The Lucretius Today Podcast

View Our Episode Guide Here.

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The Lucretius Today Podcast is a weekly panel discussion and presentation of Epicurean philosophy. Our current podcasters are: Cassius, Martin, Joshua, Kalosyni, and Don. Each episode of the show has a thread below with podcast notes and listener comments. The podcast is available for free subscription at all major podcast sources, or it can be listened to with online players such as PodcastIndex.com or Podverse.fm. A complete set of past podcasts can be downloaded from Archive.org here. For the text of Lucretius read during the first 92 episodes, click here to download the EpicureanFriends Reference Edition of Lucretius.

If you are new to the podcast, the best episode to start with is Episode 200 - Retrospective and Recap, which provides a history of the podcast and a discussion of the best places to start in the study of Lucretius. We don't have all our episodes uploaded to youtube, but this one is there and can be found here:

View Our Complete Episode Guide Here.

If you are just getting started with our podcast, we recommend as representative examples:

• Episode Two Hundred Sixty-One - "Death Is Nothing To Us"
• Episode One Hundred Fifty-Five - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 11 - The Canon, Reason, and Nature 02
• Episode One Hundred Twenty-Nine - Letter to Pythocles 03 - The Implications Of the Epicurean Position On The Size of the Sun
• Episode One Hundred Thirty-Four - The Letter to Menoeceus 01- Context and Opening of the Letter

Here are our ground rules and goals of the podcast:

First: Our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it, not to substitute our own opinions for those of Lucretius or Epicurus.

Second: In this podcast we don't express or imply or personal opinions on modern political issues. At Epicureanfriends.com we call this approach "Not Neo-Epicurean, But Epicurean." Epicurean philosophy is not Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Atheism, or Marxism - it is a unique philosophy of its own, to be understood on its own terms, and not as subordinate to or in terms of any other schools, conventional modern moralities, or political positions.

Third: The close study of Epicurean philosophy reveals that Epicurus did not advocate the pursuit of luxury, but neither did he teach a minimalist lifestyle. As is written in Vatican Saying 63, "Frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is like him who errs through excess." The four key points taught by Epicurus that we stress at EpicureanFriends.com are (1) There are no supernatural gods, (2) There is no life after death, (3) All good and evil consist in sensation, and (4) Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life.