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First, thanks for letting us know that you enjoy the podcast. One of the reasons we have pushed forward with it even after we finished the first run-through of Lucretius is that I think it helps to hear real live people who approach the philosophy similarly rather than just reading pages in a book or letters on a screen.
Glad to have you reading and listening and please join the conversations wherever you feel appropriate.
Just to help start the discussion, this is a great question, and gets into the "objective vs subjective" discussion that Emily Austin raises in Chapter 3 of her book.
It also raises issues of how "sound mind in a sound body" and our discussions of pleasure as including healthy functioning of the organism (the "hand" argument from Torquatus) are relevant.
And not at all the least, it raises PD10
PD10. If the things that produce the pleasures of profligates could dispel the fears of the mind about the phenomena of the sky, and death, and its pains, and also teach the limits of desires (and of pains), we should never have cause to blame them: for they would be filling themselves full, with pleasures from every source, and never have pain of body or mind, which is the evil of life.
In a similar vein as what Nate just posted that the Christians would have held the Epicureans in particularly low regard there is this from Alexander the Oracle Monger, where again the other schools were willing to collaborate with the revealed religionists, but the Epicureans were not:
The prosperity of the oracle is perhaps not so wonderful, when one learns what sensible, intelligent questions were in fashion with its votaries. Well, it was war to the knife between him and Epicurus, and no wonder. What fitter enemy for a charlatan who patronized miracles and hated truth, than the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and was in solitary possession of that truth? As for the Platonists, Stoics, Pythagoreans, they were his good friends; he had no quarrel with them. But the unmitigated Epicurus, as he used to call him, could not but be hateful to him, treating all such pretensions as absurd and puerile.
ok great, so I promise I will go away and do some reading but could anyone briefly summarize.....
We are glad to do that in virtually every case so don't worry that you are be asked to go away and read the manual 
Would that be accurate? Do you know why he believed in any gods at all? I am an atheist btw
Yes that statement is accurate with a caveat as to "the gods." Epicurus' working definition of "gods" does not include being supernatural, being omniscient, being omipresent, being omnipotent, or most any of the other attributes that monotheism has taught us to believe.
It's better to say that Epicurus held that "gods" exist, by which he means beings which are deathless and who live in perfect happiness without pain, in the "intermundia" -- the space between the "worlds" - which has no contact with us here on earth.
As to why he believes in this type of god at all, the best reference for that is in Cicero's "On the nature of the gods." The answer seems tied to anticipations / prolepsis, but the sources are not clear. Per the same text there is probably also linkage to the fact that Epicurus believed that life exists throughout the universe, and that it is "equitably distributed," and that nature never makes only a single thing of a kind. When you add those things together with believing that the universe is infinitely old and infinitely wide (boundless), then you have the implication that Epicurus believed that we can reason our way to believing that there are living beings throughout the universe, some of whom have reached this state of deathlessness and perfect happiness.
Lots more we can add but this is a start!
But pleasure, as a feeling, is limited to the point where there is no pain, when the body is satiated. Full satisfaction is the limit of pleasure.
Yep and that observation neatly meets the objection that pleasure has no limit or no end, and that for practical purposes (the limited life of humans) the human goal of pleasurable living CAN"T infinitely be made better. At some point every day and in your life you're full -- or as Joshua added in the podcast, you meet your final limit - death.
But it's also important that our calling this out amounts to engaging in "argument through logic" which to me is entirely separate from the argument from practical observation of nature. This is an argument that is essential to defeat Plato and Seneca, but unfortunately, if you separate out the "argument through logic" and don't explain the context, you're left fixated on a "limit" as if that is the only issue involved, when most assuredly there are many other and more important issues that don't end up being confusing in isolation.
