Recent Updates From Across EpicureanFriends.com

Salud and welcome dlippman !

No argument there! Plenty of rabbit holes.

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

…

dlippman Welcome to the forum!

[…]

In addition with the problem of abstract ideals that you mentioned, I suspect that at least part of that debate still revolves around the question of what "happiness" really means. Just like "Virtue" being hard to define, it's much easier to…

[…]

Welcome to, dlippman


I too was a longtime LT podcast listener. So it’s an extra treat to see the faces on Zoom calls of the voices you’ve listened to from Cassius , Joshua , Kalosyni , and many others on LT recordings.


Regarding the…

Welcome aboard and thank you for the fascinating initial post!

Welcome to the forum, David! You bring up some really interesting points, and I look forward to hearing more.

Welcome David!

Dear Good People

I've been a long-time listener of Lucretius Today and have greatly enjoyed the podcast. I'm an internal medicine physician and currently serve on the Board of the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, which promotes six key pillars for…

[…]

Just for the record I'm not a Brene Brown groupie or fan; however, I did find her idea (well, not her idea but the one she talked about) of emotional granularity interesting. This is another chart for honing in on emotional granularity - I would…

Today we're adding a "News and Announcements" box to the front page. It will display the last 30 days worth of "News/Announcements" threads that have been posted by a moderator/admin. We intend to use this box to keep people up to date on site…

[…]

Love it, too, and also feel that the tone doesn't quite capture Epicurean thanatology, which triggers a reflection in my mind on Epíkouros resting in a bathtub, declaring "Remember the doctrines!"

Dylan Thomas had a turbelent life, and his pre-mature…

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…

I take the poem as a bit too ambiguous and not sure what I should be reading into "light" and "night" and the images that these men are "seeing". Is it rage against dying, or is it rage against some kind of onset of oppression? My mind tends to go to…

[…]

Thank you for helping with this. We know Diogenes Laertius references as his source "Apollodorus of Athens" (7.181) and "Apollodorus the Epicurean" (10.13). This itself might be the source of the scholastic tradition of them being two different men.

…

[…]

I still think your translation of "Phallodorus" captures the whole spirit better.

[…]

Yes, Joshua pointed this out as well and I agree that it is the correct direction. I'll update.

Thank you for your comments!

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on "constructed emotion" may be applicable to bring up here as well:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5390700/

https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/

youtu.be/0gks6ceq4eQ?si=eiRUtYf8Ayoa8Y5F

FWIW Brene Brown's Atlas of the Heart provides a look at emotional granularity:

https://brenebrown.com/read-along-resources/

[…]

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…

Remember, it's specifically stated in the letter to Herodotus by Epicurus:

"To begin with, nothing comes into being out of what is non-existent." πρῶτον μὲν ὅτι οὐδὲν γίνεται ἐκ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος

Whether it's atoms or quantum fields, those are still existent…

We didn't end up discussing it very much, but I highly recommend this video of a debate between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss on Krauss' book "Something From Nothing."

Video Discussion Between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss on the "Something…

[…]

I will look to see if we have prior threads on what happens when philosophy seems to conflict with science. I know the subject has come up regularly, but it tends to get buried with other topics.

But for now and in general, I don't think this apparent…

[…]

Ahh, okay! So you disagree with the dominant hypothesis?

Yes I was pointing to the similarities between Heraclitus "the Agitator" and the current theorists in charge as a further charge against them!

[…]

Haha, I see where you’re coming from Cassius! Though I have to assume that this theory of a “universe in constant transformation” is based in scientific reasoning rather than supernatural leaps of faith and societal control. I’m of course no…

[…]

I don't think Bryan meant to imply that, If following dominant interpretations were always a good idea, Epicurus would have accepted intelligent design for his physics and we would all be Abrahamists today! 😀

[…]

Both are true. Neither don't necessarily adequately fully describe our lived experience.

There certainly appear to be such things as atoms and subatomic particles.

There certainly appear to be such things as quantum fluctuations in quantum fields.

My…