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As has often been noted, Epicurus and his followers were indebted to an
ancient tradition of empiricism in epistemology. Thus there are many
points of contact between Epicureanism and the position defended by
the self-styled Empiricists (large E as opposed to small e empiricists), a
medical school which arose near Epicurus' lifetime but whose views are
based on ideas that were already familiar to Plato and Aristotle. Both
schools assign a place of fundamental importance in their accounts of
knowledge to the observation of relations of sequence and conjunction
among events, and later Epicureans used some of the same empirical
terminology as the Empiricists. Most notably, the Epicureans used the
term, 'epilogismos', which was used by some Empiricists for the form of
reasoning about matters falling under experience that they accept,
though with differences that it has proved very hard to pin down.
Yet in certain crucial respects, Epicurean epistemology is about as far
removed from empiricism as it is possible to be. Medical Empiricism
defined itself in opposition to rationalism. 'Rationalism' was in fact the
Empiricists' polemical term for a mass of disparate views whose adherents were united only by the conviction that mere experience was
insufficient to give rise to a body of knowledge that deserved to be called
an art, whether in medicine or any other sphere. Its leading characteristic,
according to the Empiricists, was a claimed ability to go beyond experience and grasp nonevident entities and processes by means of a special
faculty of reason. These are sometimes described as matters seen or
discerned by reason ( ). The atoms about whose behavior
the Epicureans had so much to say were a paradigm of this kind of entity.
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Experience as a Source 91
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92 James Allen
II
Experience as a Source 93
Ill
94 James Allen
attested or not contested by the evident. The opinion that that is Plato
over there, for instance, awaits attestation. It can legitimately be accepted
as true if, upon closer inspection, it is attested or rejected as false if, under
the same conditions, it is not attested. An opinion about nonevident
matters is contested when it has an observable consequence that observation shows tobe false; not contested when its observable consequences
are not shown to be false by observation. Why the mere absence of
contestation should confirm the truth of an opinion about the nonevident is a notorious puzzle to which we shall turn in a moment; the use
of contestation to eliminate false opinions, on the other hand, seems not
to present a problem. Thus the false opinion that there is no void, which
is the contradictory of the true Epicurean doctrine, is contested by the
evident fact that there is motion, as there would not be if there were no
void for bodies to move into or so the Epicureans maintained (Ep Hdt
40; Lucretius I 334).
But suppose we connect contestation and non-attestation in the way
that seems most obvious. Then a false opinion about nonevident matters
will be contested when one of its observable consequences is not attested
(in the appropriate conditions). Sometimes, when the observable consequence of the thesis to be contested is a universal negative, e.g., that there
is no motion, this can be achieved by the attestation of a single counterinstance, assuming that we grant the unobjectionable principle that if P
is attested then not-P is not attested. One observed episode of motion
will banish the denial of void and vindicate its contradictory.
Matters are not always so simple, however. Consider, for example,
the Epicurean argument for the principle that nothing comes to be from
nothing. If it did, then anything could come to be anywhere at any time
without the proper seeds, which is contested because not attested by
observation (Ep Hdt 38; Lucretius 1159 ff.). Or the argument that atoms
cannot be of any size because, if they were, there would have to be visible
atomic bodies, which is likewise not attested (Ep Hdt 55-6; Lucretius II
496-9).3 Yet as we have seen, attestation and non-attestation appear to
establish only contingent matters of fact or empirical truths. A classical
3 To be sure, he adds other reasons, e.g., that it is not possible to conceive how an
atom could become visible. This may refer to his theory of vision, according to which
vision is caused by the flow of invisible atomic films from the object being seen to
the eyes. The problem would then be how an atom of this size could interact with
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the organs of visual perception.
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Experience as a Source 95
empiricist, a Humean descendent of his, or indeed anyone who subscribes to the framework described above, will patiently explain that the
fact that episodes of random spontaneous generation or absolutely
unbreakable objects have not been attested in our experience, and that
recorded history contains no traces of them, does not by itself entitle us
to conclude that one has not been overlooked or will not occur or be
found in ten seconds, or ten years or ten million years. According to this
familiar way of looking at things, no amount of observation or experience by itself can rule it out as a possibility.
