Our Posting Policy At EpicureanFriends.com

This graphic and the policy will be updated to replace the word "partisan" with "contemporay." The issue is not that the divisive politics is "party-related" or "election-related" but that it is so "contemporary" that elevated emotions on a particular issue overwhelm the general purpose of the forum.

Background: I continue to look for ways to make the "DeWitt" viewpoint easier to understand and graspable as quickly as possible, thus the addition of the "absolute virtue / Platonic ideals" point to this chart. My expectation, thinking especially about the 2019 Catherine Wilson books, is that people don't always consider their own standards of morality to fit under the "No Politics" rule, although they probably should. So the addition of "absolute virtue" and "Platonic ideals" is intended to convey that while viewpoints on particular virtues and particular ideals are extremely important to our personal pleasure and happiness, those things will differ between people over time and location and all sorts of circumstances.

The overall goal of promoting Epicurean philosophy has to deal with the tension there: We are (through Epicurean doctrines) encouraging everyone to understand and follow their feelings of pleasure, but at the same time we have to recognize that not everyone is going to have the same feelings about the same things, and that conflicts are going to arise between people under certain circumstances.

If we allow this forum or our work in promoting Epicurean philosophy to be captured by one moral or political viewpoint, then the project gets crippled at a basic level, and it's my view that the project of promoting the philosophy in general is far more important than any day-to-day political position. It will be very easy for those who want to pursue a special moral or political viewpoint to do so in their own circles, as we see is already done. Personally, I consider the "Cambridge / Academic" viewpoint to be one such segment (essentially Stoic/Platonic) that has captured Epicurus for many years, and I could name other specific webpages I would put in a similar category, but I prefer not to name them.

So the purpose of this graphic, combined with the "Not Neo-Epicurean But Epicurean" graphic, is to try to present these issues as clearly and quickly as possible to new participants here.