Hiram Crespo's Blog, page 2
October 5, 2016
Six Things I Learned After Writing “Tending the Epicurean Garden”
This month of October marks the 2-year anniversary of the “official” publication of my book (review here), although the book had been available on Amazon prior to that date. I wrote the bulk of the content for Tending the Epicurean Garden during the year 2013, but in the years since I have not ceased to learn about philosophy and about the many subjects I discussed in TtEG. For some time, I’ve wanted to give my readers a clear learning path for after they’re done reading my book, and this occasion is as good as any, so here are six important things I’ve learned about Epicurean philosophy after writing Tending the Epicurean Garden.
1. The Philodemus Series
I delved into the reading of the scrolls from the villa of Herculaneum shortly after completing my book. The scrolls are the remnants that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 of Common Era. They are a treasure trove of ancient humanist wisdom, the Humanist Nag Hammadi. In one of the scrolls, for instance, the Scholarch Polystratus anticipates the contemporary work of Sam Harris by over 22 centuries: he lays out sober and robust arguments for a hedonist moral realism based on theories of physics and ethics laid out by Epicurus in his Epistle to Herodotus. In this scroll he battled cultural and moral relativism, and superstition, and also defended the scientific study of nature as essential for ethics, decency and morality.
Epicurus’ teachings against the use of empty words help us to better understand Philodemus’ Rhetorica and Methods of Inference, and in general just help us to reason more clearly. The scroll about property management provides useful guidance for our life-long self-sufficiency projects, but the most important scroll in my view, and the greatest masterpiece of humanist literature from Herculaneum has to be the one On Death, which catalogues all the logical and common-sense repercussions of our teaching that death is nothing to us.
2. Norman DeWitt is key to understanding Epicurean philosophy on its own terms. He is particularly good at explaining the Canon (epistemology) and the importance of the doctrine of pleasure as the end. Read his Philosophy for the Millions pamphlet, which narrates and gives some perspective on the historical battle between the naturalist philosophy of the scientists and the Platonic philosophy of the mystics and charlatans.
3. Frances Wright wrote the great Epicurean masterpiece in the English language A Few Days in Athens. See a detailed review here.
4. Neuroscience was a field of great interest to Epicurean philosophy from the onset. Epicurus, in his speech on Moral Development, discussed how the “atomic structure” of the brain can be changed through certain practices (like repetition of certain teachings), and how as part of our moral development, we must take ownership of the content of our brains and our characters. Later on, Lucretius discussed neural pathways in his On the Nature of Things. It is clear that, as Epicureans, we are responsible for the steady and diligent cultivation of our brains in the same way that athletes are responsible for the cultivation of their bodies.
5. Natural community (family, tribe, circle of friends) is conceived as distinct from Platonic (or imagined) communities (nations, races, ethnicities, etc.) Just as we learn in Philodemus that there is a natural measure of wealth (that corresponds with ensuring that we can satisfy our natural and necessary desires), our friends from the Las Indias Coop, while reasoning about the world from an Epicurean perspective, also argued that there is a natural (measure of) community, and even cite modern research to separate natural from Platonic communities.
I use the word “measure” here to refer specifically to the Dunbar number (almost 150), which indicates how many real, significant relationships humans are cognitively able to have. Natural selection strongly favors this because our ancestors evolved in tribes, which protected individuals from weather, wild beasts, and other dangers, and also secured access to food sources and transferred traditional wisdom about where to find them. There’s other research that demonstrates that isolation is a health risk on par with obesity and smoking, so that the lone-wolf “ideal” is also unhealthy and unnatural.
There’s simply no question that humans are tribal by nature. In Epicurus, the philos ideal (devoted friendship with our intellectual kin) is considered the healthiest way to build our tribe and channel our social instinct.
6. The Cyrenaics were a philosophical Atlantis, and paved the way for Epicurean ethics just as Democritus and Leucippus paved the way for physics.
Further Reading:
Tending the Epicurean Garden – The Humanist Review
Elemental Epicureanism
1. The Philodemus Series
I delved into the reading of the scrolls from the villa of Herculaneum shortly after completing my book. The scrolls are the remnants that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 of Common Era. They are a treasure trove of ancient humanist wisdom, the Humanist Nag Hammadi. In one of the scrolls, for instance, the Scholarch Polystratus anticipates the contemporary work of Sam Harris by over 22 centuries: he lays out sober and robust arguments for a hedonist moral realism based on theories of physics and ethics laid out by Epicurus in his Epistle to Herodotus. In this scroll he battled cultural and moral relativism, and superstition, and also defended the scientific study of nature as essential for ethics, decency and morality.
