Prolepsis y justicia en el epicureísmo
The influential 19th century philosophical historiography did not recognize in Epicureanism a political philosophy worthy of study. Based on an analysis of the Principal Doctrines and texts of Hermarchus, Polystratus and Lucretius, this paper aims to show that Epicureans developed a relevant political theory that connected two traditions: the Ionian naturalism and the Socratic reformulation of philosophy as the only true politics. In the establishment of justice through covenants and its continuity in the language through the prolepsis of what is just, they saw a finding that offered man the required security to satisfy his necessary natural desires and his survival.
The Justice of the Epicurean Wise Man
In this essay I discuss an important but neglected controversy in which the Stoics sought to discredit Epicurus' teaching on justice by showing that the Epicurean wise man, if immune from detection or punishment, will commit injustice whenever he may profit from it. Under the influence of this criticism, tradition has developed a view of Epicurus' position that makes it so weak and vulnerable that it is difficult to see how Epicureans could have defended it over the course of several centuries. There is decisive evidence, however, that Epicurus' critics seriously misrepresented his position, and that the tradition influenced by their polemic stands in need of fundamental revision.1 My purpose here is to prove that the Epicurean wise man will not commit injustice, secretly or openly, because it is in his self–interest to be just; to reconstruct Epicurus' arguments for this teaching; to show how he defends his position against natural right theorists; and to clarify the larger issues at stake in his controversy with the Stoics. I begin by sketching the Stoic criticisms and the Epicurean response (section I).
On the ontology of particle mass and energy in special relativity
Einstein claimed that the fundamental dynamical insight of special relativity was the equivalence of mass and energy. I disagree. Not only are mass and energy not equivalent (whatever exactly that means) but talk of such equivalence obscures the real dynamical insight of special relativity, which concerns the nature of 4-forces and interactions more generally. In this paper I present and defend a new ontology of special relativistic particle dynamics that makes this insight perspicuous and I explain how alleged cases of mass–energy conversion can be accommodated within that ontology.