If we talk about pigs and babies and real living things, it's much harder to think in terms of their day to day practical goal being well defined by discussing "limits." The logic argument is invaluable in its context, but can't be taken as the ultimate reasoning. I think Epicurus engaged in it, and we have to also, because we are faced with the necessity of fighting on logical terms if we want to communicate with people who are interested in ideas, but that doesn't mean that the whole exercise isn't hazardous for both sides. It's easy to omit important points and end up looking bad when taken out of context.
So he says we need no reasoning or debate to shew why pleasure is matter for desire, pain for aversion. These facts he thinks are simply perceived, just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white, and honey sweet, no one of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate arguments; it is enough merely to draw attention to the fact; and there is a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand and a slight hint and direction of the attention on the other; the one process reveals to us mysteries and things under a veil, so to speak; the other enables us to pronounce upon patent and evident facts.
Also:
conflating (on purpose) pleasure and desire. The *desire* for pleasure is infinite
It may well help us to distinguish pleasure and desire like that, but I don't think it would help Plato or Seneca for the reason you mentioned -- they are conflating things *on purpose* because they want to defend their own "god" (virtue, wisdom, etc) as the ultimate end. If you were to point out to them the distinction between pleasure and desire they would just shift off in another direction with another similar argument, maybe reminding you that cows have similar limits, but are you a cow?
There's ultimately no satisfying these people because they have made up their minds and they are not going to change. But we can help a lot of other people - open-minded people - by explaining these issues, so they don't end up confused and lost like Philebus was at the end of that dialogue.
TAΓAϴON seems to have a similar application, in that the word popularly connotes a perfect, transcendental principle, but also literally refers to that objects that create pleasurable feelings, or pleasure itself.
Yep. And how do you fight against thousands of years of false premises in the meaning of "gods" or "good" or "the end" or any of such terms -- it's very frustrating but a conversation that has to be held.
Episode 174 of the podcast is now available!
Νο. No, no, no.
Once again as I see it we have a perspective issue, in which I placed "greatest good" in scare quotes in extension of the way that Godrey and I are discussing it as an ideal form, while you also rightfully bring back the point that there is another perspective in human feeling where it is essential and vital that we do consider it to be real.
My view is that *both* observations have to be made (the "greatest good" does not exist as an ideal form but does exist as a feeling which is our guide), and we have to be flexible enough to keep both in mind at the same time. Only then can we both understand where Plato and friends go wrong, while at the same time understand where Epicurus gets it right.
If we don't understand that *both* perspectives are important for us to understand then I don't think we ever get on top of these issues with enough confidence to deal with the Platonic arguments that undercut Philebus and the whole attack against "pleasure" as the greatest good. From the ideal perspective we have to see that Platonically the "greatest good" doesn't exist any more than does a line with no width, but from the real world perspective it does exist in our focusing of our mind on an intelligible guide.
I would like to think that we could dispense with this argument and simply talk about pleasure in "realistic" terms, but we don't live in such a world and given the way it has developed for 2000 years we - at least we in our lifetimes - in all likelihood never will.
I think most of us here will find this largely positive review to be something we can mostly agree with, while at the same time it will help us to dive further into the differences between Rand and Aristotle and Epicurus.
The reviewer wishes that LFP had gone further into these differences, which is a perspective I can share without calling it a criticism. The thing I like about LFP is that it goes as far as it does in presenting a positive view of Epicurus that active and healthy people can embrace. When the reviewer talks about JFK's speech on the reasons for going to the moon, he doesn't so much point out a flaw in the book or in Epicurus but in the current orthodox understanding that Epicurus would hesitate to go himself if he had the chance.
The main failure I would point out in turn as to the review is that the writer does not acknowledge that Rand placed "selfishness" and "reason" at the heart of her philosophy, rather than the feeling of pleasure and the rejection of logical rationalism. But to explore that would open too many wounds for most Objectivists, who have a long way to go before they begin to realize that their own sin of rationalism - which many of them admit - is built in to Rand's' neo-Stoic and neo-Platonic worship of "reason" rather than the feeling of pleasure as the ultimate standard of a proper way to live.
