt to persuade Aristippus of the importance of virtue and self-control, Socrates is in danger of failing to register clearly a distinction between pleasure taking in hard work or self-denial and pleasure won as a result of hard work and self-denial.

At 2.1.18-20 Socrates appears to be emphasising the latter option: pleasures are like the animals caught after a long day of difficult hunting (18), a reward for a period of hardship and, more importantly, the goal for which that hardship is undertaken. At 2.1.20 Socrates quotes a nice tag from Epicharmus to help make the point:

τῶν πόνων πωλοῦσιν ἡμῖν πάντα τἀγάθ’ οἱ θεοί.

The gods sell us all good things in exchange for our toils.

It's like the line from the beginning of Fame: 'You want the good? Well, the good costs. And right here's where you start paying... in sweat.' And that's the main thrust of the last speech given by personified Virtue at the end of this dialogue: training and exertion, a refusal to gratify desires immediately, is a way to ensure the eventual enjoyment of more pleasure than would be won in a profligate life. Pain and toil itself is not good, but it can be used to get what you really want.

But there is another strand to Socrates' argument even here (2.1.19):

καὶ τὰ μὲν τοιαῦτα ἆθλα τῶν πόνων μικροῦ τινος ἄξιά ἐστι, τοὺς δὲ πονοῦντας ἵνα φίλους ἀγαθοὺς κτήσωνται, ἢ ὅπως ἐχθροὺς χειρώσωνται, ἢ ἵνα δυνατοὶ γενόμενοι καὶ τοῖς σώμασι καὶ ταῖς ψυχαῖς καὶ τὸν ἑαυτῶν οἶκον καλῶς οἰκῶσι καὶ τοὺς φίλους εὖ ποιῶσι καὶ τὴν πατρίδα εὐεργετῶσι, πῶς οὐκ οἴεσθαι χρὴ τούτους καὶ πονεῖν ἡδέως εἰς τὰ τοιαῦτα καὶ ζῆν εὐφραινομένους, ἀγαμένους μὲν ἑαυτούς, ἐπαινουμένους δὲ καὶ ζηλουμένους ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλων;

These rewards from effort (ponoi) are worth little. But those people who toil (ponountas) in order to acquire good friends or to do down their enemies, or to become powerful in body and soul, and who run their household well and do well by their friends and benefit their country, how should we not think that these people toil in pleasure (ponein hēdeōs) for such goals and live joyfully (euphrainomenous), being contented themselves and being praised and envied by others?

The contrast mentioned at the beginning of the quotation is between these serious goals and the goal of hunting in the previous paragraph. The goals detailed here are worth a lifetime of effort since they are most valuable and lasting. What's most interesting, though, is the passage in bold since this seems to say that the very effort involved in itself a source of pleasure. It is not merely that the goal of being envied or having a well-run house and good friends is a source of pleasure worth purchasing in exchange for some toils. Socrates is surely being deliberately paradoxial by asserting that toil itself can be done in a pleasant way (ponein hēdeōs), and this is just the sort of thing that seems to have been attractive to the Cynics.

I'm not sure that Socrates here sees the distinction between ponos being itself pleasant and ponos being a means to greater pleasure in the long-run. At least, if he does see it he is not concerned to make much of it. Either way, he will have some ammunition against Aristippus and will be able to offer some argument against his chosen way of life which deals in terms which Aristippus himself might agree are valuable.

Eurosong fever

Come on, UK, it's time for us to make up our minds over which act we are to send as a sacrificial victim to the Eurovision Song Contest in Belgrade. The choices are here for you to listen to, but it's not a great bunch. I reckon Michelle Gayle is the least awful but we'll still get no votes. Probably something to do with us invading various countries recently.

Ireland, however, have got the right idea. It might not be 'My lovely horse', but this is about what the competition deserves.

More Cynicism-

Some more thoughts provoked from the last discussion with the B3 team:

What did Antisthenes think about pleasure and pain? There are snippets of information here and there. For example:

DL 6.2: He thought that pain (ponos: perhaps 'toil' or 'hard work' would be a better translation, but ponos often carries the connotation of discomfort or pain) is good (for which claim he pointed as support to the example of Heracles). Apparently he got this idea from Socrates' hardiness.

Saying that pain is good does not, of course, require you to think that pleasure is bad. There are plenty of texts which talk of pain/ponos being instrumentally good. And it might be instrumentally good in the sense that it allows you to win greater pleasure in the long run.

But there are other texts which offer the stronger claim that pleasure is for some reason not to be pursued.

DL 6.3: He said he'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.
DL 9.101: Epicurus thought that pleasure is good; Antisthenes thought that it is bad.

The second of these is perhaps less compelling because it is clearly part of a set of doxographical divisions and categorisations which by their nature cannot always capture more subtle views. Anthisthenes is a nice contrast with the hedonists. Other texts appear to ascribe to him distinctions between pleasures and also the claim that some - perhaps those that are worked for, or deserved - ought to be pursued. (E.g. Stob. 3.29.65: you should pursue pleasures 'after' (meta) ponos but not those 'before' (pro); cf. Stob 3.6.43 and 3.18.26 on the proper attitude to 'everyday' pleasures; Athenaeus 12 513a even says that Antisthenes thought pleasure to be good, at least pleasure 'of the kind that is not later regretted'.) The sources may be a bit jumbled here. Still, there is no doubting that he thought some, perhaps even all, pleasure is best avoided.

Then there is the depiction of Antisthenes in Xenophon, esp. Symp. 4.39:

καὶ πάντα τοίνυν ταῦτα οὕτως ἡδέα μοι δοκεῖ εἶναι ὡς μᾶλλον μὲν ἥδεσθαι ποιῶν ἕκαστα αὐτῶν οὐκ ἂν εὐξαίμην, ἧττον δέ· οὕτω μοι δοκεῖ ἔνια αὐτῶν ἡδίω εἶναι τοῦ συμφέροντος.

And all these things seem to me to be so pleasant that I wouldn't wish to enjoy each of them more, but less. Some of them seem to me to be in this way more pleasant than is beneficial.

