Sunday, 05 July 2026

Major works meeting

• Continuing De Rerum Natura
• Starting Book V, Cosmos and Civilization
• Ending at line 420
• Next week we’ll finish Book V

Minor works meeting

• Continuing Sophist
• Starting from just after 221c
• Stopping at the beginning of 234d

Sophist reminder for next week:

We continue the discussion from where we left, namely that we have remainning to now define what a sophist is, after having successffuly agreed upon the name and definitino of what an angler is. This leads our argument to pursue the same line of inquiry but where it forked off ezrly in the ancestry tree from angler, namely that of hunters on land. We then continue to define hunting in increasingly divisive terms that lead us to a form of persuasian vs violence. So Sophists are within the persuasian ancestry, and from there we lay the foundation for deriving 5 or 6 other definitions, all equal, to sophist. More or less it amounts to persuaidng with knowledge for money to achieve a goal and people can hire them. The 6th (or maybe 5th) definitino was disputed, and this seemed important, because it had to do with cleansing, wihcih wass defined as separately the bad from the good, in terms of the soul. THeatetus and the vistor were not necessarily 100% in agreement on this definitino, and the metaphor of the wolf vs the dog came up. Where one sort of looks and acts like the other but is quite different.

This line of inuqiry then leads us to discuss whether something like a sophist, in other words someone who seems to know something about everything better than everyone else, is even categorically possible. It is not, then they begin to discuss whether someone can achieve the goal of seeming like they know more than experts on every subject, and it is.