July 7, 2025 First Monday Zoom Discussion 8pm ET - Agenda & Topic of discussion

Hi Everyone, coming up this next Monday is our First Monday Epicurean Meet-and-greet & Discussion Via Zoom. The topic of discussion this month: "Emotions in Epicurean Philosophy".

Agenda:

• Welcome and meet-and-greet: round the table greetings and introductions.
• A short presentation on the discussion topic (by Kalosyni). Following the presentation, discussion prompts will be given to spur on the discussion, and we will go around the table offering everyone an opportunity to participate in the discussion.
• We may also include discussion on the latest forum threads and podcast, depending on how the evening flows.
• We also include time for any questions on Epicurean philosophy, especially for newer members.

This meeting is open to Level 02 members and up (and also Level 01 by approval of the moderator team). You can find out how to attend over in this other post. Hope to see you there!

Tomorrow night at First Monday I'll give a short overview on some of the ancient Epicurean texts that bring up the topic of emotions (from Diogenes Laertius, Lucretius, and Philodemus)...and then we will open it up to discussion (Cassius will be there helping moderate the discussion and available to answer any questions).

And just as an aside, here is something from modern thought and research on emotions, which is very multifaceted - an excerpt highlighting important psychology research, from a Wikipedia article:

Quote

Basic emotions

• William James in 1890 proposed four basic emotions: fear, grief, love, and rage, based on bodily involvement.^[35]
• Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.^[36] Wallace V. Friesen and Phoebe C. Ellsworth worked with him on the same basic structure.^[37] The emotions can be linked to facial expressions. In the 1990s, Ekman proposed an expanded list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions that are not all encoded in facial muscles.^[38] The newly included emotions are: amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, and shame.^[38]
• Richard and Bernice Lazarus in 1996 expanded the list to 15 emotions: aesthetic experience, anger, anxiety, compassion, depression, envy, fright, gratitude, guilt, happiness, hope, jealousy, love, pride, relief, sadness, and shame, in the book Passion and Reason.^[39][40]
• Researchers^[41] at University of California, Berkeley identified 27 categories of emotion: admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire and surprise.^[42] This was based on 2185 short videos intended to elicit a certain emotion. These were then modeled onto a "map" of emotions.^[43]

Contrasting basic emotions

A 2009 review^[44] of theories of emotion identifies and contrasts fundamental emotions according to three key criteria for mental experiences that:

1. have a strongly motivating subjective quality like pleasure or pain;
2. are a response to some event or object that is either real or imagined;
3. motivate particular kinds of behavior.

The combination of these attributes distinguishes emotions from sensations, feelings and moods.

Kind of emotion	Positive emotions	Negative emotions
Related to object properties	Interest, curiosity, enthusiasm	Alarm, panic
	Attraction, desire, admiration	Aversion, disgust, revulsion
	Surprise, amusement	Indifference, habituation, boredom
Future appraisal	Hope, excitement	Fear, anxiety, dread
Event-related	Gratitude, thankfulness	Anger, rage
	Joy, elation, triumph, jubilation	Sorrow, grief
	Patience	Frustration, restlessness
	Contentment	Discontentment, disappointment
Self-appraisal	Humility, modesty	Pride, arrogance
Social	Charity	Avarice, greed, miserliness, envy, jealousy
	Sympathy	Cruelty
Cathected	Love	Hate

Emotion dynamics

Researchers distinguish several emotion dynamics, most commonly how intense (mean level), variable (fluctuations), inert (temporal dependency), instable (magnitude of moment-to-moment fluctuations), or differentiated someone's emotions are (the specificity of granularity of emotions), and whether and how an emotion augments or blunts other emotions.^[45] Meta-analytic reviews show systematic developmental changes in emotion dynamics throughout childhood and adolescence and substantial between-person differences.^[45]

^{*Source: Wikipedia - Emotion Classification}

Don I looked at Brene Brown's "87 Emotions & Experiences" chart, and found it to be overly complicated, and would personally use different labels for things, and would classify things differently. But everyone finds things that resonate depending on their own framing.

I personally would recommend sticking with a smaller number of words and focusing on levels of intensity rather than trying to find fancy words for things.

I haven't yet looked into Lisa Feldman Barrett's system (will let you know after I do ).

Don I'm thinking about the difference between emotions and feelings, and came up with this:

• Emotions are automatic, physiological responses to stimuli (the body's initial reaction)
• Feelings are the conscious awareness of experienced emotions together with further mental interpretations (further thoughts in an attempt to make sense of our emotional reaction)

Looking at that new list of words that you posted (in post 6)...and thinking about them (there's a lot of rabbit holes in these words ).