Surely a great loss to the world.
>>24833919Over 90% of Hellenic literature was lost.There's nothing we can do about itOTOH, there's still so much of Ancient Greek text that one can't read them all, even if they are just classics.
>>24833960>there's still so much of Ancient Greek text that one can't read them all, even if they are just classics.2 to 3 years of reading
>>24833919>>24833960There still might be something among the Herculaneum scrolls. The majority of them haven't even been touched yet, could be some really great discoveries.
>>24833967Can you imagine what’s in the scrolls?
>>24834121The Elder Scrolls?
>>24834121The few scrolls that have been investigated have been interesting: several works by the Epicurean Philodemus, including his draft for a history of the Platonic Academy. There could well be writings of Epicurus or Chrysippus or some of the histories that Philodemus was copying out from.
>>24833967>>24834121Aren't they like fucking carbonized? Even if they can recover anything it'll be incomplete, barely legible fragments.
>>24834134Sure, and scholars have been working with tech to scan them and pick up traces of ink. Philodemus' history of the Academy was opened in the 1700s, and in just the last few years, a great deal of what wasn't readable has been made legible.
>>24833919The writings of Chrysippus were a greater loss desu. He developed a propositional logic system that not only rivaled, but exceeded Aristotelian logic and was arguably a greater achievement that was neglected by classical and medieval philosophers. We really didn't realize how right he was until Calculus was discovered.
>>24833919I wouldn't say so
I like how Epicurus defends morality from a hedonistic perspective. It's all very neat and makes no appeal to abstractions.
I'd rather focus on preserving the works of our civilization rather than recovering those of a hedonist from 2000 years ago.
>>24834180The last century of philosophy has underlined what a joke it was to yoke philosophy to propositional logic, Stephan.
>>24833919
>>24834197He has surprising relevancy for the modern world because the perspective from which his philosophy sets off from is very similar to that of current materialist atheists. It was a very fringe view during his time but now it's commonplace.
>>24834214>It was a very fringe view during his time but now it's commonplace.wasn't his philosophy the dominant one besides stoicism in Augustan Rome?
>>24833919Assholes kept the Plato etc., but trashed the Epicurus and Sappho. And we're supposed to lick their asses with thanks for preserving what they did.Hell, we only have Aristotle because of the Muslims
>>24833919Good riddance. The lost text of Heraclitus on the other hand...
>>24834216It achieved some level of prominence during the 1st century BC, then decayed in the imperial period, but how much the people actually engaged with the underlying ideas vs just going "woah cool Greek guy maxims" is up to debate, especially taking into consideration its whole deceptive language around the gods and different levels of complexity it was presented with. I don't think every single Roman that etched an Epicurean saying into his gravestone was as much of an "atheist" as Epicurus or his philosopher buddies were.
>>24834236>Hell, we only have Aristotle because of the MuslimsWe have Aristotle because of the Byzantines.
>>24834236people always bring up Sappho even though she's much better preserved than many other poets
>>24834292Aren't there only two mostly complete poems and then a bunch of stray lines and fragments?
>>24834236Could be even worse. The Catholic Church was trying to get De Rerum Natura destroyed during the late 1500s/early 1600s but it had already spread too widely by that point. Giordano Bruno was executed during this time for trying to revive Epicureanism.
>>24834134There are sophisticated new methods using CT scans and machine learning to recover the text. Really amazing stuffhttps://scrollprize.org/
>>24834294While most of it is somewhat incomplete there's much more than that along with all those fragments of one or two lines preserved in quotations. But compare that to Terpander, Corinna, Myrtis, Praxilla or Cinesias whose remaining corpus is smaller combined than Sappho's. Not to mention all the other tragedians or the poets of the epic cycle. Aside from Pindar most of the famous lyric poets have just as few poems remaining as her.
>>24834313>Elon Musk donated 2 million dollars to these guys
>>24833919>>24833960Blame the Christfags. The biggest disaster ever to befall western civilisation.
>>24834197>hedonistCongratulations on the most elementary misreading of Epicureanism, dumbass.