Rather than continue my own comments I'll just post the link and we can discuss further to the extent people are interested.
Godfrey this excerpt from DeWitt is not exactly the same point, but I think closely related:
Note: This kind of reference to Italians and Ionians always confuses me. I am not sure whether I am misreading DeWitt's labels here or he is talking colloquially, or what, because according to Laertius Epicurus is listed with the Italians and Plato with the Ionians. Then again Aristotle is an Ionian and he disagreed a lot with Plato. But those labels aren't really relevant to the current discussion.
Yes I think that's the point.
And it may also be exactly the same point as with the "greatest good" which exists only in Platonic ideal status.
Many of our conversations may boil down to exactly that point, and maybe that's exactly why Epicurus recommended against walking around obsessing over the meaning of "good."
It is pretty mind-boggling to think that so much controversy might in reality be so simple to unravel.
Looks to me too like this section of the following article is interesting, however I am not comfortable with the "better" part in the title or the "modest satisfaction." near the end.
Sounds to me this is parallel to where Diogenes Laertius says Epicurus valued *both* pleasures of rest and of action, and I would think the better approach is just to be aware of the differences and how the choice between one vs the other is contextual and requires prudence. Slow mental pleasures might not be what you want when you're resting on a railroad track and a train is approaching, while at other times the roller coaster ride really isn't a good idea when the ride isn't being well maintained and the chance of accident is high. And as to the "modest satisfaction' it's better just to realize that pleasure comes in many packages both mental and physical.
But thinking about these three bullet points makes sense.
Satisfaction is better than exhilaration.
We've been conditioned to think that the right combination of actions will achieve a flash of exhilaration. When we happen upon the perfect marketing strategy, we expect a rush of joy. When we discover the best business for us to start, we're flooded with an electric sensation of excitement.
This thrill-seeking mentality is yet another symptom of the good killing the perfect. It's important to understand that the perfect-being-the-enemy-of-the-good can skew aspects of our daily lives, like those listed above. But the concept can impose even more damage, skewing our expectations even as it cripples our actions. So, try the following moves:
It's good to condition ourselves for success. We can do this by preparing for it, visioning it, pursuing it, seeking it and wanting it. But we can't expect our success to explode like the finale in a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Instead, success is more likely to be gradual. It may feel good, but it won't necessarily feel perfect. Success arrives as a sense of satisfaction, not a sudden thrill.
Supportive of the main point:
chief among them is the view that there is no meaning or purpose behind suffering
Great point
Even from the Nietzschean "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" perspective, there darn well better be a goal of "making us stronger" for engaging in any suffering or else I want no part of it! 
Certainly standing alone the idea of fixating on suffering is awful. I haven't really absorbed or am ready to endorse N's view of "pity" as being such a bad thing, but I think he has a point there too which could eventually be made more clear. In my case I concretize the issue by thinking about how easy it would be for me to sit around thinking constantly about people in nursing homes or animals in animal shelters or in factory farms. But I can usually catch myself by realizing that if I did nothing but continue to think about those issues there would be no time for anything else in life, much less the possibility of finding time to help at least a few of them where possible.
I guess we need a specific thread on "perfect as the enemy of the good" so here it is, starting with Wikipedia citing Voltaire:
This is a thread specifically devoted to "perfect as the enemy of the good." Seems to me this has a lot of application in Epicurean decisionmaking, although this thread stems from the discussion of Hegesias the Death Persuader. Some apparently assert that the perfect "is" the enemy of the good, but others react that we cannot allow this to be accepted. While the two things may not be the same, having the imperfect is superior to taking positions or actions that never allow us to obtain the perfect. Absence of pain may be desirable in the abstract, but for humans the only way to achieve total freedom from pain is death, and the dead can experience neither pleasure nor pain, so obsessing on total absence of pain is self-defeating for humans. That's why I think it is unfair to Epicurus to interpret him as doing so, and that when he "seems" to do so he is engaged in philosophical debate about competing philosophic definitions, not stating that we should forgo the pleasures of life in order to make sure we never experience pain.