Epicurus’ teachings against the use of empty words help us to better understand Philodemus’ Rhetorica and Methods of Inference, and in general just help us to reason more clearly. The scroll about property management provides useful guidance for our life-long self-sufficiency projects, but the most important scroll in my view, and the greatest masterpiece of humanist literature from Herculaneum has to be the one On Death, which catalogues all the logical and common-sense repercussions of our teaching that death is nothing to us.
2. Norman DeWitt is key to understanding Epicurean philosophy on its own terms. He is particularly good at explaining the Canon (epistemology) and the importance of the doctrine of pleasure as the end. Read his Philosophy for the Millions pamphlet, which narrates and gives some perspective on the historical battle between the naturalist philosophy of the scientists and the Platonic philosophy of the mystics and charlatans.
3. Frances Wright wrote the great Epicurean masterpiece in the English language A Few Days in Athens. See a detailed review here.
4. Neuroscience was a field of great interest to Epicurean philosophy from the onset. Epicurus, in his speech on Moral Development, discussed how the “atomic structure” of the brain can be changed through certain practices (like repetition of certain teachings), and how as part of our moral development, we must take ownership of the content of our brains and our characters. Later on, Lucretius discussed neural pathways in his On the Nature of Things. It is clear that, as Epicureans, we are responsible for the steady and diligent cultivation of our brains in the same way that athletes are responsible for the cultivation of their bodies.
5. Natural community (family, tribe, circle of friends) is conceived as distinct from Platonic (or imagined) communities (nations, races, ethnicities, etc.) Just as we learn in Philodemus that there is a natural measure of wealth (that corresponds with ensuring that we can satisfy our natural and necessary desires), our friends from the Las Indias Coop, while reasoning about the world from an Epicurean perspective, also argued that there is a natural (measure of) community, and even cite modern research to separate natural from Platonic communities.
I use the word “measure” here to refer specifically to the Dunbar number (almost 150), which indicates how many real, significant relationships humans are cognitively able to have. Natural selection strongly favors this because our ancestors evolved in tribes, which protected individuals from weather, wild beasts, and other dangers, and also secured access to food sources and transferred traditional wisdom about where to find them. There’s other research that demonstrates that isolation is a health risk on par with obesity and smoking, so that the lone-wolf “ideal” is also unhealthy and unnatural.
There’s simply no question that humans are tribal by nature. In Epicurus, the philos ideal (devoted friendship with our intellectual kin) is considered the healthiest way to build our tribe and channel our social instinct.
6. The Cyrenaics were a philosophical Atlantis, and paved the way for Epicurean ethics just as Democritus and Leucippus paved the way for physics.
Further Reading:
Tending the Epicurean Garden – The Humanist Review
Elemental Epicureanism
August 16, 2015
Contributing Blogger at Partially Examined Life
In recent months, I've joined PEL as one of its bloggers. Some of my initial pieces were introductory blogs about Epicurus' Four Cures and the Herculaneum scrolls. There have also been comparisons between Epicurean and Taoist philosophies, a piece on the delightful comedic literature of Lucian of Samosata, and a piece that presents the hypothesis that religion may be comparable to play activity among social species.
Please visit the PEL site and share the links!
Please visit the PEL site and share the links!
May 8, 2015
Society of Epicurus publishes Epítome
According to Norman DeWitt, ancient Epicureans used to study a Little Epitome, which is extant today as the Letter to Herodotus, and would later on graduate to the Big Epitome for which, he suggests, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura was used although some other volume must have been used during the first couple of centuries prior to Lucretius.
In celebration of this tradition and to encourage and facilitate the systematic study of its writings in Spain and Latin America, the Society of Friends of Epicurus recently released a Spanish-language Epítome: Escrituras Epicúreas, a collection of the ancient writings of our tradition with commentary and a study guide by Hiram Crespo, author of Tending the Epicurean Garden (Humanist Press, 2014).
The work is written in chapter and verse format, both for ease of reference and to dignify the considerable historical value of its content. It includes a Spanish translation of Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings and the Epistles to Moeneceus, Pythocles and Herodotus, in addition to a summarized chronicle of the lives of the Scholarchs and great masters of the tradition up to Philodemus of Gadara, as well as the Spanish translation of nine reasonings based on the surviving fragments of the Herculaneum Scrolls.