It appears that something more is required to establish opinions of the
kind that are candidates for contestation and non-contestation. We must
somehow be able to tell that what is implied by the false opinion to be
contested, e.g., the manifest episodes of random spontaneous generation
that are implied by the opinion that creation ex nihilo is possible or the
visible atoms that are implied by the opinion that atoms can be of any
size, are not the sort or type or kind of thing that can happen or exist. But
attestation and non-attestation through or by means of the evident do
not seem to be equal to this task.
The same result appears to follow if we approach matters from a
different angle. The principal candidates for contestation, which can be
rejected as false if contested and accepted as true if not contested, are
theories, for example, the theories about meteorological matters that are
discussed in the Letter to Pythocles (Ep Pyth). And the main source of these
is analogy with the phenomena with us ( ') or, as translators often
put it, 'in our experience' (Ep Hdt 80). Inevitably it often happens that
more than one theory about the nonevident causation of a natural
phenomenon suggested by analogy remains uncontested (cf. Lucretius
VI 703 ff.). Yet it appears that the status of such a theory is not like that
of an opinion about an evident matter awaiting attestation by remaining
epistemically possible, i.e., possible for all we know or can say, as long
as it is not falsified by observation. Rather, Epicurus seems to have
regarded all the theories compatible with the phenomena as objectively
possible. Indeed, he seems to have held that they are true in the sense of
being realized either at some time in our world or in some other world
in the infinite universe (Lucretius V 526-33).
Now suppose that one could somehow be on the moon in the way
imagined by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics and see which accounts
of eclipses or waxing and waning do not obtain there (I 31, 87b39; II
90a26). Apparently, on the Epicurean view, the fact that these theories
are not directly attested in these conditions would
not show
they
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are false as claims about what might be or what is true in some world.
96 James Allen
Yet this is not how Epicurus treated our failures to observe episodes of
random spontaneous generation or to find atoms of observable size.
These revealed that certain phenomena or objects or events that would
have to be phenomena if they were capable of existingare not the kind
of things that can exist at all, and thereby refute certain theories once and
for all.4 Trips to the moon or efforts to determine whether that is, say,
Plato over there, by establishing contingent matters of fact, serve only to
show that an opinion is false here or a theory does not apply in this
cosmos.
The way in which the two pairs attestation and non-attestation, on
the one hand, and contestation and non-contestation, on the other are
both said to take place 'through the evident' appears to conceal a gap
between two quite different ways of grasping the evident and to leave
the relation between them in the dark (Sextus Empiricus M VII 216). At
any rate, this is how someone in sympathy with the framework that I
outlined above is likely to feel.
IV
4 The discussion of the shapes of the cosmoi in the Letter to Pythocles 88 might seem to
count against this. There it is said that many shapes are possible because this is
contested by none of the phenomena in this cosmos, whose boundary it is not
possible to grasp. This could be taken to mean that the many possible cosmic shapes
are not contested since we cannot grasp the shape of our own cosmos, with the
implication that, if we could, all of the shapes apart from the one that belongs to our
cosmos would be contested. In this case, their non-attestation here would contest
the possibility of their obtaining anywhere at all. I take the point rather to be that
the many possible shapes are not contested by phenomena within this cosmos,
whose own boundary, like the way in which eclipses and many other phenomena
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come about in it, are, as it happens, unknown.
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Experience as a Source 97
98 James Allen
For our present purpose, what matters most is that Epicurus was able to
assign such an important part to analogy because he did not share the
assumptions about what can and cannot fall under a grasp of the evident
that are incorporated in the framework set out above. According to these
assumptions, on the basis of such a grasp we know only that things have
behaved as we have observed they did. This knowledge will make an
empiricist, who relies only on experience, expect that events will coincide, follow and precede one another as they have been observed to,
without in any way justifying his expectation. But Epicurus seems to
suppose that, in grasping the phenomena, we grasp how things can and
must be. I am tempted to go further and say that, according to Epicurus
to grasp the phenomena is, within limits and in part,
to understand
the
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causes at work by grasping the natures in virtue of Authenticated
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Experience as a Source 99
medium sized objects act and behave as they do. Understanding how
and why they behave as they do, we thereby see how bigger objects
further away that are relevantly like them by sharing the nature responsible for their behavior must behave. The same holds mutatis mutandis
for smaller objects whose distance from us may be negligible, but which
are too small for us to perceive.
