Experience as a Source and

Ground of Theory in Epicureanism

James Allen

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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The Epicureans also defended theories about the nonevident causes of

astronomical phenomena like eclipses and much else besides. And they
achieved these results, or claimed to achieve them, by rationalist means:
inference or demonstration from signs or evidence furnished by the
phenomena. By these measures, Epicureanism is a form of rationalism.
The aim of this paper is to compare Epicurean views about experience
to other views available in the Hellenistic period, including those of the
medical Empiricists. In this way I hope to throw light on the Epicureans'
distinctive attitude towards experience, an attitude whose affinities with
empiricism sets Epicureanism apart from more orthodox forms of rationalism but permits the Epicureans to base on experience theories that
orthodox empiricists would reject as unsupported by experience.

Talk of 'experience' involves a certain amount of unclarity. The word has

several senses, whose history would make an interesting study in its own
right. Present-day discussions of what is given in immediate experience,
where this means something like bare sensation prior to interpretation
or inference, or about the quality of conscious experience, use the term
in a way that would, I think, have been new to ancient Greek and Latin
speakers familiar with the words 'experientia' or empeiria.
Clues that will help us understand the ancient conception of experience are furnished by the medical Empiricists' reflections about their
terminology. Galen's Outline of Empiricism (Subfiguratio empirica; henceforward Subfig emp), which is meant to be a faithful presentation of the
Empiricists' own views, makes a point about one term in the Empiricist
vocabulary that is also true of others. Though the term autopsia, seeing
or observing for oneself, ought strictly to be applied to an activity, he
tells us, it was also used by the Empiricists for knowledge, namely the
knowledge one has as a result of observing for oneself (Subfig emp 47,
14-26). The Empiricists used two terms that are traditionally translated
as 'experience', peira and empeiria. The Outline of Empiricism defines them
not as activities, but as psychic states or forms of knowledge (notitia:
). Peira is 'autoptic knowledge', i.e., the knowledge one has as a
result of an episode of observation (44,6 ff.). Empeiria, on the other hand,
is knowledge or memory of what has been observed to happen many
times in the same way (Subfig emp 45,24; 50,23). The
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Experience as a Source 91

was a form of memory (Galen, On Therapeutic Method; henceforward

Meth med X 36, 3 K hn = fr. 46 Deichgr ber), but that is another story.1
According to these definitions, then, empeiria is a kind of knowledge
that arises on the basis of many episodes of observation, each of which
gives rise to an instance of peira. One has empeiria as opposed to peira
when one has observed something often enough for the knowledge that
one now has as a result to be expressed in a theorem (Subfig emp 45, 24
ff.). And this is the case when one is in a position to say, e.g., that the
administration of such and such a remedy in cases of such and such a
kind is followed by recovery always, for the most part, roughly half the
time or rarely. In this favored sense, empeiria applies to expert knowledge, many instances of which, when they form a cluster (),
make up a complete expertise or art (On Sects for Beginners; henceforward
Sect ingred SM , 13-16 Helmreich). And in what is perhaps the most
privileged sense of all, the term empeiria applies to the art as a whole
(Subfig emp 47, 26; 54, 10-13). This means that the contrast between
experience and reason is indirect. Experience as knowledge and the
activities that give rise to it are opposed to the activities of the faculty of
reason (or a special form of it) and the knowledge to which they give
rise, and reason as a faculty is opposed to the faculty or faculties which
are responsible for experience (cf. Subfig emp 86,23-87,12).
In Empiricist usage, however, the words for experience are not restricted to these meanings any more than autopsia is restricted to its
official meaning. Empeiria, in particular, is often used in place of peira,
and both are frequently used for the activities of perception and observation that give rise to peira and empeiria in the sense of knowledge, just
as activity words like 'autopsy' and Observation' () are sometimes used of the knowledge to which the activities give rise (Subfig emp
47,26-48,4; 48,11-21).2 Nevertheless, the distinctions that we have seen
are available make it easier to characterize ancient empiricism. Art or
expertise is experience (empeiria) and experience, both in the sense of
empeiria and that of peira, has its source in the activities of perception and
observation. This knowledge is confined to what can be perceived or
observed, items which are called phenomena, evident matters or perceptibles by the Empiricists. One can, however, supplement the experience

1 On this point see Frede, 1990.

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= fr. 51toDeichgr

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92 James Allen

one has as a result of one's own observation with history ()

what one learns by reading and evaluating the reports of other people,
which is ultimately based on their own observations (Subfig emp 47,
14-26).

