Cassius' Blog

The Completeness Argument

One of the oldest objections to placing the highest good in anything other than virtue runs like this: the good must be complete — whole, finished, lacking nothing — and…

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"Academic Questions" sounds like exactly what a modern reader expects from ancient philosophy: a dry, technical argument about definitions, conducted by men with nothing better to do, over a question…

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Centuries of commentators have treated this and similar statements as an invitation to make something other than pleasure the real goal of Epicurean philosophy -- a neutral resting state, a merely…

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The Passage You've Seen a Thousand Times, and What It Actually Says

You have almost certainly seen this sentence before, even if you've never read a word of it: "Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem…

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The Current Establishment View - Which It Is the Editorial Policy Of EpicureanFriends.com to Reject

With only a few notable exceptions, practically every modern account of Epicurean ethics repeats the…

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Is The "Emphasis" In Epicurean Philosophy On Relief From Pain?

In a separate article I have made the case that it is a major rhetorical and factual mistake to describe Epicurean philosophy as…

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The Claim and Why It Matters

The claim that Epicurean philosophy is “primarily about the absence of pain” — that the Epicurean goal is a passive, featureless neutral state free from disturbance…

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Epicurus had important things to say about happiness, pleasure, fear, and anxiety. But before the modern world reduced him to the status of a street-corner therapist, his most important contributions…

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Epicurus Was Right: Geometry Is a Powerful Tool But Not the Final Truth About Physical Reality

Introduction: Two Inscriptions Over Two Doors

Over the entrance to Plato’s Academy in Athens, tradition…

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Introduction: A Very Old Argument

The intelligent design argument is one of the oldest and most persistent claims in the history of human thought. In its simplest form it says: the world we observe is…

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