Grasping true theories about the nonevident extends and deepens our
understanding of the causes which explain and necessitate the behavior
we are able to observe, but the sharp line which the framework takes to
separate knowledge of the phenomena from the grasp of truths about
what can and must be of the kind that figure in causal explanations
appears not to be a part of Epicureanism.5 For adherents of the framework, anything that smacks of knowledge of natures, the necessities they
impose and the possibilities they open up, is knowledge of the nonevident, to be had, if it can be had at all, by inference or by means of another
exercise of a special rational faculty distinct from experience. But as we
have seen, this is not so for Epicurus and the Epicureans: the grasp of the
evident, which precedes and secures all knowledge of the nonevident,
must itself already be a grasp, however partial, of how things can and
must be.
Should we then say that the Epicureans were committed to a conception of experience still more generous and richer than the one enshrined
in the framework the suggestion that I put forward for consideration
above?6 Perhaps, but there are reasons to hesitate, most notably the fact
that this is not something any Epicurean ever says or, I suspect, ever
would say. The framework takes experience to be coordinate with
evident matters or phenomena. They are accessible to experience, and
the knowledge one has of them is experience. A better way of describing
the distinctive character of the Epicurean position, I shall suggest, would
be to say that this coordination does not obtain in Epicureanism.
5 Perhaps this is what Epicurus is saying in a passage of the Letter to Pythocles, where
he notes that 'signs about celestial matters are furnished by certain phenomena m
our experience concerning which it is seen how they are' unlike celestial phenomena themselves (87; cf. Ep Hdl 80). N.B., however, that this reading is based on an
emendation.
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6 This is something I have said elsewhere. See Allen, 2001,196,236-9.
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This becomes clear when we try to see what Epicurus and his followers thought about ancient forms of empiricism. To judge by the available
evidence, it is not a subject that Epicurus himself took much of an interest
in.7 Philodemus is a different matter, however. On Signs and Sign-inferences (henceforward On Signs) defends the so called method of similarity,
which would allow us to infer, e.g., that all human beings everywhere
are mortal from the fact that those among us are or that atoms behave
mutatis mutandis in the way visible bodies do from the fact that visible
bodies behave in that way. The work is full of terms and notions from
empiricism, which retain the meanings they have in it, e.g., peira and
historia. And Philodemus directly confronts the problem that arises
already in Epicurus, namely how observation of a finite sample, however
large, of, say, human beings, can entitle us to conclude that all human
beings everywhere are mortal. The occasion for the work is the challenge
presented by unnamed opponents who raise precisely this problem. Yet
Philodemus does not credit peira, the activity, with any more powers, or
take the knowledge we have as a result of it to extend any further or
penetrate any more deeply than empiricism does.8
Consider, however, Letter to Herodotus, 79, where Epicurus remarks that what comes
under history () about the risings, settings, eclipses and like matters does not
contribute to blessedness because it leaves untouched fears that can block the way
to happiness. His point is that it is possible to have a great deal of astronomical
knowledge of this kind while remaining vulnerable to superstition, which can be
banished only by a grasp of the natures () and principal causes (
) underlying the phenomena. , though not the exclusive property of
Empiricists, was a key term of theirs, and this passage reads very much like a
rejection of merely empirical astronomy in favor of a version that satisfies the
rationalists' demand for explanation by way of natures and causes, albeit for reasons
peculiar to Epicureanism.
And in his work On rhetoric, using language that would not have been out of place
in a Platonist inspired by the Gorgias, he maintains that practices grounded in
observation and history, and , which he calls , are not arts
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properly speaking (Rhet IIXXX 19 f f ; but cf. XXXVIII2 Brought
ff).