>>24834327>Lee donated 2 million CAD (approximately 2 USD) to that poster
>>24834371To some extent, sure, but we have even Lucretius because of a Christian scriptorium. A great deal of what gets lost is by circumstance (wars where conquerors might not give a shit if a library burns in a siege) and because of how fragile papyri scrolls were (so a lot of 8th and 9th century Greek and Roman works survive because the codices were using parchment or vellum, which held up better). That, and sometimes the ancients and medievals took for granted what was available and didn't imagine it would disappear, like Aristotle's dialogues, which were still available in late antiquity, but which were likely not copied out and more widely published because his treatises were considered more important.
>>24834375It is hedonism. It's just one with a peculiar calculus of pain vs pleasure.
>>24834399The early Christians took great delight in smashing pagan temples and destroying the works of pagans. Not just their literature, but artifacts and architecture. 90% of the pagan temples of Europe and near Asia were destroyed at their hands.
>>24834706so true, that's why nobody's ever read pagan literature like Homer or Virgil, or pagan philosophy like Plato or Aristotle, and nobody knows what happened to the Parthenon or the Pantheon.
>>24834706>90% of the pagan temples of Europe and near Asia were destroyed at their hands.made the fuck up award
>>24834706It would be wrong to deny that that never happened, true, but I'm not as sure as you that it was as widespread as you make it out to be. The most notable exception is Alexandria, but Alexandria was violent and the Pagans were in on that too, with the Christians and Pagans having a constant Hatfield-McCoy bloodfeud. But otherwise, temples tended to be reappropriated for Christian use, and Christians were far from responsible for the destruction of 90% of them. Like, you know there were constant rebellions and wars and sieges that took down temples among other buildings, right? Plato's original Academy was destroyed by the Roman general Sulla, and the sacred trees of the site were chopped down to be used as siege engines for taking Athens. And for every Tertullian who rejected Pagan learning, there was a Basil or Augustine or Boethius who thought Greek and Roman literature could be useful and edifying, and it's absolutely the case that the bulk of the writings that survive antiquity were preserved and passed down by Christians. Practically all of our Greek manuscripts came to us via the Byzantines.
>>24834239>Such a fate would have to be malicious indeed to deprive us of Heraclitus, of the wonderful poetry of Empedocles, and of the writings of Democritus, thought by the ancients to be Plato's equal and, so far as ingenuity is concerned, his superior, slipping us instead the Stoics, the Epicureans, and Cicero.
>>24834706I think the Christian emperors should have gone as far as Muhammad and destroyed all the works of the Greek philosophers, creating a new wholly Christian imperiumI normally hate to even say this but those writings have only seemed to hurt people
>>24833919I can never understand this fascination/despair/hope over lost works of philosophy.These aren’t religious texts; the words themselves don’t mean anything.After thousands of years, these authors would be over the moon that the spirits of their ideas still exist.But they’d surely cringe in disappointment at anyone still trying to scrape together the vestiges of their writings.Epicurus would want us to just write our own version of what he was getting at—a version better equipped for our here and now—instead of wait for a miracle out of his incompatible past.I subscribe to the autur theory, but the point of philosophy is not to read a philosopher as if they were a fiction writer (and definitely not as some holy prophet!), but to take lifestyle cues from their general school of thought.This obsession over “What was, and could have been…”—is it fetishization of the past? Or impotence of the present?
>>24835090>Epicurus would want us to just write our own version of what he was getting at—a version better equipped for our here and now—instead of wait for a miracle out of his incompatible past.>This obsession over “What was, and could have been…”—is it fetishization of the past? Or impotence of the present?Nice emdashes chatgpt
>>24835116>Nice emdashes chatgptNo, I am a human being who knows how to type em-dashes—unbelievable, I know!For proof of my fallibility—even after spening HALF AN HOUR writing out my post—simply notice how I messed up with>Epicurus would want us to just write…instead of waitwhen I should have gone for>Epicurus would just want us to write…not to wait
>>24834180>He developed a propositional logic system that not only rivaled, but exceeded Aristotelian logic Interesting! Elaborate and share your sources, please.
>>24834371Seething tranny.
>>24833919>Epicurus wrote over 300 treatises, none of which surviveAnd very little of value was lost. Even the best of ancient philosophy is complete slop, and only really useful for historical reasons.
Epicurus sure loved his treaties.
>>24833919Epicurus. The original cope and seethe poster.
