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Don July 4, 2026 at 12:13 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

Max DuBoff : I want to really emphasize that I greatly appreciate your willingness to engage on these topics. This thread has grown WAY beyond a "Welcome Max DuBoff " so this has been both intellectually stimulating and fun. Thank you.

[…]

Agreed. I…
Don July 3, 2026 at 11:08 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
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[…]

I personally like something like "complete" to riff on the connotation of "all (pan-) goals (telos) have been met or achieved." There's nothing lacking, which I realize form an English semantic perspective, you could use "perfect." But to me,…
Godfrey July 3, 2026 at 9:31 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
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[…]

[…]

[…]

Regarding pantelēs: I'm quite ignorant of the nuances of Greek (not just the nuances, most of it) but I see from Nate Bartman's compilation of PD translations that translations of PD21 are fairly evenly divided by translating it as perfect and…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 4:07 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
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[…]

I agree withj wbernys here and this is why I would say that once you focus on the logic implications of the foundattional premise that there are only two feelings, it makes perfect sense that the best state is going to be one of pure pleasure…
wbernys July 3, 2026 at 3:25 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

This is a great summarization of my views, along with what I believe Epicurus believed.

Someone feeling perpetual joy or delight is not in any way inferior or superior to feeling constant Serenity or Tranquility. Both are equally Pleaseant. Kinetic and…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 12:40 PM

Replied to the thread New Advancement on Reading Herculaneum Scrolls.
Post

Also:

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/yet-more-scrol…ic-philosopher/
Don July 3, 2026 at 12:29 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus (DL 10.82; Hicks via Perseus): [82] But mental tranquillity (ataraxia) means being released from all these troubles and cherishing a continual remembrance of the highest and most important truths.

[82] ἡ δὲ…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 11:59 AM

Posted the thread World's Worst Epicurus Videos.
Thread

Sometimes I don't know why but I subscribe to a google alert that gives me new references to Epicurus.

This video just came over that feed. It's not just an example of homogenized pure-AI clickbate. It does have a message, and it perfectly illustrates why…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 11:35 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

Here's another example I just noted from the signature line used by Elli, one of our members from Greece:

Should we tell her that that's not accurate, and that she should change it to:

Beauty and virtue and such are worthy of honor, if they bring …
Elli July 3, 2026 at 11:10 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

DaveT Thank you for your kind words and your thoughtful reflection.

Epicurus would agree with you that intimacy and friendship are deeply intertwined. In fact, in Diogenes Laertius "on the wise man" we read that friendship begins from practical need,…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 10:33 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

Another direct question that would be helpful to answer:

Just as we question as to "flourishing," what exactly does "tranquility" mean and what does it entail?

In short, what Max do you think at that a person is doing while they are tranquil?

Also, do you…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 10:05 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

One way of summarily getting to the conclusion would be to go back to my eariler question: was Emily Austin's book misnamed? Your comment would imply that to be accurate to Epicurus it should have titled it "Living for Tranquility"? Or perhaps…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 9:58 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

If there were a fate it would be that we would once again be going down the Katastematic/Kinetic rabbit hole and all that it entails. DeWitt, Gosling and Taylor, Emily Austin, and Boris Nikolsky can be lined up military-style against virtually the…
DaveT July 3, 2026 at 9:13 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

[…]

Elli I enjoyed reading your posts. I'm not sure whether friendship is a subset of intimacy, or intimacy is a subset of friendship. But your statement above made me think of the old saying that to have a friend, you must be a friend. And perhaps to…
Max DuBoff July 3, 2026 at 8:31 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

Oops, I forgot to mention: I designate "resistance"/"resist" to translate antiparatattesthai. It's not a literal translation (it's impossible to capture the full context in one word), but it does preserve the military context. (I owe this suggestion…
Max DuBoff July 3, 2026 at 8:27 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
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[…]

I've now reread the thread, and I'm going to respond to a number of posts, but I think it'd be more helpful to write a few paragraphs than respond to individual points. If there's an individual point from upthread which you think is important for the…
Max DuBoff July 3, 2026 at 7:50 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