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VI
How, then, are we able to infer conclusions about the nonevident from
the phenomena? A crucial part in the Epicurean account appears to be
played by epilogismos, which, or at least the term for which, was, as we
noted, also used by the medical Empiricists. They stressed two features:
that epilogismos is concerned exclusively with evident matters, unlike
analogismos, the form of reasoning that is employed by the Rationalists
and which allows them to deduce nonevident conclusions; and that it is
the kind of reasoning employed by ordinary human beings in everyday
life. They use it, for instance, of inferring one evident matter, which is
temporarily nonevident, from another, which they call commemorative
signification elsewhere, e.g., 'since there is smoke, there is fire' (Sect
ingred 10,23-4; 11, 9-10).
As I noted above, however, this is not how the Epicureans used the
term. An earlier tendency to render it as 'empirical inference' has been
much criticized. Though Philodemus speaks frequently of the epilogismos
of the phenomena, and even, in one especially badly preserved passage,
of the application of epilogismos to what has been grasped by experience
(peira) (fr. 4), a survey of Epicurean usage shows that it is often applied
to items that are not obviously empirical. Epicurus himself speaks of the
epilogismos of the end or telos, and one of Philodemus' authorities,
Demetrius of Laconia, speaks intriguingly of his opponents' failure to
apply epilogismos to their own method of inference (XXVIII13 ff.). What
is more, it is not obvious that the rational activity designated by 'epilogismos' is a matter of inference. Viewed in isolation, a few passages seem
to suggest that epilogismos is the inference of the nonevident conclusion
from evident signs (XXII37 ff.), but it is plain from a fuller survey of the
evidence that epilogismos belongs to a preliminary phase prior to the
inference of a nonevident conclusion, for which the terms 'sign-inference' () or 'reasoning' () are reserved.9 Philodemus speaks of advancing or making a transition to a nonevident
conclusion through or by means of epilogismos because epilogismos is an
indispensable precondition for the inference, not the inference proper.
The noun and the verb occur in several
different constructions. We find the verb used with a direct object and
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9 Cf. Barnes, 1988,130-1, Sedley, 1978, 27-34, and especially
Schofield,
1996.
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the noun taking an objective genitive, e.g., the epilogismos of the end or
of the phenomena which have already been mentioned.10 The verb can
be used to introduce a subordinate clause that, with which we seem to
come closest to reasoning as inference or deduction.11 And there are
constructions in which the verb takes a direct object and introduces a
subordinate clause the 'consider the lilies, how they grow' construction especially familiar in Greek verbs 'to know', where the subordinate
clause unpacks in propositional form what it is one knows o/an item in
knowing it (Philodemus, On Signs XXVIII15-25; cf. Epicurus, Men 133,
where the construction is implicit).
Though the last construction is rare, the fact that it is possible may
help us. Suppose we distinguish between the materials to which reasoning is applied and its upshot or result. I hesitate to say 'conclusion'
because I do not want to prejudge the question of whether the reasoning
at issue is a form of deduction or inference, though the premises of an
inference may perhaps be viewed as one kind of material and its conclusion as one kind of upshot or result. The distinguishing feature of
epilogistic reasoning, signaled by the prefix epi-, would then be that the
materials to which one applies it and that about which one knows, or
knows better, as a result are the same.12 Passages in which epilogismos/epilogizesthai takes a direct object or objective genitive, signifying the material to which epilogistic reasoning is applied, and passages in which
epilogismos/epilogizesthai introduces a subordinate clause, signifying the
upshot or conclusion of the reasoning, would then be incomplete specifications of part of a whole instance of epilogistic reasoning.