II

It should be plain that a rather generous conception of experience, both

in the sense of the activities of perception and observation and in the
sense of the knowledge they yield, is presupposed. The phenomena or
evident matters that are perceived or observed are things like people,
animals, mountains or trees as well as certain states, qualities and
activities of theirs like being green or running or having a fever. Questions about how observation conceived in this way is ultimately based
on what modem philosophers call immediate experience or bare sensation receive little attention. Instead the focus is on how expert knowledge
complete and systematic enough to qualify as an art, e.g., of medicine,
can arise out of observation or experience of people, their activities,
habits, diets, environments, symptoms and the like. Nonetheless, generous as this conception of experience is, it restricts experience to knowledge that certain patterns of sequence and correlation among
phenomena obtain. The causes which would explain why the patterns
occur and recur as they do can be grasped, if at all, only by means of
faculties other than those responsible for experience.
The idea that it is only facts that which are accessible to experience is
behind a way in which we use the term 'empirical', e.g., when we speak
of an 'empirical question'. Our point when speaking in this way is less
that the question has been or is likely to be resolved by experience than
that, because the truth at issue is not determined by laws of nature or
laws of reason or relations of ideas or the like and therefore cannot be
known by grasping how it is determined in one of these privileged ways
it is a contingent matter of fact that can be known, if at all, by
experience. But it is important to note that it is possible to grasp facts,
which are not empirical questions in this sense, as empirical truths.
Something that we grasp as a fact that on the basis of experience may be
the necessary consequence of the inalterable nature of things; and someone in a position to grasp it as the necessary consequence of first
principles will grasp it as more than a fact that. Brought
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Experience as a Source 93

as a fact of experience and grasping that same truth as required and

explained by first principles.
The disagreement between rationalism and empiricism, as it is usually understood, presupposes a framework of common assumptions that
was widely if not universally shared. They emerge especially clearly, for
instance, in the account of the different epistemic conditions at the
beginning of Aristotle's Metaphysics (A l, 980a27 ff., 981a27 ff.).
(i) Experience grasps only facts that;
(ii) The causes that supply the reasons why these facts obtain, if they
can be known at all, are the object of a separate rational faculty;
(iii) Experience is prior to this rational faculty, whose insights, if and
when possible, are nonetheless somehow based on experience.
This framework was treated as uncontroversial by many philosophers and scientists in antiquity, especially in the Hellenistic period,
when just about everyone seems to have been committed to an epistemology that was broadly empiricist in the sense of taking all knowledge
to be based, ultimately and in the last analysis, on a grasp of the evident.
The Epicureans seem to have subscribed to an especially strong form of
this position. Pronouncements of theirs to the effect that all knowledge
either consists in or arises out of a grasp of the evident are not hard to
find (e.g., Letter to Herodotus, 38; Diogenes Laertius X, 32). Nonetheless I
mean to argue that the use Epicureanism made of the common empirical
tradition led them to take a position which the framework could not
accommodate or could accommodate only with very significant qualifications. One way of putting this though this too will require qualification is to say that the Epicureans were committed to a still more
generous conception of experience.

Ill

We can see this, among other places, in the apparently exhaustive

scheme for assessing opinions as true or false proposed by Epicurus (DL
X 34; Ep Hdt 51-2; Sextus Empiricus, M VII 211-16). Attestation and
non-attestation ( and ) apply to evident
matters; contestation and non-contestation ( and
) to nonevident matters. Falsity arises
when
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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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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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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

This suspicion is well founded, and it receives additional support from

the use Epicurus makes of analogies with the phenomena in establishing
theories about the nonevident. This use makes the most sense if it rests
on the assumption that a grasp of the evident puts us in possession of
truths not only, as we have seen, about what cannot be, but also about
what, in very robust sense, can be. Near the end of the Letter to Herodotus,
Epicurus says: 'seeing in how many ways the like comes to be with us
( '), one must theorize about the causes () of astro-

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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Experience as a Source 97

nomical phenomena () and everything nonevident' (80). And in

the Letter to Pythodes, he offers multiple explanations for a host of
meteorological phenomena based on analogies with the behavior of
medium sized physical objects that we can observe from close up.
If every possibility is realized somewhere or at some time in the
infinite universe, analogies suggested by observation of the phenomena
among us will suggest theories that stand a good chance of being true in
the sense that they are true of some episodes of the phenomenon to be
explained at some time or in some cosmos. But is being suggested by the
phenomena sufficient to show that a theory is genuinely possible, and
therefore true in this way? Perhaps, despite having a better chance of
being true on Epicurean assumptions than it would on other assumptions, a theory suggested by an analogy with the phenomena has, so far,
only been shown to be epistemically possible. It could still happen, for
all we know or can say, that it is not genuinely or objectively possible.
And if this is so, we shall be entitled to accept it as a genuine possibility
only after it has survived the test of contestation by the phenomena. If it
does not survive, then it only seemed to be genuinely possible.
Some of Epicurus' language suggests an interpretation along these
lines or is compatible with it (Ep Pyth 92, 93, 98-9). But there is also
evidence suggesting that likeness of the right kind to a phenomenal
analogue is sufficient to establish a theory about nonevident causation
as true. In parts of the Letter to Pythodes, where explanations based on
analogies with the phenomena in our experience are discussed, these
phenomena are four times said to bid or call for the analogous explanations (87, 94,100,113). This may be merely suggestive, but in the same
work, after remarking that the waxing and waning of the moon can come
about in all the ways in which we observe similar phenomena coming
about in our experience, and noting that the same is true of the way in
which the moon gets its light and presents a visage to us, Epicurus says
that someone who accepts one of the explanations and rejects the others
will be in conflict () with the evident (96). And, after reviewing the
explanations for the varying lengths of nights and days over the course
of the year that are suggested by analogous occurrences in our experience, Epicurus insists that it is necessary to speak of meteorological
matters in a manner that is consonant or in agreement () with
the phenomena, before going on to say that those who accept only one
explanation are, once again, in conflict with the phenomena (98).
It seems very much as if a theory's similarity to the phenomena is
sufficient to ensure that it is in agreement with them,
andto that
being
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98 James Allen