Antisthenes has been describing his frugal lifestyle and the way in which he can make do with very little. He has accustomed himself sufficiently to a life free from luxury that he takes great pleasure from his modest house and simple life. Most important, these things provide him with pleasure. Of course, it is possible to think that this is once again pleasure of a different sort from the pleasures rejected in e.g. DL 6.3, perhaps like Diogenes' pleasures in despising pleasures. But that doesn't seem too convincing since Antisthenes' point appears to be that he too enjoys being warm, not being hungry, sex and all the other things we might think of as simple and obvious cases of pleasure. More to the point, his last comment in Xenophon surely points to him being aware of a problem similar to that raised for Diogenes' views. Antisthenes is concerned that he is enjoying the frugal life too much. Perhaps it's time for some advanced training in frugality or a bit more ponos. This is not quite like the problem faced by Diogenes: Antisthenes is not concerned that he is taking pleasure in the very fact of his being ascetic. Rather, he is concerned that his asceticism is in a way self-defeating. His avoidance of luxury has made his frugal life now appear luxurious to him.

Cynic pleasure

I've been trying to piece together what the Cynics think about pleasure, but it's not at all easy. Here’s a first set of thoughts.

Diogenes Laertius (6.71) says this is the view of Diogenes of Sinope:

καὶ γὰρ αὐτῆς τῆς ἡδονῆς ἡ καταφρόνησις ἡδυτάτη προμελετηθεῖσα, καὶ ὥσπερ οἱ συνεθισθέντες ἡδέως ζῆν, ἀηδῶς ἐπὶ τοὐναντίον μετίασιν, οὕτως οἱ τοὐναντίον ἀσκηθέντες ἥδιον αὐτῶν τῶν ἡδονῶν καταφρονοῦσι.

(1) For even the despising of pleasure is itself the most pleasurable, when we are accustomed to it; (2) and just as those who are accustomed to a life of pleasure find it unpleasant when they pass over the opposite, so those whose training has been of the opposite kind derive more pleasure from despising pleasure than from the pleasures themselves (trans. Hicks, lightly modified; I've added (1) and (2) for reference).

I think I can understand (1) although it is clearly phrased in a deliberately paradoxical fashion. I suppose it says that after a time the very practice of denying yourself indulgences can become something pleasant. Perhaps you begin to take pleasure in the fact of your self-control. You begin to enjoy the state of mind you reach now that you are no longer busy pursuing pleasure. We might even say that there are two kinds of pleasure involved here: (a) pleasure of the sort that most people enjoy, and (b) pleasure of the sort enjoyed only as a result of disdaining pleasures of type (a). Now, here’s a thought: Pleasures of type (b), we must further suppose, must be somehow sufficiently different from pleasures of type (a) as to be acceptable and not deserving of a similar kind of meta-disdain, for fear of a regress. (You can imagine a particularly hard-line ascetic scolding a student who dares to say that he is in fact taking pleasure in his disdaining pleasure...) This seems like a coherent thought, though not a very persuasive one. I suppose the idea behind (1) as a whole is that it allows a response to an objection based on the notion that the life Diogenes recommends on other grounds (e.g. that it is a ‘natural’ life) looks inhumanly devoid of pleasure. Not so, comes the reply, since the disdain of pleasure can itself provide pleasure. But in that case, pleasures of type (b) cannot be so different from pleasures of type (a) that they won’t do as an answer to this kind of objection.

What about (2)? The analogy appears to be between a hedonist who feels disgust when forced into temporary asceticism and an ascetic who, we are told, takes less enjoyment from an indulgent night out than from a night in despising pleasure in the way elaborated in (1). In both cases, the life one is accustomed to makes it unpleasant to live, however temporarily, in an alternative way. So the hedonist will feel that his very way of life is being denied and will find it unpleasant, that is to say less choice-worthy in terms of what he finds valuable, namely pleasure. But Diogenes also wants to say that the ascetic, on the other hand, if made to life the life of a hedonist, will find that life unpleasant compared with his own. But is this why he doesn’t want to live such a life? Presumably not; because it is not, I suppose, in order to experience the pleasures of disdaining pleasures (as in (1)) that the ascetic takes up his asceticism.

Every day is like Sunday...

.. well, it isn't. One of the few things Moz gets wrong. Partly, this is because yesterday was good for two reasons which are not common to every other day.

1. I discovered that new Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack albums are due this year. Hooray. I briefly indulged in remembering my MPhil year in 1995-6 when we watched This Life and watched them listening to Portishead before doing the same ourselves. And then I remembered how Alex, Mark, and I could do an excellent a capella version of the This Life theme tune -- esp. that guitary bit just before the end of the opening credits.

2. Robert Carlyle was in the new BBC Sunday drama, The Last Enemy, ('Look! See how bad ID cards will be!) and got through the whole first episode without saying a word. He just looked a bit moody, typed a bit while sitting in an anti-surveillance cage-thing, and did that thing when he flexes his jaw muscles with his mouth closed and his cheek wobbles a bit. Menacing. I don't think he's really a baddie, though, because in BBC drama things these days the baddies are the ones wearing the suits.

Sources for a new Diogenes Laertius

Nick used the following anecdote last night to illustrate a point in Plotinus. I can't remember quite what the Plotinian point was, but this made me laugh. Robert rightly wondered if it had the air of a Diogenes Laertius anecdote. So in good Laertian style, I got this version from Wikipedia (which DL would surely have loved. He could have submitted rubbish poems on various people...).

The Life of A. J. Ayer (extract)

Rogers [1] says of Ayer: At a party that same year [2] held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men". Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.

It is not know what the two men talked about. It is unlikely that Tyson as a result of this meeting became Ayer's akoustês...

Notes

[1] See Rogers, Ben A.J. Ayer: A Life, Grove Press, 1999, p. 344.
[2] 1987.

Pest control?

I should be used to seeing slightly odd things around college, but this is something new. For the past couple of days, Old Court has been home to two birds of prey. They looked pretty comfortable despite the fog this morning. I shall do some research and find out why they are here...

UPDATE: I am told they are here to scare pigeons.

Platonic polemic

I'm afraid I haven't been up to much that is blogworthy recently, but I have been thinking about a paper I'm giving this summer at a conference on Plutarch and philosophy, on Non posse and Plato's Republic. I more or less fell into the topic since I've been thinking about Republic IX and also about Epicurean hedonism and this Plutarch text seems to me to be a nice way of bringing the two topics together. There is always the danger, I suppose, that my preoccupations have me seeing things in the Plutarch that are not necessarily that prominent or significant, but I'll live with that. There's definitely something in it, though, and more than the obvious links between e.g. Non posse 1091D-E and Rep. 584dff. (For example, it seems to me that Rep. 586a-b lies behind a lot of Plutarch's polemic, coupled with the familiar Epicureans-as-pigs idea.)