Whether every use of 'epilogismos' can be made to fit this pattern, I
do not know. But if this is the basic idea, it might explain some things
about both the Epicurean and Empiricist uses of the term. For instance,
though it is far from clear that this distinction is marked in Epicureanism,
according to the Empiricists, what distinguishes epilogismos from the
analogismos of the rationalists is that it never departs from the phenom-
10 With a direct object Epicurus, Ep Hdt 72, Letter to Menoeceus 133, Principal Doctrines
XXII, Philodemus, On Signs XIII 32. With an objective genitive- Epicurus, Principle
Doctrines XX; Philodemus, On Signs XXII37, XXVII 23.
11 Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 35, Ep Hdt 73; Philodemus, On Signs XXVIII16
12 For these ideas about epilogismos and analogismos see Schofield, 1996, nn. 8 (which
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contains suggestions of David Sedley) and 12
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ena, while analogismos, though it sets out from the phenomena, proceeds
to the utterly different, namely the completely nonevident (Sect ingred
106, 4-7).13 Strictly speaking, the Empiricists maintain, nothing can be
known on the basis of something else, but everything has need of
knowledge from itself (105, 27).
To be sure, if sign-inferences of the kind exemplified by the inference
from smoke to fire are instances of epilogismos, it must in some way
permit us to know one thing from another. Indeed in the part of his
account of Empiricism from which these citations come, Galen tells us
that the Empiricists say that epilogismos is useful for the discovery
() of what they call temporarily nonevident matters (107, 34 ff.).
But there is much talk of epilogismos as the logos of the phenomena (Subfig
emp 62, 23-7; Sect ingred 11, 8; On Medical Experience, 133-5 Walzer), and
one admittedly rather obscure passage describes it as the rational consideration of what follows on each thing ([Soranus], Medical Questions 50
= fr. 12 Deichgr ber). Perhaps the gap can be closed to some extent by
supposing that, in its primary sense, the Empiricists' epilogismos is the
application of reason to the phenomena, and that sign-inference from
one phenomenon to another, temporarily nonevident phenomenon conjoined with it in past experience can also be called 'epilogismos' because
it is an application of epilogismos in this sense.
Malcolm Schofield has proposed 'assessment' or 'comparative assessment' as a translation of 'epilogismos' as it is used by the Epicureans.
But perhaps 'assessment' or 'rational assessment' would also cover
Empirical epilogismos conceived in this way as well. The differences that
remain between the two schools include the already noted fact that
epilogismos is confined to the phenomena by the Empiricists, who seem
to treat this as part of its meaning, but not by the Epicureans. But even
so, both schools would agree that epilogismos, when of the phenomena,
cannot by itself yield conclusions about matters other than phenomena.
Something further is required to infer nonevident conclusions. The
Epicureans are confident that we can make such inferences; the Empiricists are not. The critical difference between them concerns the knowledge that Epicurean epilogismos of the phenomena yields. The
Empiricist knows that certain phenomena coincide, precede or follow
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VII
Bibliography
Allen, James. 2001. Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Annas, J. and Grimm, R.H., eds. 1988. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barnes, Jonathan. 1988. 'Epicurean Signs', in Annas and Grimm, eds. 91-134
De Lacy, P.H. and H.A., eds. 2nd edn. 1978. Philodemus: On Methods of Inference Naples:
Bibliopolis.
14 I am grateful for comments and criticism to the participants in the conference, to the
speakers and audience at Philosophy in Assos, July 2004, where I delivered a paper
related to this one, and to the participants in the Pittsburgh/Athens Symposium,
October 2000, where I first presented some of these ideas as a commentator on
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Michael Frede's paper, 'Experience in the ancient "Empiricists"
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Deichgrber, Karl, ed 2nd edn 1965 Die griechische Empinkerschule Sammlung der Fragmente und Darstellung der Lehre Berlin Weidmann
Everson, S. ed. 1990. Companions to Ancient Thought I Epistenwlogy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Frede, M. 1990. 'An empiricist view of knowledge: memorism', in Everson, ed 225-50.
Frede, M. and Striker, G., eds. 1996. Rationality in Creek Thought. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Schofield, M. 1996. 'Epilogismos: An Appraisal', in Frede and Striker, eds 221-37.
Sedley, D. 1973. 'Epicurus on Nature Book XVIII'. Cronache ercolanesi 3: 5-83