The book is available from Amazon, or directly from CreateSpace.
In celebration of this tradition and to encourage and facilitate the systematic study of its writings in Spain and Latin America, the Society of Friends of Epicurus recently released a Spanish-language Epítome: Escrituras Epicúreas, a collection of the ancient writings of our tradition with commentary and a study guide by Hiram Crespo, author of Tending the Epicurean Garden (Humanist Press, 2014).
The work is written in chapter and verse format, both for ease of reference and to dignify the considerable historical value of its content. It includes a Spanish translation of Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings and the Epistles to Moeneceus, Pythocles and Herodotus, in addition to a summarized chronicle of the lives of the Scholarchs and great masters of the tradition up to Philodemus of Gadara, as well as the Spanish translation of nine reasonings based on the surviving fragments of the Herculaneum Scrolls.
The book is available from Amazon, or directly from CreateSpace.
May 6, 2015
FullScream Book Review
A new book review was just published by blogger Tom Church under the title HIRAM CRESPO ON TENDING THE EPICUREAN GARDEN: PLEASURE AND HEDONISM. In it, he covers some of the basic definitions used in our science of happiness. His blog, Screams, blends aesthetics, the arts, history and philosophy and is part of FullScream.com, a "creative studio that specializes in TV branding, motion design, and fashion video production".
May 5, 2015
Interview with DB and Piece for The Humanist
I was recently interviewed, together with a fellow member of the Society of Friends of Epicurus, for Decisiones Bambú which is a Spanish-language program put together by Rey Yacolca Producciones in Perú. The interview has been uploaded to the SoFE youtube channel, with an English transcript of it at societyofepicurus.com. Please subscribe to our youtube channel!
We discussed the differences and similarities between Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, as well as the indigenous sumak kawsay wisdom tradition of South America. We also talked about the science of happiness, Epicurean therapy, and the importance of having values that are aligned with empirical evidence.
I recently also wrote Whose Pleasure? Whose Pain? Applying the Hedonic Calculus to Public Policy for The Humanist, a publication of the American Humanist Association. In the piece, I argue that hedonic calculus is an ideal method for ethical decision-making at the personal level, but that it does not necessarily work at the public policy level and that there are more intelligent ways for secular humanist philosophers to infuence public policy.
The piece was written as part of their May-June issue, which features a piece on the SMART therapy for recovery from alcoholism and addiction. SMART ("Self-Management and Recovery Training") is a fully non-religious alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, which has been under fire recently for its lack of effectiveness, yet has served for many years to channel public and private funds into religious propaganda.
We discussed the differences and similarities between Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, as well as the indigenous sumak kawsay wisdom tradition of South America. We also talked about the science of happiness, Epicurean therapy, and the importance of having values that are aligned with empirical evidence.
I recently also wrote Whose Pleasure? Whose Pain? Applying the Hedonic Calculus to Public Policy for The Humanist, a publication of the American Humanist Association. In the piece, I argue that hedonic calculus is an ideal method for ethical decision-making at the personal level, but that it does not necessarily work at the public policy level and that there are more intelligent ways for secular humanist philosophers to infuence public policy.
The piece was written as part of their May-June issue, which features a piece on the SMART therapy for recovery from alcoholism and addiction. SMART ("Self-Management and Recovery Training") is a fully non-religious alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, which has been under fire recently for its lack of effectiveness, yet has served for many years to channel public and private funds into religious propaganda.
March 8, 2015
Venta en smashwords
La traducción al castellano del libro Varios días en Atenas va a estar a la venta por 3.99 en smashwords durante el resto del mes de marzo. Hace un excelente regalo para toda persona que quiera estudiar la filosofía epicúrea y entender de que manera es diferente a otras tradiciones.
January 26, 2015
A Few Days in Athens: The Friends of Epicurus Edition
A Few Days in Athens: The Friends of Epicurus Edition is now available in English-language paperback from Amazon and in kindle version. This edition includes the review written for societyofepicurus.com as well as a study guide at the end of the novel.
January 23, 2015
Varios días en Atenas / A Few Days in Athens now at amazon
Varios días en Atenas, la traducción al castellano de la novela de Frances Wright (con comentario introductorio y guía de estudio), está ya disponible en amazon.
The Spanish translation of A Few Days in Athens is now available from amazon.
The Spanish translation of A Few Days in Athens is now available from amazon.