Anyway, the overall point is going to be something like this: Plutarch uses the work to bash the Epicureans over the head with Plato's Republic. They are completely wrong about pleasure, the soul, the body, what humans are, what the value of knowledge is, death, the gods -- in short, all the important stuff of philosophy. But it's a clever way of doing this because Plutarch uses all sorts of quotations and cues from the Epicureans themselves as a way of damning them and also because it seems to me there is good reason to think the Epicureans had already had a go at Plato's Republic themselves. Certainly, Plutarch's annoyer-in-chief, Colotes, had stuck the boot into the myth of Er. No wonder, then, that Plutarch reaches for the Republic for his material in retaliation. He likes turning the tables in this way: Adv. Col. is an exercise in showing that not only was Colotes wrong in his criticisms of earlier philosophers, but the criticisms really apply to the Epicureans themselves and not their opponents; Non posse, its companion-piece, on this view is an exercise in showing how the Epicureans' serious misunderstanding of the nature of human beings and the proper nature of pleasure shows that far from offering a recipe for a pleasant life, they in fact deny us all proper and fulfilling experience of pleasure.

That's the line, anyway. Now I just have to write the thing and that, I tend to find, is where things get tricky and the text gets in the way of all the neat and tidy points I want to make. Ho hum.

Astronomical

Me: How was playgroup today?

Daughter #2: I bumped into ____. We were running. We crashed together just like Earth and Theia.

I only got the last bit because we've been watching Earth: Power of the Planet over and over. But in case you're wondering, it's explained here.

Perhaps Callicles was right...

Well, we now know just why it feels so pleasant to scratch an itch... Read the Times report here. (And thanks to JB for the link.) The picture, by the way is of Robert Arneson 'Pablo Ruiz with Itch' 1980, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Found on flickr.com. (Click on the picture for more details and for the photographer's credits.) Does he look like he's enjoying it?

Plato, pleasure, and the arts

Plato sometimes gets a bad press for his views on the value of art, mostly because of his insistence in Republic on cleaning up the content of poetry, his concentration on the various potentially harmful (and beneficial) psychological effects of different rhythms and the like and his general metaphysical distaste for mimetic representations. But in a class this morning we came across an interesting passages in Laws II which might add another dimension. Here, it seems, the Athenian is prepared to imagine a class of works of art which are properly judged solely according to the pleasure they produce.

ΑΘ. Οὐκοῦν ἡδονῇ κρίνοιτ’ ἂν μόνον ἐκεῖνο ὀρθῶς, ὃ μήτε τινὰ ὠφελίαν μήτε ἀλήθειαν μήτε ὁμοιότητα ἀπεργαζόμενον παρέχεται, μηδ’ αὖ γε βλάβην, ἀλλ’ αὐτοῦ τούτου μόνου ἕνεκα γίγνοιτο τοῦ συμπαρεπομένου τοῖς ἄλλοις, τῆς χάριτος, ἣν δὴ κάλλιστά τις ὀνομάσαι ἂν ἡδονήν, ὅταν μηδὲν αὐτῇ τούτων ἐπακολουθῇ;

ΚΛ. Ἀβλαβῆ λέγεις ἡδονὴν μόνον.

Laws 667d-e

So pleasure would be the proper criterion in one case only. A work of art may be produced with nothing to offer by way of usefulness or truth or accuracy of representation (or harm, of course). It may be produced solely for the sake of this element that normally accompanies the others, the attractive one. (In fact, it is when this element is associated with none of the others that it most genuinely deserves the name 'pleasure'.)

You mean only harmless pleasure?

Trans. T. J. Saunders

This discussion seems to carve out a category for a possible work of art which is neither mimetic (and so is not available for evaluation in terms of its accuracy, here: quantitative and qualitative isotês) nor can serve any purpose (and so is not available for evaluation in terms of its usefulness, here: ôpheleia). The Athenian refers to them as 'play' (paidia). Items in this category we would rightly judge solely in terms of the pleasure they produce. Presumably, the more pleasure the better. This is fine, I suppose, both because this class is likely to be relatively small and also because since in these cases we have specified that there is no sense in which these objects might either mislead or otherwise do harm they are sufficiently ethically and psychologically safe that pleasure can be allowed as the proper criterion of evaluation. Importantly, it is only in these cases that pleasure should win the day -- precisely when there is no reason to worry that there are other criteria worth being concerned about -- and in cases where we can make judgements involving standards of accuracy or use these will take priority.

Now another question arises. Does the Athenian imagine that there genuinely are works of art which fall into this category? He gives no examples. If there are any examples, what would they be? Painting, music and sculpture are all cases of imitative arts, we soon discover (668aff.) Perhaps the lack of examples is simply because whatever things fit in this category we need not bother about them as lawgivers or educators. Certainly the Athenian says that they need not bother talking about them or giving any further account of them (667e-8). But if there are no examples of works in this category, then this argument is also perhaps something of a reductio. Only on these very stringent criteria would it be right to judge a work solely on its production of pleasure; but given these criteria no work would qualify. So it is never right so to evaluate works of art.

Cuts

More bad news. The AHRC, as a result of the Comprehensive Spending Review, has announced that it will be able to offer only 2/3 of it previous number of new postgraduate awards. So there will be only 1000 (that's right, 1000) AHRC funded new postgraduates this coming year. The situation will improve a bit next year, but won't get back to the previous 1500 until at least 2011. Not good news at all if you're about to take your finals and desperately want to stay for further research since for most UK students an AHRC grant is the only way to fund work for a higher degree.

Please draw your pain

We had an interesting discussion in the first of this term's classes for the finals ancient philosophy paper 'Pleasure'. We were discussing Ryle's contention (‘Pleasure’ in his Dilemmas, (Cambridge, 1954)) that -- broadly speaking -- although pains are locatable and 'clockable', pleasures are not. I found one of the pain description charts that are often used by patients trying to describe pain to doctors as an aid to diagnosis and pain-relief (click on the thumbnail for a larger version). Can you imagine an analogous version for 'pleasure'? 'How many hours of the day do you feel pleasure?' 'Please draw your pleasure, indicating its location and expressing its quality...'

O tempora!

