Thursday, September 9, 2010

More on Epimenides

As Jonathan Livengood helpfully pointed out in a comment on my last post, Bayle links Epimenides to the semantic paradoxes in his Dictionary entry for Euclid (1740, although perhaps also in an earlier edition). A modern source cited by Bayle is Gassendi, and when you track down that reference you indeed find a link between Epimenides and the semantic paradoxes:




This comes from p. 40 of the first volume of the Opera Omnia from 1658, which has been scanned and posted online here. I don't know Latin, but the reference to this case as "celebre" suggests that Gassendi does not take himself to be making a new connection.

2 comments:

Jonathan Livengood said...

Wow! That's great! Where do we go from here?

Chris said...

Well, we might be reaching the limits of what online searching can reveal. It is clear that Cicero is the inspiration for Gassendi here, so we could look at Cicero and see how he sets up the issues. My colleague Mike Jacovides suggested that many, many people before Gassendi would have been familiar with this part of Cicero, so there should be others who make the link.