January 2, 2015
The Humanist Book Review
2014 closed for me with this amazing review of Tending the Epicurean Garden by Cornell University classicist Michael Fontaine, which was written for Jan-Feb 2015 issue of The Humanist, a publication of the American Humanist Association.
The reviewer had previously written works comparing Epicureanism (favorably) with the work of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. This influenced his response to my book.
The review represents the ideas expressed in my book fairly and sets accurate expectations for readers, and then it closes with a Szasz-inspired challenge to contemporary Epicurean thinkers:
This raises many complex ethical questions, for which we should expect no easy answers. For-profit health care does create a clash between the interests of patients (who want to heal) and the interests of Big Pharma, one of the biggest lobbies in DC whose interests are for patients to purchase, to become dependant, and to keep purchasing, their products. For-profit health care creates a distortion of our values and views that must always be factored into our ethical considerations.
That is just one problem. Then there is the matter of social control via medication, and if Big Pharma profits from keeping the population doped and influences policy, does this not create a (pardon the pun) lethal cocktail of serious moral problems? Some ethical questions we may ask are: who is really pulling the strings when people are doped? Who decides a diagnosis? And to what extent is a person with a certain psychiatric condition (say, schizophrenia) still responsible for his actions?
In my book, I discuss hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill, which explains how people who suffer great losses or good fortune (even if they’ve won the lottery or lost limbs), always return to a normal, natural, stable level of happiness and how certain pleasures decrease once we get used to them. Therefore, the science of happiness teaches us that we must always have a long-term perspective and while (to cite my own words) my general view is that science should serve to maximize everyone’s pleasure/comfort and minimize everyone’s pain/discomfort, and while I think Epicureanism is about control of our experience, this should not be translated as meaning that addiction-creating drugs should always be favored. Long-term health, ataraxia and stability should be favored, and it is always with this perspective in mind that we should conduct hedonic calculus and make ethical choices.
This is likely to inspire more blogs and discussions among Epicureans in the future. In the meantime, please enjoy and share the review by Michael Fontaine of Tending the Epicurean Garden.
The reviewer had previously written works comparing Epicureanism (favorably) with the work of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. This influenced his response to my book.
The review represents the ideas expressed in my book fairly and sets accurate expectations for readers, and then it closes with a Szasz-inspired challenge to contemporary Epicurean thinkers:
In candidly pinpointing self-control as a means of achieving happiness, Crespo puts himself squarely at odds with the dominant ethos of the medicalized society in which we now live.
This raises many complex ethical questions, for which we should expect no easy answers. For-profit health care does create a clash between the interests of patients (who want to heal) and the interests of Big Pharma, one of the biggest lobbies in DC whose interests are for patients to purchase, to become dependant, and to keep purchasing, their products. For-profit health care creates a distortion of our values and views that must always be factored into our ethical considerations.
That is just one problem. Then there is the matter of social control via medication, and if Big Pharma profits from keeping the population doped and influences policy, does this not create a (pardon the pun) lethal cocktail of serious moral problems? Some ethical questions we may ask are: who is really pulling the strings when people are doped? Who decides a diagnosis? And to what extent is a person with a certain psychiatric condition (say, schizophrenia) still responsible for his actions?
In my book, I discuss hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill, which explains how people who suffer great losses or good fortune (even if they’ve won the lottery or lost limbs), always return to a normal, natural, stable level of happiness and how certain pleasures decrease once we get used to them. Therefore, the science of happiness teaches us that we must always have a long-term perspective and while (to cite my own words) my general view is that science should serve to maximize everyone’s pleasure/comfort and minimize everyone’s pain/discomfort, and while I think Epicureanism is about control of our experience, this should not be translated as meaning that addiction-creating drugs should always be favored. Long-term health, ataraxia and stability should be favored, and it is always with this perspective in mind that we should conduct hedonic calculus and make ethical choices.
This is likely to inspire more blogs and discussions among Epicureans in the future. In the meantime, please enjoy and share the review by Michael Fontaine of Tending the Epicurean Garden.
December 8, 2014
E-book sale at Humanist Press
My e-book, Tending the Epicurean Garden, is part of the Humanist Press holiday sale. It can be purchased as an e-book through the holidays for $ 4.99.
Once a reader gets the e-book directly from HP, s/he is able to leave comments on its chapters which, once approved, become forever part of the work. Please share the gift of wisdom and share your love of philosophy with your friends!
Once a reader gets the e-book directly from HP, s/he is able to leave comments on its chapters which, once approved, become forever part of the work. Please share the gift of wisdom and share your love of philosophy with your friends!