Such is the decline in classical learning... I realise that Facebook's US formatting may confuse some people who fail to see that they ought to enter their year of (eventual) graduation and not the year they entered the school/university etc. (you see, it's all to do with, say, 'the class of 95'), but there really is no excuse for people listing themselves as e.g. 'Cambridge Alum' before they have graduated. Come on, people! It's a complete pain if you're trying to find somebody. You have first to wonder whether they will have understood the instructions properly.

Amazing!

I know this may not be a surprise to many, but I have just worked out how to rotate my monitor to portrait mode. It's a bit odd and I reckon it will take me a while to get used to it, but certainly it makes word-processing a bit nicer and lots of webpages (including www.classics.cam.ac.uk) look rather nice in this format. I'll live with it for a bit and then decide.

Managing expectations

Oliver Burkeman's discussion of strategic incompetence is spot on. Unfortunately, encouraging others to have low expectations of me is something I find very difficult to do. (It's just a kind of lying, isn't it? Sure, the outcome might be beneficial in one sense -- I might be asked to do less --- but there's always the danger my cover might be blown.) But there are others who are much better at it and seem to have no qualms at all, so perhaps I should model myself a bit more on them. On the other hand, it's not clear to me that they have arranged such low expectations intentionally. Maybe they just are incompetent, and not strategically so.

Now, can anyone set up an add-on for Thunderbird that lets me answer an email but won't send the reply for a good couple of hours afterwards? Then I can enjoy the mental freedom of an empty inbox while not seeming to be too efficient.

UPDATE: the busy bees have already done what I wanted. Download the 'Send Later' add on here (right-click and save link as).

Pedantry

Daughter #1 (in histrionic style): My leg itches! It feels like it's bro-o-ken!

Me: _____, your leg is not broken.

Daughter #1: No, Dad. I said it feels like it's broken.

I surrender.

It's tough enough...

.. for a UK student just to get funding to do a PhD in the arts and humanities from the AHRC. Those luck people who get an award are usually grateful and rightly so -- this is public money funding what many see as indulgent higher higher education. But for a University Faculty these awards come at a high price: the AHRC's regulations which penalise departments if a certain proportion their students on these scholarships do not submit in time are hard to understand. Worse, they penalise in particular students in subsequent years who want to come and study by 'blacklisting' departments. (You can read their Submission Rate Policy here [Word document] or go here.) Simon Blackburn has a sensible discussion of a not-so-sensible policy here in the THE (no S any more). The problem really bites when the AHRC is not sensitive to there being reasons for late submission besides indolence or some other academic vice. Students have in any case plenty of reason for trying as hard as possible to submit their theses on time. Usually, this is because their funding runs out and they won't earn much else unless they have a doctorate. And if they have got themselves an academic job, it seems to me that this just goes to show that a promising young academic has been properly and profitably funded.

No one thinks it is reasonable to throw public money at graduate students who never finish and never make any further use of the time and investment expended on them. But if there is a stick to be applied then it's important to aim it properly.

Bias

This report from Friday's Guardian is a bit depressing. Another piece of important work from the Sutton Trust points out the misconceptions common among state-sector teachers about Oxbridge applications and the success rate of state-schooled applicants. (See the brief report of the Trust's own site here.) Many of the teachers surveyed, for example, falsely believe that it is more expensive to study at Oxbridge than at other universities. The danger is that this leads to them discouraging students from applying.

This all sounds quite familiar. My wife and I both came to Cambridge from good comprehensive schools. We both benefited, in particular, from enthusiastic and inspiring help from one or two particular teachers. It's quite possible that without that fortune I would not have considered applying.

So what should we do? It seems to me that it shows the importance of the university targeting outreach work not only to students but also to teachers. After all, if we can get a teacher interested and enthusiastic about what the university can offer, that enthusiasm and knowledge can be passed on to his or her students year after year.

Sponge-throwing

I've just noticed the slightly odd reference to sponge-throwing in the passage from Chrysippus I quoted in the last post:

For in disappointment we are 'outside of' or 'beside' ourselves and, in a word, blinded, so that sometimes, if we have a sponge or a bit of wool in our hands, we pick it up and throw it, as if that would achieve something.

How often would people throw sponges about? Were there sponges just lying around in ancient houses like those foam stress-relief toys? [1] It reminds me of the other very famous instance of someone getting all fed up and throwing a sponge, namely the story of Apelles the painter in Sextus Empiricus PH 1.28:

Once, they say, when Apelles was painting a horse and wished to represent in the painting the horse's foam, he was so unsuccessful that he gave up the attempt and flung at the picture the sponge on which he used to wipe the paints of his brush, and the mark of the sponge produced the effect of a horse's foam (Bury's translation).

For Sextus, this is an example of how the sceptic might stumble upon tranquillity about a given question not by finding a convincing answer but by coming to see how all the possible answers are somehow not convincing enough. Best then to suspend judgement and -- hey presto! -- that's something that brings along the tranquillity we wanted all along. Apelles' story was perhaps quite famous (I wonder if it was in Antigonus of Carystus' account of the painter's life; Antigonus also wrote a Life of Pyrrho, the philosophical inspiration for Sextus' scepticism). But anyway, here's my thought:

Is Chrysippus' reference to throwing a sponge in frustration part of a discussion over the Apelles' story, or something like it? Perhaps it goes like this: the Stoics interpret Apelles' frustration in a way consistent with their general intellectualist account of the emotions. At the root of it is some kind of dispositional belief combined with some judgment about the current failings of his attempts to paint the horse's foam. To get things right, for the Stoics, Apelles ought to get his general beliefs right about what truly matters and what does not. Does it really matter if in the end your painting looks a bit crappy? As in their more famous account of the archer, a good painter is a painter who does all a painter can do to try to get the right result. The final result itself if not ethically significant. (This seems to me not altogether plausible, at least in the case of painters, but that's another story. A good painter is surely someone able to produce good paintings and, because in Apelles' case we are thinking about mimetic art, a good painting will be one which convincingly represents the intended subject; the end result in this instance is clearly rather important...)

Anyway, Sextus has a different story: for him, what matters is that Apelles did get the right result after all (the sponge did create the desired effect), but it did not happen in the way Apelles had expected. The frustration he feels at the repeated failure of his individual attempts at the right technique for painting the foam leads cumulatively to a feeling that there is no particular way to get this right. And it is this position of dissatisfaction which leads to his gesture of surrender -- throwing the sponge -- which unexpectedly leads to the right result.

