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Essentially, are we arguing that Seneca's use of "Summum Bonum" (or "highest good") as opposed to another phrase, perhaps the available "Maximum bonum" (or "greatest good") is an indication that Seneca misunderstood a nuanced, yet crucial distinction between "high" and "great"? What leads us to believe that Epicurus recognized such a distinction? I personally think "Summum" might be a better rendering than "Maximum": the ancient Greek word Epicurus employed to describe the fullness of pure pleas…

Is there a good that is equal to or greater than pleasure? If we cannot identify a good that is at least equal to pleasure, then I think we can safely say that pleasure is not just a good, but rather the good, the "greatest" good.

I think it's important to recognize that our suspicion is toward "the form of the good", but not "goodness". (I'm going to avoid relying on an upper-case letter to distinguish these concepts because ancient Greek lacked this device). The phrase H TOY AΓAΘOY I∆EA or "the form of the good" was used by Plato in The Republic, and enthusiastically adopted by Plotinus, the Neo-Platonists, and, much later, the Gnostics. The concept is at the heart of Platonism, so it is fair for anti-Platonists to view…

I found a number of descriptive, albeit conflicting accounts of the "highest good". In Epicureanism (2009), author Tim O'Keefe titles his eleventh chapter "Pleasure, the highest good". He explains, "For almost all Greek philosophers of the time, the fundamental questions of ethics were (i) what is the highest good and (ii) how do you attain it, with the highest good being what is desirable for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. Epicurus declares pleasure to be the highest good" …

Where do we fit the following phrase from Ep. Men. into this discussion? "...TO MEΓIΣTON AΓAΘON ΦPONHΣIΣ..." Epicurus then compares ΦPONHΣIΣ against the "other virtues", therein linking the concepts of AΓAΘON with APETAI.

(Quote from Don) At this point, I can summarize my position as follows: "It's all good."

After reflection, I'm inclined to see "the Good" as an evaluative statement that expresses a measurement of the magnitude of pleasure. On a scale of 0% to 100%, we might describe "the highest good" as those actions which most reliably facilitate the cultivation of maximum pleasure. Therein, "the Good" is not necessarily pleasure, itself (since pleasure is elsewhere defined as the goal of life), but rather, an evaluation of the means by which that goal is achieved. Contrasting Epicurus "good" wit…

To respond to the original topic, both [1] Aristotle's Golden Mean and [2] the Romans' framing of Epicurean Voluptas as the Summum Bonum are misrepresentations of Epicurean ethics. While Epicurean philosophy is compatible with the phrase Summum Bonum (MEΓIΣTON AΓAΘON), the Summum Bonum is not described as HΔONH (pleasure), but as ΦPONHΣIΣ (prudence). It would have been more accurate for the Stoics to have written "SVMMVM BONVM EST PRVDENTIA". If Stoic and early Christian authors had described Ep…

To my knowledge, TAΓAΘON is not found in the texts of early Ionian philosophers (whom De Witt identifies as being a philosophical inspiration for Epicurus), and Democritus rarely uses TAΓAΘON in favor of the abundant TAΓAΘA or "the goods" (https://philarchive.org/archive/PACTCO-8v1). Where we cannot find many instances of TAΓAΘON in Epicurean writings, and their older cousins, we find an abundance of the word in the writings of his contemporary and earlier opponents. I did just notice that Epicu…