Thanks for this idea. Although I largely agree with Cassius just below, it's good that you raised this, because one of the biggest developments in 20th-century scholarship on Epicurus was less attention paid to PD 9. I don't mean to necessarily say…
Max DuBoff July 3, 2026 at 7:33 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
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[…]

Thanks for this point, Don. Antiparatattesthai is markedly military language, evoking a battle line and the presence of an enemy. It derives from paratattein, which refers to arranging battle lines. Antiparatattesthai is perhaps best translated as…
Elli July 3, 2026 at 4:43 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

[…]

I have read this quote in a post of a friend, who claimed that said by Epicurus, but this is fake!
Elli July 3, 2026 at 4:26 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Plutarch was not a neutral observer. He was a priest of the Delphic priesthood, an ideological guardian of the Platonic and religious establishment. When he could not refute Epicurus philosophically, he resorted to ad hominem attacks, moralistic slander,…
Cassius July 3, 2026 at 3:42 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Thank you for that post Elli!

I am sure someone will ask about this:

[…]

Is this an actual quote for which there is a citation, or is this exhortation a paraphrase?
Elli July 3, 2026 at 3:24 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Epicurus’ Political Revolution Without Bloodshed

In On the Education of Children, Plutarch begins with a series of “moral” recommendations that Epicurus would immediately classify as empty beliefs. These are external social norms that have nothing to…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 5:09 PM

Replied to the thread Rebuttal to a Stoic who stated that "flourishing" would be a "better" goal of life than Pleasure.
Post

Thank you Matt. We have had a very good team of people rotate through over the years, and I am convinced that the material there is some of the best we produce. I've now gotten most all of them converted over into text transcripts which are all…
Matteng July 2, 2026 at 5:03 PM

Replied to the thread Rebuttal to a Stoic who stated that "flourishing" would be a "better" goal of life than Pleasure.
Post

[…]

Last year, I actually started right from the beginning.

That went on for several months.

But the great thing about it is that you stay more in the context and don't have to wait a week—it's basically "binge-listening"

It hammers the points home
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 4:47 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

I always "like" it when you call our attention to PD09 on this topic. In this case I have a comment in regard to "All pleasure is pleasure, full stop." That very simple sentence stands at the top of a mountain of specific questions. Yes, I agree,…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 4:37 PM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

I am tagging Patrikios here because I feel sure he will be interested in Elli's post 10 directly above.
Godfrey July 2, 2026 at 4:15 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

I feel the need at this point to add in my reading of some of the PDs, which when carefully considered (at least to me), delve into further parsing pleasure as intensity, duration and location. All pleasure is pleasure, full stop. The way to…
Elli July 2, 2026 at 4:02 PM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Epicurus classifies sex as a desire “natural but not necessary.” He does this for a very precise reason: sex activates two different neurochemical systems in the human organism. One of them is stabilizing; the other is destabilizing.

The stabilizing part…
Don July 2, 2026 at 2:30 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

Slight quibble: he didn't write that his mental pleasures outweighed the physical pains, but he did write that he could contend with his pains with the mental pleasure of his memories: ἀντιπαρετάττετο "metaphorical, hold one's ground…
DaveT July 2, 2026 at 2:13 PM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

[…]

Raphael Raul Yes, as Cassius said, there are a lot of issues worth discussing in your original post. Not the least one being that Epicurus seemed to discourage creating children within the marriage contract except if you were one of the rare…
Elli July 2, 2026 at 1:40 PM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Ηello to all epicurean friends,

Dear Raphael, sorry but your whole text is a measurement of turmoil, not pleasure. You count taxes, cost of living, politics, technology, decline, demographics, robots, migration, feminism, MGTOW, Schopenhauer, Augustus,…
Pacatus July 2, 2026 at 1:11 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

Maybe “tranquillity” (which seems to be the dominant translation of ἀταραξία) is a translation subject to too much distortion, often taken as an unfeeling state. I think that Don and I have both used “equanimity” – but that seems to come up…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 10:56 AM

Posted the thread Episode 341 - EATAQ23 - Not Yet Recorded.
Thread

Welcome to Episode 341 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 9:47 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