Now, I have no idea how plausible this is. In any case, the story of Apelles is a nice way to contrast the Stoics and sceptics on an important bit of psychology. And, of course, for Sextus, Apelles' story stands for a general account of Pyrrhonist method, not just an account of a Pyrrhonist's emotional life. But I do wonder if buried somewhere in the mass of evidence we have lost there is some connection between Chrysippus' remark and Sextus' story.

[1] Come to think of it, didn't the Romans -- and probably Greeks -- use sponges as a way of cleaning themselves after using the toilet? And probably also in the bath? You can learn a lot about Greek toilets here. Not sure whether that's a plausible situation for one to feel beside oneself in disappointment, though...

Door-kicking

It's nice when you are reading something ancient and come across a passage which strikes a very particular and direct chord. I'm reading Margaret Graver's new book, Stoicism and emotion (Chicago, 2007) and enjoying it a lot. I was also very pleased to read a passage from Galen which she discusses near the beginning of chapter 3. She is interested in the sense that the Stoics can give to the idea that emotions are 'up to us', that is are ultimately dependent on ourselves and we can be held responsible for them. This is a hot topic for some ancient philosophers, closely related to the famous discussions over the possibility of akrasia -- 'weakness of will' or 'incontinence' -- the possibility that I might be overcome by anger, or pleasure, or erotic passion, or some such and end up acting contrary to my better judgement. The Stoics' general psychological picture would appear to rule out this sort of phenomenon. So it is interesting to hear Chrysippus saying something like this:

“οὕτω γὰρ ἐξιστάμεθα καὶ ἔξω γινόμεθα ἑαυτῶν καὶ τελέως ἀποτυφλούμεθα ἐν τοῖς σφαλλομένοις, ὥστε ἔστιν ὅτε σπόγγον ἔχοντες ἢ ἔριον ἐν ταῖς χερσὶ τοῦτο διαράμενοι βάλλομεν ὡς δή τι περανοῦντες δι’ αὐτῶν. εἰ δ’ ἐτυγχάνομεν μάχαιραν ἔχοντες ἢ ἄλλο τι, τούτῳ ἂν ἐχρησάμεθα παραπλησίως.” καὶ ἐφεξῆς “πολλάκις δὲ κατὰ τὴν τοιαύτην τυφλότητα τὰς κλεῖς δάκνομεν καὶ τὰς θύρας τύπτομεν οὐ ταχὺ αὐτῶν ἀνοιγομένων πρός τε τοὺς λίθους ἐὰν προσπταίσωμεν, τιμωρητικῶς προσφερόμεθα καταγνύντες καὶ ῥιπτοῦντες αὐτοὺς εἴς τινας τόπους καὶ ἐπιλέγοντες καθ’ ἕκαστα τούτων ἀτοπώτατα.”

Chrysippus, in Galen PHP 4.6.43-5 De Lacy

Here is Graver's translation:

For in disappointment we are 'outside of' or 'beside' ourselves and, in a word, blinded, so that sometimes, if we have a sponge or a bit of wool in our hands, we pick it up and throw it, as if that would achieve something. And if we happened to be holding a dagger, or some other weapon, we would do the same with that... And often, through the same blindness, we bite keys and beat at doors when they do not open quickly, and if we stumble on a stone we take revenge on it by breaking it or throwing it somewhere, and we say very odd things on such occasions.

This is cited by Galen as part of his general discussion of Platonic vs. Stoic psychology and that is obviously a worthy and interesting discussion in its own right. The passage made me smile, though, because intense rage at inanimate objects is something to which I am, unfortunately, personally prone.

Now, I am quite prepared to believe that this failing is 'up to me' in the sense relevant to my being subject to moral evaluation for it. But there it is. I could probably do with some well-aimed psychological therapy at the hands of some Epictetus or Socrates. (Then again, they would probably annoy me even more...) And I do know that it has landed me in some hot water. For instance, I once was coming into the house from the garden and carelessly as I opened the door allowed it to bump into and push over my little girl, who had been in the house trying to spy me through the cat flap. In the heat and emotion (embarrassment, anger, self-criticism) that followed, I somehow decided that the right thing to do was to kick the offending back door very hard. I managed, however, to put my foot right through the cat flap, smashing it. So the whole thing was made much worse and I had to spend the rest of the afternoon finding and fitting a replacement.

Well, I'm not sure whose analysis of these situations is right, Chrysippus' or Plato's. But I'm sure that they happen. And it shows that you don't need to go digging around high literature like Homer or Attic tragedy to find illuminating and complicated psychological examples.

Something sustaining

Back at work in earnest today, and I've just realised that I've been through ten or so contributions to the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism that I am editing and have been changing the bibliographies to a slightly incorrect formatting. Bum. I'll have to go back tomorrow and hunt down the pesky edited volumes and move people around. Yes, I know Endnote or something else clever would probably do it for me, but if not all the contributors use it and if I have always been too mean to shell out then I suppose I'll just have to buckle down and do it old skool.

Still, I was cheered up tonight because younger daughter chose one of my favourite stories for bedtime: chapter two of Winnie the Pooh, '...in which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place'. If you haven't read it (shame on you) then you can do so here. I'm not entirely sure that its copyright kosher to put that on the 'net, but it's there. In fact, even if you have read it, then treat yourself to five minutes fun and read it here. It's best, of course with the E. H. Shepard illustrations (shame on those Disney folk...) The prose is brilliant -- especially the exchanges between Rabbit and Pooh. But tonight I particularly enjoyed the reference Pooh makes to the sort of book he would like to hear while he is waiting to get thinner and become unstuck from Rabbit's front door:

"Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

(The capitals are important.) That sounds like just the sort of thing that would help me right now, both in my post Xmas/too many Celebrations (the chocolates)/ aren't those new 85% cocoa After Eights good/ just another glass of wine then... sort of state and in my metaphorical need for sustinence in a time of Great Tightness.

Shame on us?

Alain be Botton writes in The Philosophers' Magazine here about the treatment his work has received at the hands of some professional academic philosophers including -- he names names so I don't have to -- one or two people who work like me on ancient philosophy. His piece concludes:

It clearly feels very important for academic philosophers to guard their borders aggressively. Doing so has brought them extraordinary neglect and mockery. I’d recommend that they learn to make philosophy into a big tent and stop being so threatened by practioners who don’t share their assumptions, lest they find out that there are no more true believers.

