Month: April 2015
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Fill Life To The Rim – With Pleasure
Here is an illustration of Lucretius’ vessel analogy in Book 6 that may hit home with my American friends of a certain age. With Pleasure, why be ascetic and settle...
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Slashing Another Stoic Chain – Courtesy of a Norse God
This is something that has been staring me in the face without my seeing it – if it had been a snake it would have bitten me. Probably everyone else...
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Which Is Happier?
Hiram Crespo recently published a very good article in Humanist Magazine entitled “Whose Pleasure? Whose Pain? Applying the Hedonic Calculus to Public Policy.” This is a topic that is going...
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The “Four Days Of Virtue And Painlessness” Challenge
Here is a hypothetical that may help with thinking about the role of “virtue” and “painlessness” in Epicurean philosophy. The assumptions of this hypothetical are very simple and designed to...
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Peace and Safety For Your Twentieth of April – Conventional Pleasure vs. the “Zero State”
Peace and Safety to the Epicureans of today, no matter where you might be! On this twentieth of April I’d like to offer more thoughts on the issue of whether...
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The Major Importance of “Confident Expectation”
In reading through Plutarch’s attack on Colotes and his Epicurean views (“That It Is Not Possible To Live Pleasurably According To The Doctrines of Epicurus“), I was struck with the...
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A Brief Good Word About the Platonists – At the Expense of the Stoics
I like to admit mistakes and correct them as soon as possible, and tonight I found an article that causes me to think that my opinion of Stoicism has been...
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Lucretius’ Hymn To Venus and The Defense of Pleasure
When I first started reading Lucretius as an introduction to Epicurus, I was consumed with the religious issues, and I found it very difficult to understand how Lucretius could begin...