I have the same reaction, Wbernys, and I would be alert to the direction that some writers seem to take that tranquility does not only not "feel great" -- but that tranquility is not a "feeling" at all. That's how "they" (not referring here to Max)…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 9:38 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

[…]

Raphael Raul what do you think of that formulation? What kind of philosophical perspective can we bring to the question of how many zeroes are required to be confident that the pleasure would outweigh the pain?
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 9:18 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

As to what plesaures actually determine a blessed life, I think I recall Gosling & Taylor examining that at length in "The Greeks On Pleasure" in their chapter on the katastematic/kinetic issue, and concluding that there is nothing mysterious at all…
wbernys July 2, 2026 at 9:13 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

I would slightly disagree, caviar and a beautiful view do feel great in the same way as tranquility, afterall pleasure reach it's limit in removing pain, it's just that tranquility (like all mental feelings) last a lot longer and are more intense…
Noah Calderon July 2, 2026 at 9:11 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Marriage and children don't seem to have been out of the question for Epicureans, but Epicurus and his followers definitely seemed to place more emphasis on friendship more generally than on pair-bonding, romance, and reproduction. This makes sense…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 9:09 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

You certainly can! No time limits are ticking, and your patience and attention to detail is appreciated! I presume I can speak for most everyone that we appreciate your being here and engaging.
Max DuBoff July 2, 2026 at 9:00 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
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[…]

She's writing a book on Epicurus for the Routledge Philosophers series.
Max DuBoff July 2, 2026 at 8:59 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

Ohhhh, yes, I wasn't denying that the absence of pain (i.e., tranquility and the asence of bodily pain) is pleasure. The question is, in large part, what "pleasure" means. What it doesn't mean (in my view) is that tranquility feels great in the way that…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 8:04 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

I never said it was not foundational or fundamental and I agree with you that it is. But foundational and fundamental are very different from "the goal." Those who push something other than pleasure as "the goal" know this very well. Food is…
Don July 2, 2026 at 7:21 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

I think it's a jump to always immediately go from discussion of the importance of tranquility/ataraxia to seeing this as an endorsement of asceticism. I don't necessarily see people who write "tranquility is the ultimate pleasure" or "tranquility is…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 6:23 AM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

Basic analysis of this issue is also going to be related to, or a subset of, the entire question of friendship relationships, and there we have some clear points:

1 - We pursue friendship for pleasure, even though over time the pleasure of our friends…
Cassius July 2, 2026 at 5:01 AM

Replied to the thread Episode 340 - EATAQ22 - The Fatal Flaw in Socratic Skepticism.
Post

Transcript of this episode:

https://epicurustoday.com/00-lucretiusto…st/episode_340/
Godfrey July 2, 2026 at 1:26 AM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

PD20 . The flesh assumes that the limits of joy are infinite, and that infinite joy can be produced only through infinite time.... (Saint-Andre translation)

Max DuBoff , is this the extent of the beginning of PD20 that you're referring to? I'm…
wbernys July 1, 2026 at 10:08 PM

Replied to the thread Lesser known quotes by Epicurus..
Post

[…]

Yeah I know. I just wanted a collection of some of the best on the site so more could see them especially, i did something on reddit as well. Plus i like having more stuff on the site.
wbernys July 1, 2026 at 9:56 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

Hello Max DuBoff , sorry for not saying hi earlier but happy to have you here! Your articles look great, by the way, just read them, and match my own thoughts. Do you know (or are allowed to share) if Emily Austin has any new works on Epicurus coming…
Cassius July 1, 2026 at 9:28 PM

Replied to the thread Marriage & children seem less pleasurable today: financial worry, relational problems, high rates of divorce. Are they worth the pain ( tarakhē τᾰραχή) they entail?.
Post

I have pinned this thread to the top of the "Relationships" forum. There are a huge number of issues that can be picked out of Raphael's post and discussed. If this thread gets long and goes off in different directions we can break it into sub-threads…
Don July 1, 2026 at 8:32 PM

Replied to the thread Welcome Max Duboff.
Post

[…]

As I remember, she insisted that "pleasure" be in the title.

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