I know Alain feels very strongly about this; he was written to tell me as much when I posted something he felt discredited his work in much the same way here he says other professional philosophers have done. But I still think there is something of an improper contrast being made, and perhaps being pursued by both sides. It seems to me that a 'big tent' might well be a good idea, but only so long as it's big enough that we can do what we each do without having to jostle for space or feel threatened by one another. Attacking writers like de Botton for doing what they do might well be unfair and/or unproductive. I see no reason not to call it philosophy. But similarly, telling professional academic philosophers they are somehow doing a disservice to philosophy by pursuing more abstruse or technical or less popular avenues of research is not going to get us very far either. That too offers too narrow a vision of what the subject is and should be.

Feedback

And one little coda to the interview story: not long ago I rediscovered a little postcard sent to me in December 1991 by the person who was eventually to be my Director of Studies at Clare; he was writing to tell me that I would be getting a conditional offer of a place. That sort of thing isn't supposed to happen any more, because it's important to be absolutely sure that any communication about decisions comes initially via the Admissions Office and is double-checked etc. But in some ways, that's a bit of a shame. That small card meant an enormous amount to me and also was a very humane way of letting me enjoy my Christmas without the anxiety of still not knowing how my application had gone.

So, tell me a little about....

The admissions interview season is more or less over, so we can at last spend a few days frantically trying to do some of our own work before Christmas. I still remember my own interviews, so this time of year causes some serious flashbacks and I find myself sympathising a great deal with the various candidates who come along and have a go at answering tricky questions in a new and probably intimidating environment with rather a lot at stake. For my part, I hope I do what I can to make the experience reasonably pain-free without stinting on the level of care and seriousness that we apply to the decision-making. It's important for the interview to be revealing of what the various applicants would be like were they to be admitted, so it can't be too cosy.

Like all Classics applicants, I was interviewed at not just the college of my first choice (Clare) but at another place assigned by the Faculty. For me, this was Trinity, and the Trinity interview came first, on the morning after a v. hard test in Clare (which involved a chunk of the nastiest Latin I have ever read; or at least that's how it felt... I don't think there was a verb in the first sentence. Silver Latin, eh?). I had to find my way to Grange Road after a night freezing in a room in Memorial Court. Those were the days before central heating and certainly before en suite facilities -- all now demanded by the paying undergraduate clients and certainly by the lucrative conference facilities. I remember talking to my Trinity interviewer about Herodotus and Thucydides, and wondering how different they were -- even making up something about their prose style. I couldn't read a word of Greek at that time, so it was all a bit off the cuff. At the end, the interviewer told me that he reckoned I had a good chance but Trinity had so many of its own applicants that I probably wouldn't end up there. Fair enough. I hadn't applied to Trinity anyway; but it's interesting to note that that sort of talk is definitely -- and rightly -- verboten these days. (It may well have been verboten even then...)

Then three interviews at Clare, with the Director of Studies and one of the college lecturers, with the person who would eventually be my tutor, and with a Professorial fellow in Classics. These I remember less well, but I was certainly asked if I agreed with Quintilian's assessment of Livy's prose style (ummmm, well.... mumble....) and whether I'd prefer to know a little about a lot or a lot about a little. I have no idea what I said to that. Quite a full day, though.

Still, I think I enjoyed it. At least, I enjoyed the obvious time and attention being paid to my application. And that is still the case. The decisions are taken very carefully and with a great deal of consideration of each candidate's various strengths and weaknesses. It's a shame we cannot take more people, of course, and then there are people to whom the course or the method of teaching we offer are not well suited. In fact, if there is one piece of advice that I would insist upon for potential applicants it is that they all need to look carefully at the course they apply for. Make sure you know what it involves, what it does not cover, and the sort of work you will be doing. All that information is easily available, but it is surprising how many applicants appear not to have spent much time looking and thinking about what they are signing up for...

A new Callicles?

This is from the intriguing http://www.magicmolly.com/:

Looks like S. will have hard time refutin' Kanye. Peace out.

More shirts

It seems to me that there are more philosophy-themed t-shirts on sale than there are people who would wear philosophy-themed t-shirts. But sometimes they make me laugh, all the same. Here's one that made me laugh from Gadflycreations.com, 'Offering products than which none greater can be conceived'.

Grrrr

I've just got home on the Citi (sic) 2 bus service. Yes, I know I probably shouldn't be using Stagecoach buses, but it's the only service in town. It was grim enought waiting 40 minutes for the 'every 20 mins' service, but then when I got on I had to share the bus with a eejit who insisted on playing the assembled passenger aggresive rap from the tinny crap speakers in his mobile phone. Prat. I know it must be hard to get respec' on the mean streets of Impington or wherever, and perhaps somewhere in his tiny brain he was entertaining fantasies of ridin' round the projects of Baltimore but for Pete's sake stop inflicting this trebley drivel on all and sundry. Of course, this being Britain and because we're all worried about being knifed on public transport, no one said anything to get him to stop. And why should we have to in any case? Grrrr.

Ho ho ho

Term is over so we academics should all be sitting back and waiting for Christmas, right? Not a bit of it; hence the lack of much blogging recently. At the moment the colleges are full of students who are applying for admission in October 2008 (or for deferred entry in 2009). Our current first-years have only just started and already we need to think about the next year's intake. I find the whole process a lot of hard work, and pretty stressful. Not, I suppose, as stressful as the candidates find it. But all the same, there are some big decisions to be made and we try to make them fairly and well.

That's not all. For our Faculty, this is the time of year when we begin to set exam papers for the summer. It's a long and baroque process, with all sorts of complicated discussions about formats and fonts and markbooks and workbooks and candidates from other courses and the like. One of the hardest parts of the job, in fact, is moving between the various different teaching, Faculty, college, research, and publication tasks that we each take on. I can't juggle and I'm only just able to manage this working equivalent.

But there are some things to smile about too. Like: www.elfyourself.com (8 new elves per second, apparently...). Or the interesting and often very bright students we get to interview. Or finding out that YouTube has footage of perhaps the best thing that Socrates ever did.

Had I written it...

Ah, the demise of the subjunctive... Not long after I became grumpy at the sight of a college Governing Body paper written with clauses like: 'The committee recommend that X is [sic] tasked with' etc..., I find that the new lamentable OJ Simpson book has the title 'If I did it'. Now, this is fine for the Goldman family, I suppose, because now they have been granted rights to the book they can arrange the title on the front cover with the 'If' in a colour that blends almost imperceptibly into the background. But really, what would have been so wrong with 'Had I done it...'? Perhaps OJ is genuinely unsure whether he did it or not, so the remote conditional didn't strike him as appropriate. But I doubt it.