This is the current 5/18/23 content of the Wikipedia page:
Perfect is the enemy of good is an aphorism which means insistence on perfection often prevents implementation of good improvements. The Pareto principle or 80–20 rule explains this numerically. For example, it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort.[1] Achieving absolute perfection may be impossible and so, as increasing effort results in diminishing returns, further activity becomes increasingly inefficient.
In the English-speaking world the aphorism is commonly attributed to Voltaire, who quoted an Italian proverb in his Questions sur l'Encyclopédie [fr] in 1770: "Il meglio è l'inimico del bene".[2] It subsequently appeared in his moral poem, La Bégueule, which starts[3]
Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
(In his writings, a wise Italian
says that the best is the enemy of the good)
Previously, around 1726, in his Pensées, Montesquieu wrote "Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien" (The best is the mortal enemy of the good).[4]
Aristotle and other classical philosophers propounded the principle of the golden mean which counsels against extremism in general.[5]
Its sense in English literature can be traced back to Shakespeare,[6] In his tragedy, King Lear (1606), the Duke of Albany warns of "striving to better, oft we mar what's well" and in Sonnet 103:
To mar the subject that before was well?
The 1893 Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources lists a similar proverb, which it claims is of Chinese provenance: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."
More recent applications include Robert Watson-Watt propounding a "cult of the imperfect", which he stated as "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes";[7] economist George Stigler's assertion that "If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport";[8][9] and, in
Seems to me too that at a very basic level we can pin a lot of the problem of Buddhism and Stoicism to their "physics" views that there is essentially a soul that survives death to experience new things in some type of future existence. That's at bottom of what they use to justify renouncing pleasure while it is available in this life, and even to consider that it might have been better not to have been born. In the absence of some reward for ascetic behavior somewhere down the road, why would any sane person ever choose it? (And for the present conversation we can just refer to the "sane" rather than worrying about the insane.)
With Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics you can't even entertain such a suggestion as reasonable to consider, so you steer clear of ideas that what will happen after death justifies counter-intuitive decisions in this life.
At the same time, Epicurus does recognize that for at least most of us today is not the last day of life, so we do in fact make short-term decisions to choose pain for the sake of pleasure that comes afterwards.
But when you know that the playing field is exclusively *this* life, you keep that calculation in check, and come to reasonable conclusions in balancing the present and the future.
Just as an aside, in flipping over to the Latin Library, I see that google is now more ready than in the past to translate to Latin.
But it's really NOT ready - here's the google translate of the section on Epicurus at the start of Book 1:
Human eyes were filthy with life 62
In countries under severe religion ,
the head of the air, countries showed
dreadful upon the appearance of mortals , 65
Gray was the first person to take the mortal
The eyes dared to oppose ;
the fame of the gods, neither the thunderbolts, nor threatening them with whom they have neither
murmurs sky, but the more severe
provokes the power to break tight 70
nature of the first gates barriers desire.
Therefore, the force of the lively and out
Then there came out the walls of the world by far the flame-like
and every soul of the mind and soul ,
What matters to us is the winner can rise , 75
what can not be, the power of the finite, in short, to each one
for it is the reason and the high-term clinging to the.
Why is religion in the feet, subject to the other hand
it is necessary that we match the victory of the sky.
Although Hieronymous of Rhodes was not a Cyreniac, it's useful to contrast HIS views too in this conversation. Hieronymous held that not pleasure, but absence of pain, was the goal of life:
These seem to me to be the kinds of errors that people run into when they fail to appreciate how Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics steers you to a reasonable conclusion about how to deal with guides and goals of life. Cicero is doing us a favor by showing us how contrasting these different views helps to sort them out.
