Reasonings about Philodemus’ On Frank Criticism
Frank Speech and Friendship
Master as Moral Model
Against the Charlatans
Blogs
On Natural Community
Naturalist Reasoning on Friendship
Concord: a Book on Friendship (review of a book from AC Grayling's The Good Book)
Since she claimed to be Aristotelian, I have created this thread to post blogs and pieces with arguments that criticize her philosophy from our vantage point.
It's been said that Epicurean philosophy treats the mind in its healthy, natural state, like positive psychology does, but what happens when people are so sick and broken, psychologically, that they take pleasure in masochism, sadism, and cruelty? What happens when people take pleasure in horrible things.
One reply I can come up with is in PD 39, where we are invited to remove ourselves from the presence of this person, to ostracize a sociopath or psychopath, which our legal and prison system already does. The words used as "so far as it is advantageous, exclude them from your life" - because friendship should be, and is by nature, mutually advantageous. A psychopath provides no advantage by his friendship.
The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life.
If others would like to brainstorms arguments re: psychopaths and pleasure so that we can more accurately debate this issue, please share those here.
