SOURCE: Plutarch, "The Polemic of Plutarch," in The Epicurus Reader, translated and edited by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994, pp. 68-74.

In the following excerpt from Against Colotes, Plutarch seeks out logical contradictions and inconsistencies in Epicurean philosophy, focusing largely on ideas of sensation and sense perception.

(1109a) … Anyway, he [Colotes] who even held that nothing is any more like this than like that, is using Epicurus' doctrine that all presentations received through the senses are true. (1109b) For if when two people speak and one person says that the wine is dry and the other says that it is sweet, and neither is wrong about his sense-perception, how can the wine be dry rather than sweet? And again, you can see that some people treat a bath as though it were hot and that others treat the same bath as though it...