sense of being possible and true somewhere or at some time, for it is

implied that to reject one of the explanations based on analogy with a
phenomenon is to deny the reality of the phenomenon that it resembles.
Perhaps theories undergo a double test. When put forward as universal
explanations, holding of all times and places, they qualify as true if they
are merely not contested by the phenomena, but when reformulated as
claims about possibility, each has a contradictory, viz., the proposition
that it is not possible, which is in conflict with the phenomenon that it
resembles and which was the basis of the analogy that is its source. This
would mean that theories conceived as claims about objective possibility follow from the phenomena to which they are analogous. The
grounds that the phenomenon on which an analogous theory is based
furnish for accepting the theory would then complement the grounds
furnished by the fact that the theory is not contested by the phenomena
quite generally.
Epicurus' use of the vocabulary of signs and sign-inference of signs
that seem to signify how nonevident matters are by being similar to them
lends additional support to this suggestion (Ep Pyth 97; cf. 104). To reject
some possible explanations while giving arbitrary preference to one is,
he maintains, to be unable to grasp the phenomena as signs and to be
carried into inconceivability (97). My guess is that the inconceivability
that he means is that of denying that one instance of a type of behavior
is possible when other manifest instances of it show that behavior of that
type is possible.

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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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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Experience as a Source 101

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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102 James Allen

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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Experience as a Source 103

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

13 Cf , to refer one thing to another, or , to reduce one thing to

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104 James Allen

one another, in certain patterns and with certain relative frequencies. On

the basis of this knowledge, he can, in a manner of speaking, reason
about the phenomena and form reasonable expectations about unobserved observables or phenomena to be. As a result of his epilogismos, on
the other hand, the Epicurean has a grasp, however incomplete and
partial, of the natures and powers of the items he is studying. And on
this basis he is able to infer that unobserved and even unobservable items
must be the same or similar.

VII

If the Epicureans had, as I put it earlier, a still more generous conception

of experience than that admitted by the framework, then it is not one
they described in terms drawn from the standard empirical vocabulary.
The activities that went under the head of 'experience' remained capable
only of grasping facts that, devoid of necessity and explanatory power.
If you will, Epicurean epistemology depends on a more than empirical
grasp or comprehension of the phenomena or the evident. It is pretty
clear that epilogismos, to which Epicurus had already appealed, was
enlisted by Philodemus' Epicurean authorities to close a gap between
the deliverances of experience and the grasp of the phenomena that is
necessary if sign-inferences to the nonevident are to be possible. It is also
a fair guess that their opponents responded by taking epilogistic reasoning to be a matter of inference or deduction. Having elicited the admission that experience by itself tells us nothing about how things must be,
they could then proceed by demanding to know how an inference from
the data of experience can yield a grasp of the phenomena which is at
once the upshot or result of epilogismos and a sufficient basis for sign-inferences to the nonevident.
Thus, if the framework cannot accommodate Epicurean views, it is
not because the Epicureans explicitly disavow the assumptions that
compose it. Indeed such evidence as we have suggests they might have
been willing to endorse claims about the limits of experience strictly so
called. Yet the fact that they do not take experience to be coordinate with
the phenomena and, as I put it earlier, permit a more than empirical
grasp or comprehension of the phenomena, means that this tells us less
about Epicureanism than it otherwise might. This is not the comprehension of the phenomena that we have when we view them in the light of
first principles or as effects of their underlying causes
is an
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Experience as a Source 105

the framework, experience plays this part, whereas for Epicureans,

experience merely prepares the way for the more than empirical grasp
of the phenomena that in turn supports rational insights about nonevident matters. If 'experience' were simply the name for the grasp or
comprehension of the phenomena that precedes aetiology, then the
Epicureans would disavow the restrictions on empirical knowledge
imposed by the framework.
I suggest that we look at matters in this way. Sometimes, when
philosophers like Plato and Aristotle defended one position and opposed another, they were not taking a familiar position in a dispute that
was already being conducted along well defined lines so much as
creating a new way of understanding the issues. When the medical
Empiricists defend the claim that experience can by itself give rise to
artistic knowledge, it is an impoverished form of experience, experience
as conceived and marked off from reason by Plato and Aristotle. But it
is doubtful that earlier figures who made large claims for experience
drew the lines quite so sharply. Rather, from the point of view of Plato
and Aristotle, it was probably fairer to say that they failed to see that
knowledge of the kind which they assumed could be explained by
experience and perception alone actually requires a separate rational
faculty with distinctive powers of its own. In this respect, as in others,
Epicurus is something of a throwback.14

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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106 James Allen

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

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