Charity has its limits

Oh dear. Kenodoxia has now been cited in Mary Beard's 'Don's diary' (in the latest Cam magazine) as a vaguely scholarly trip along the by-ways of ancient philosophy. I have a sneaking feeling I haven't been very scholarly lately, nor very philosophical. But here's a gesture in that direction.

What's the worst argument to be found in an ancient philosophical text? I mean the argument that is the most obviously fallacious or otherwise glaringly misguided? Now, the Principle of Charity often leads us in the business to try to do the best for whatever apparently ghastly bit of reasoning we might find. (Think, for example, of the 'Argument from opposites' in Plato's Phaedo: 'being dead' and 'being alive' are opposites in the required sense, are they Socrates?)

But I can't do very much for the following:

'If you are light, pain, I can bear you; if I cannot bear you, you are short.'

levis es si ferre possum; brevis es si ferre non possum.

Sen. Ep. Mor. 24.14

This is meant to persuade us that intense pain does not last. It's not just Seneca who peddles this rubbish, though: he probably caught it from an Epicurean (see Epic. Ep. Men. 133; KD 4; SV 4; Diog. Oin. fr. 42 Smith; also Cic. Tusc. 2.44.) But Seneca is daft enough to repeat it, even thanking nature for making it so (Ep. Mor. 78.7). If it's an argument at all and not just a daftly optimistic assertion, then it must mean something like this:

If pain is intolerable then it will kill you; it will not last. If pain lasts then it must therefore be tolerable.

This is of course true only in a very special and literal sense of 'intolerable'. I doubt anyone will be much relieved when they turn to a doctor and complain of excruciating agony if the doctor turns round and says: 'Well, it hasn't killed you. So it must be tolerable. Luck you.' Anyone persuaded by this not to worry about pain is an idiot or (and?) already, like Seneca, a Stoic...

Any arguments worse than this?

Why kids are great

Despite getting us all up at 5.30 for the last three days, daughter #2 managed to cheer us up by provoking the following conversation over breakfast:

Daughter #2: 'Will you come to explore a volcano with me?' (Daughter #2 is wearing a bike-helmet to eat her breakfast. In fact, she has been wearing it all weekend since seeing Dr Iain Stewart's new BBC2 series and people abseiling into a crater to look at moltem lava.)

Daughter #1: 'Sorry, no. It's a school day today.'

So, this is what it's all for?

A report in yesterday's Guardian tells me that philosophy graduates are much more popular with prospective employers than perhaps they used to be. Certainly there are many more of them (in 2006 more than twice as many people graduated with a degree in philosophy than in 2001) and they are finding work in some interesting places.

Good for them. But I couldn't help feeling a little deflated by the following:

Fiona Czerniawska, director of the Management Consultancies Association's think tank, says: "A philosophy degree has trained the individual's brain and given them the ability to provide management-consulting firms with the sort of skills that they require and clients demand. These skills can include the ability to be very analytical, provide clear and innovative thinking, and question assumptions."

I would have hoped that all university degrees offer that kind of education. For my part, I don't think that what I am doing when I teach is fit someone out with the kind of skills that management consulting firms demand. And it somehow bores me to hear once again the reduction of philosophy to some kind of 'brain-training' and the provision of a set of transferable analytic skills. But perhaps the increased employability of a philosophy degree will attract some good students who might otherwise have been put off and, if things go well, perhaps they will in the course of their studies read and think about something which lets them imagine doing something interesting afterwards.

More free stuff...

Thanks to Harry who commented on a previous post, I found the Internet Archive. Not only does it hold lots of interesting music, but plenty of free pdfs of books -- with no problems this time with access from the UK and so no need for proxies.

I now have a nice pdf of Mutschmann's edition of Sextus Empiricus PH and also Oliveri's editions of Philodemus On the good king... and On frank speech.

I missed out...

Yesterday was UNESCO World Philosophy Day. Julian Baggini, on the Guardian website, is not sure whether to celebrate. I had no such troubles, mainly because -- I confess -- I didn't know anything about it. From my perspective at least, yesterday was not particularly philosophical. No more than most other days, in any case. But at least I'm not too late for the 2007 World Philosophy Day activities in Instanbul, on November 21-23. There's a programme here.

This is what the DG of UNESCO thinks it is all about:

To give greater depth to political, philosophical and intercultural dialogue and to mutual understanding of shared memories and values, ambitions and joint projects admittedly requires an updated chart of lines of convergence and divergence, of the differences, silences, misunderstandings and deadlocks that are always possible. The purpose of this Day is therefore to set out the conditions for such a universal dialogue by opening up to the diversity of interlocutors, and of philosophical currents and traditions, in an endeavour to take stock, to provide a perspective on the world and to engage in a critical rereading of our concepts and way of thinking.

Admirable aims, I suppose, albeit with a whiff of hand-waving generality...

De morte

Was the first century BC, the years 55-c.40 BC in particular, a boom period for thanatology? I have been looking at some works of that period and I am beginning to compile a relatively long list of works we either have in total or in part or else can be confident belonged to that period:

1. Lucretius, De rerum natura, book 3, lines 830-end
2. Cicero, Tusculan disputations, book 1 (Cicero also wrote a Consolatio just before Tusc. His daughter, Tullia, died early in 45 BC.)
3. Philodemus, On death
4. L. Varius Rufus, On death (a poem; fragments survive)
5. And, perhaps: Pseudo-Platonic Axiochus

This may not be a tremendously long list, but in terms of ancient works which survive or are known and considering the relatively close date of at least 1-4, I reckon this looks like a period of particular interest in such matters. If so, why?

Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that it is the result of a growing Roman interest in Epicureanism, the philosophy which emphasised most strongly the importance of getting right about the fear of death. Also, items 1, 3, and 4 were perhaps composed by people who were acquaintances or perhaps more loosely associated. This is therefore perhaps the result of a particular group's interest in this question. And, I imagine we should not discount the possibility that the turbulent times leading up to and after Caesar's assassination, the ongoing upheavals and -- no doubt -- deaths, might have encouraged this kind of reflection. We ought not to over-emphasise this last point, I suppose, since people die all the time and the Romans can't be said to have lived an entirely trouble-free kind of existence before the mid-first century BC. All the same, a number of these works either explicitly mention or can be plausibly linked to political concerns.

