Book 2
8
The unfairness of Plutarch's criticism of Epicurus' knowledge of the syllogism.
8
PLUTARCH, in the second book of his essay On Homer, vii, p. 100, Bern. asserts that Epicurus made use of an incomplete, perverted and faulty syllogism, and he quotes Epicurus' own words: Sent. II, p. 71, Ussing. Death is nothing to us, for what is dissolved is without perception, and what is without perception is nothing to us. Now Epicurus, says Plutarch, "omitted what he ought to have stated as his major premise, that death is a dissolution of body and soul, and then, to prove something else, he goes on to use the very premise that he had omitted, as if it had been stated and conceded. But this syllogism," says Plutarch, cannot advance, unless that premise be first presented.
