"Living for Pleasure" Book group - Chapter Highlights

Living for Pleasure by Emily Austin - April 30th meeting

Chapters 1 - 4

Chapter 1 - Maybe We’re Doing it Wrong

• Imagining the pleasure of a perfect vacation
• Hedonism at first glance seems like a recipe for following destructive impulses and "giving license to our failure of self-control", but Epicurus is different
• Feelings of shame can come up around natural bodily desires – we both need and want to have the freedom to enjoy what brings us pleasure
• Pleasure is a sweeping term that includes everything that is not painful
• The importance of removing anxiety and taking action
• Not life coaching - this is to wake you up to pleasure and pain, and that pleasure is the natural guide to live a happier life
  

Chapter 2 - Epicureanism, the Original Cast

• Epicurus
• Lucretius
• Philodemus
• Diogenes of Oenoanda

• The Opposition: Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch
  

Chapter 3 - Happiness, Theirs and Ours

• The dispute between the various ancient schools of philosophy is about their divergent views about the nature of happiness and the ways to achieve it
• An objective vs. subjective understanding of happiness
  

Chapter 4 - Natural Hedonism

• It is easily observed that we pursue pleasure and avoid pain by nature
• The cradle argument
• All our actions aim toward our own pleasure
• Hedonistic prudence
• Psychological hedonism
• Prudential miscalculations
• Objections from the opponents of Epicureanism

Here are some of the slides that I presented in last night's Zoom book review of Emily Austin's "Living for Pleasure". (I present a few highlights of chapters 5, 6, and 7. And Cassius presented on chapter 8.)

Thank you to all who attended last night's meeting.

Revisiting the meeting...I only created one "generic" slide which listed the chapter numbers and titles, then for each chapter I read some excerpts which captured some of the highlights of each chapter.

For me the group's discussion about social media stuck in my mind (as part of Chapter 12) - and we went around the circle and briefly talked about our own experiences with Facebook or other social media.

These four chapters covered a lot so the evening's discussion jumped around quite a bit.