When will Epicurueanism make a comeback?
>compatible with modern science (atoms, nothing happens after you die)
>friendship is important
>frugality and independence
>distinction of necessary and unnecessary desire
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It's passé. Get over it.
It has too little to recommend itself for political life, so hard to make into a movement.
Isn't this how most people live anyway?
Came here to post this epicurean-nihilism is the default philosophy of a good chunk of people. It is in some ways the American culture default of people who just want to be left alone and enjoy consumer culture.
Nah it’s Stoicism, its been filtered through the collective consciousness of the world into some McMindfulness nonsense.
No. It's more akin to mindless epicureanism (epicurus but all pleasure good). You either do not know what stoicism is or you don't go outside.
>It is in some ways the American culture default of people who just want to be left alone and enjoy consumer culture.
The being left alone bit is Epicurean, the "enjoying consumer culture" bit not at all, but then everyone throughput history has made up shit about the nature of the kind of pleasures you're supposed to enjoy in Epicureanism.
No not really, if it was, they would spend less time working and spend less. Epicurus had a very simple diet and considered cheese to be a luxury.
If he were alive today, would he still consider cheese a luxury? What constitutes a luxury?
Do you feel smart asking dumb questions?
That anon actually asked an extremely relevant question and you are an idiot if you fail to see why it's important to answer that.
It's actually a dumb question and you're a dumb Black person
Yeah, he would. He had an ideal, for him, cheese was too luxurious.
>What constitutes a luxury?
Hmm, it's not relative, despite the fact that it's semantically shrunk and grown throughout all of these years, all this development. I suppose, anything that removes struggle, counterbalance, contrary to the basic, plebian variant. But I'm not certain, I'll think on this.
Epicureanism is very different from what most modern people follow.
Epicurus was a celibate man who lived a very ascetic and simple life.
>As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines: in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. the merit of his philosophy is in the beauties of his style. diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. his prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention.
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-15-02-0141-0001
>"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
-Thomas Jefferson (Letter - from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April 1823)
>"The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason."
-Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack)
>”This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it"
-John Adams (Letter - from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 19 April 1817)
Uhhhh……..bros….
Who cares
Freemasons, dummy.
>confederate cucks
Hamilton and Washington built this country
He was also an antinatalist, so hopefully never.
>compatible with modern science
>nothing happens after you die
Science can't say anything about what happens after you die. Science deals with the material world. It can't say if the spiritual exists or not.
Someone saying science disproves the spiritual is a charlatan.
It isn’t compatible with modern anything. Galen already refuted Epicurean science in his treatise On the Nature of Things in 200 AD.
“When the facts do not conform to Epicurus’ positions, Epicurus changes his position.” - paraphrase of Galen
I just found out that Galen was a Platonist.
Whenever I thought of Galen, I thought of "Marcus Aurelius' Epicurean doctor"
He wrote tons of philosophy including commentaries on dialogues including Timaeus but unfortunately they are all lost. His surviving medical works include brief glimpses of his philosophy though they are mostly concerned with science. On the Natural Faculties includes refutations of Anaxagoras, presocratics and Epicurus. It is mainly concerned with their science but he attempts to refute their materialist philosophy as well.
Galen refutes Epicurus on how magnets work by refuting Epicurus' atomic explanation, not really the same as refuting Epicurus in toto, nor refuting atomism in every case.
“Magnets work by mini corpuscles” is incompatible with modern science thoughbeit which was the point.
If that's the point, it's a nothingburger point, when atomism is deferred to everywhere else in modern science. There, there's your (You), gay.
But magnets don’t work by atoms and also atoms don’t prove materialism which was part of Galen’s point.
Modern science literally sides with Epicurus, "atom" for the Greeks just meant the smallest uncuttables (the literal meaning of "a-tomos") that make up matter, and modern scientists point to smaller and smaller phenomena (we call them "electrons", but for Epicurus, they'd be atoms) to explain electromagnetism.
Smaller and smaller indeed. But epicurus would not call them atoms because, guess what, we keep dividing them! And materialism is boring anyway
“Epicurus is compatible with modern science”
What about all the stupid shit he said about magnets and about organs attracting like to like and mini-corpuscles working inside each one? Clearly this isn’t the case. Magnets and bladders don’t work because of mini-corpuscles.
“That doesn’t count. What Epicurus got right was the idea of the atom.”
Firstly, Epicurus did not invent the idea of the atom. Secondly, even if he believed in atoms this is hardly proof of him being right. Many Christian theologians of the 20th century also believe atoms are real and don’t deny modern science. One would hardly say that this fact they accept something as vague as “all of life is made up of building blocks far too small for you to see” is enough to back up any of their other material or metaphysical claims.
This is all getting way off topic because my first point was that even Four humor Galen could tell Epicurus’ science was lacking so that means obviously it is backwards enough that it is incompatible with anything written in the modern era.
>“When the facts do not conform to Epicurus’ positions, Epicurus changes his position.”
Is this supposed to be a criticism? What else would you do when your position is inconsistent with facts?
What would constitute a simple life in the current year?
Out of choice, eating simple meals, being celibate, not being a consumerist, not looking for social media likes, avoiding pornography.
Sure. You've got Gordon Ramsay, right? He's epicurean, isn't he?
>When will Epicurueanism make a comeback?
>nothing happens after you die
Never because it's wrong.
The actual literal application of some of his findings likely won't, progress more or less stopped after Lucretius, and a fair amount of Epicurean material did not survive. His philosophy and method have lived on and I was unaware they were in need of a comeback, they have been highly influential throughout history in a variety of fields and by an even greater variety of people. The only scenario I could conceive in which Epicurean thought is completely removed is human extinction, or perhaps some scenario where brains are stored in vats and completely robbed of sensory input.