Am I missing any items from the list? And is there any other comparable period of activity? Is it that this looks to be unusual simply because we happen to know a bit about the works from this very well-documented period?

Decline...

You can listen here to Alain De Botton discussing what philosophy is. One claim that emerges in the interview struck me as interesting. Is it really the case that philosophers are often bad writers? Is it a shame that Kant is such a bad writer given that Plato started so well? (By which I mean both: Is it true that Kant is a bad writer? and Is it a shame that Kant writes so differently from Plato?)

Christmas list

Item no. 1 on my list is the new shirt from the good people at Philosophy Football... It commemorates the famous Monty Python joke, YouTubed below. One minor blemish is that the shirt prints 'Empedocles of Acraga' rather than 'Acragas'. The Pythons had on their teamsheet, since the final was being played in Munich, 'Empedocles von Acraga' so it was an easy slip. I'd still wear it, though, particularly since the right team won. (Sophocles at right-back is a bit of a surprise, now I think about it. I think I'd have put Melissus in -- no one gets past an Eleatic.)

Free stuff

Even better than cheap reprinted books are free books. Google Books, for example, will allow you to download Diels' Doxographi Graeci in PDF form for free... There are lots of other goodies there too, including the 1903 edition of Diels' Fragmente der Vorsokratiker... Well, you can get these if you are in the US. Those of us in the UK can't. If you hide your IP address you can get to the page only by getting there via a proxy site, and even then the PDF won't download properly. Shucks.

Reprinting is good

Recently, my life has been much improved by publishers reprinting or re-issuing some otherwise hard to find things. First, Cambridge University Press have begun paperbacking some important things that were otherwise out of print or very expensive. Favourite so far is:

But perhaps even better than that is a series from the Italian publisher Bompiani. They have now released versions of Usener's Epicurea, Von Armim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta and, more recently, Luria's edition of the fragments of Democritus. Each volume include a copy of the original publication with facing Italian translation. In the case of Luria, this includes an Italian translation of the original Russian commentary which, up to now, has been a complete mystery to me. Good on you, Bompiani! Best of all, they're cheap.

Is poikilia the spice of life?

Some more on Epicurean pleasure. How can the Epicureans persuade us to think that painlessness is itself a pleasure, let alone the greatest pleasure? Torquatus’ attempt to answer the question in Cicero Fin. 2 is brief but important. He reminds Cicero of the Epicurean notion that katastematic pleasure cannot be increased but merely varied (variari) (2.10); the painless state admits of pleasant variation. This variation, somehow, is meant to smooth the acceptance of e.g. the absence of thirst as a genuine form of pleasure. Of course, Cicero will have none of this and offers yet another dilemma – the problem which seems to me to be a genuine and serious one for Epicureanism. Although Torquatus mentioned this variation only briefly, at Fin. 1.38, Cicero has remembered his Epicureanism well enough to be able to point out something which Torquatus has not stressed, namely that this variation is distinct from painlessness and in no way increases the pleasure of painlessness (see KD 18, which is very explicit about this). The painlessness is itself supposed to be the greatest pleasure so Cicero assumes that the variation is a ‘sweet motion on the senses’ (dulcis motus sensibus) and that it is another aspect of kinetic pleasure: it is what happens when someone drinks although they are not thirsty. Cicero does not care to insist on any distinction between the pleasures of drinking when thirsty and the variation of pleasure in drinking when not thirsty. Modern commentators tend to worry about whether either or both are genuine Epicurean kinetic pleasures, but for Cicero both are clear enough cases of sensory motions. And that is all he needs for his argument.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what, precisely, this ‘variation’ might be. The precise nature of this variety or complexity of pleasures once painlessness is reached is not always considered in any detail. But there are two distinct possibilities. First, the variety might be a phenomenological variety – a heterogeneity sometimes stressed as an interesting characteristic of pleasures generally. Alternatively, this variety may lie in the different causes of painlessness. [1] Cicero appears to support the latter view at Fin. 2.10: voluptas etiam varia dici solet cum percipitur e multis dissimilibus rebus (‘Pleasure is usually said to be varied when it is perceived from many unlike things’). But again, it is important to bear in mind that this is Cicero’s own attempt to understand what he says is an obscurity in Epicureanism on the basis of the ‘natural’ understanding of the Latin varietas. Torquatus’ initial introduction of the idea at Fin. 1.38 appears to contrast the differentiation of pleasures ‘by variation’ from the differentiation of pleasures in terms size or magnitude (‘ut postea variari voluptas distinguique possit, augeri amplificarique non possit.’), a contrast which might well point in the direction of qualitative variety. For what it is worth, a first look at the uses of ποίκιλημα and ποικίλος in Philodemus and Epicurus – words cognate with the term for variation used in KD 18 – suggests that it is linked primarily with notions of complexity or qualitative variety as in, for example, the great variety of directions of atomic movement. [2]

Yet another twist, suggested to me this week by Philip Hardie is that the Epicurean stance on variatio is perhaps inspired in contrast with a common literary conceit that variety and complexity in a text or in the language used in a text are prime methods of increasing the audience’s pleasure. I found, for example, Dion. Hal. Comp. 11 and 19 from the first century BC but it might well be a much earlier idea also.

[1] For this view, see Bailey ad KD 18.

[2] See Usener’s Glossarium Epicureum s.vv. Note also Plut. Non posse 1088C.

What is the logical form of this?

Thank goodness for YouTube. Here is my favourite bit from Derek Jarman's quirky film, Wittgenstein. What is the logical form of a V sign? Witters' reaction might be a bit extreme, but it's a good lesson in the complexity of meaningful forms of communication. And funny.

Some boring statistics

Facebook collects all the information its users decide to put in their profiles. I imagine this is commercially quite useful. But it also allows it to display tables like this one, which gives some results for the Cambridge UK network (you might have to click on it to see it large enough):

I reckon it's pretty depressing. Is it really true that the 'top books' among Cambridge network people are Harry Potter... and The Lord of the Rings. Good grief. And as for the top music choices, we really do come out as a load of boring MORers. What will we all be reading and listening to when we really are boring and middle aged? (I know: some of us are closer to that than others. But I wouldn't put U2 and Queen on my list...)