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Good find, Hiram! This clip shows the conclusion to that article, and I find it is a good summary of what he wrote. This is consistent with what I have generally read from Okeefe - he focuses on the advice which tends toward minimalism, and the way he writes ends up with his thumb on the scale toward asceticism, rather than emphasizing that the goal is pleasure and the circumstances determine the way to get there. "We can be content with the little we need" is his final phrase, and it says it al…

The only way Okeefe can logically reach this result is to carefully emphasize the Tranquility /Absence of Pain argument as a link in his chain to conclude that some types of pleasure are better than others. That's why this issue is so important. If you don't deal with that argument clearly you end up with Tim Okeefe and the stoics. If the focus is kept on "pleasure" as a feeling and "all pleasures are desirable" and that the main way to rule out choosing as particular pleasure is that you can re…

This is another passage: "Peace of mind" is what really makes life pleasant." I think I would go so far to say that "peace of mind" is probably not itself a pleasure at all. A mind is always doing something and is never truly at rest. If you're lying down thinking about, or simply "realizing" what a wonderful life you have, your'e experiencing memories and actively thinking about certain things. You are calmly experiencing normal mental pleasures, not doing something in another category entirely…

Here is the argument against "essences" made by Frances Wright in A Few Days in Athens, Chapter 15. I would apply it to Epicurus' view of pleasure -- pleasure does not exist apart from the normal experiences of human life: “What is in a substance cannot be separate from it. And is not all matter a compound of qualities? Hardness, extension, form, color, motion, rest — take away all these, and where is matter? To conceive of mind independent of matter, is as if we should conceive of color indepen…