Now I'm cross-posting... usually I'm 2 or 3 hours behind in the discussion
Quote from CassiusDoes Nature herself create a concept called "pleasure" by which we should understand ALL pleasures to be included? What would you say is the intersection between human nature and the words we use to describe it?
Nature does not create a concept called "pleasure". The end of the cascade for this question, though, leads to Scepticism. All philosophies are mental models. Epicurus proposed a mental model to describe how he perceived and understood the world, and I find that model to be the best that I've come across. His model relies on faculties of sensation, feeling and anticipations and has been built upon to form the basis of modern science. The combination of Epicurus' model and modern science, to me, is the best description that we have of the universe in which we live and how to live in this universe. The persistent lack of evidence of a providential universe indicates, to me, that "Nature" has no mental models. With this in mind, pleasure is an observed, emergent phenomenon of organic life.
It's my understanding that for clarity of discussion Epicurus was very explicit, in Greek, of the meaning of "pleasure". Over the millennia and through various languages and various intentions, that word "pleasure" has taken on a life of its own. Kind of like the word "Epicurean"