I like to regularly make lists to prioritize my thinking, and here is one of interest today: What are the major categories of errors that Epicurus held to be particularly worthy of campaigning against? Often it is easier to categorize negatively rather than to set things out positively and so the following is a list of obvious candidates - without concern as to order.
What else would you add to complete the sentence: Epicurus campaigned primarily against _______________:
- Supernatural Religion
- Life After Death
- Skepticism
- Determinism
- Rationalism (Misrepresentation of the Proper Perspective Toward "Logic")
- Misinterpretation of How To Treat Pleasure and Pain
- Misrepresentation of "Virtue" / "Being a Good Person" as the goal of life, rather than the means
Some of these that I have listed are related (Skepticism / Rationalism and Supernatural Religion/Life After Death are obviously tied together), but I think they are separate enough to address individually.
It would be helpful to get suggestions and see what people think as a way of fine-tuning the list. For example when first writing the list I left out "life after death." Any other major targets missing?
As another aspect, It seems to me that all of the practical advice about pleasure and pain and desires and choices and avoidances really falls under the single category of dealing properly with pleasure and pain. That category title might need rewording, but it seems to me that all the natural and necessary and other analysis issues like that are really subsets of how to apply pleasure and pain in decisionmaking, which seems to me to be how the Torquatus material presents them - as a single unit of how people make mistakes with pleasure and pain.
