Pre-ordered it too
This is a topic on which the Epicurean philosophy often has to face with unfair criticism.
The critic (often Stoics to differentiate the both schools harsh):
"Epicureans are hiding in the garden with a few friends without interest in social/political/humankind issues as a whole because it could mean stress / adversity".
Instead justice/friendship (Philia) are essential virtues in Epicurean Philosophy and they engage when necessary (why engage if unneccesary ? Maybe for admiration / fame / empty ideas ? )
And I see friendship (Philia )in an wider sense like in the definition of Aristoteles (kindness to all humans/creatures) but with a practical limit (for example not for enemies, false friends, too harmful people, it is always balanced with prudence ).
I think prudence (phronesis ? ) and friendship (philia) are the two main virtues in Epicurean Philosophy.
"As Gerard Hughes points out, in Books VIII and IX of his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle gives examples of philia including:
young lovers (1156b2), lifelong friends (1156b12), cities with one another (1157a26), political or business contacts (1158a28), parents and children (1158b20), fellow-voyagers and fellow-soldiers (1159b28), members of the same religious society (1160a19), or of the same tribe (1161b14), a cobbler and the person who buys from him. (1163b35)[2]
All of these different relationships involve getting on well with someone, though Aristotle at times implies that something more like actual liking is required. When he is talking about the character or disposition that falls between obsequiousness or flattery on the one hand and surliness or quarrelsomeness on the other, he says that this state:
has no name, but it would seem to be most like [philia]; for the character of the person in the intermediate state is just what we mean in speaking of a decent friend, except that the friend is also fond of us. (1126b21)
This passage indicates also that, though broad, the notion of philia must be mutual, and thus excludes relationships with inanimate objects, though philia with animals, such as pets, is allowed for (see 1155b27–31) though it considers its existence in the way of inanimate objects could also "inanimately love".
In his Rhetoric, Aristotle defines the activity involved in philia (τὸ φιλεῖν) as:
wanting for someone what one thinks good, for his sake and not for one's own, and being inclined, so far as one can, to do such things for him. (1380b36–1381a2)
John M. Cooper argues that this indicates:
that the central idea of φιλíα is that of doing well by someone for his own sake, out of concern for him (and not, or not merely, out of concern for oneself). [... Thus] the different forms of φιλíα [as listed above] could be viewed just as different contexts and circumstances in which this kind of mutual well-doing can arise.[3]
Aristotle takes philia to be both necessary as a means to happiness ("no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods" [1155a5–6]) and noble or fine (καλόν) in itself. "
There is only one higher form of "love", "agape" but that is a love for/between humans an (supernatural) gods. Christians try to practice it for example in charity.
But it is maybe more limitless and maybe self-destructive as philia.
And without a supernatural god there is no agape in the sense of the definition. So here too meets (meta-)physics ethics