Seven Steps With Epicurus - A Slide Presentation

As part of our collaborative work toward an "Epicurean Week" we have come up with a series of "power-point" slides which introduce the philosophy in seven simple steps. The formulation here may change over time as we fine tune this as part of our course materials. This will eventually be expanded into a "7 Weeks with Epicurus". Questions and comments are welcome. Click here for the presentation or you can just click on the graphic above to begin the presentation.

Thanks for the suggestions so far! That's what we are doing, always looking to fine tune.

The slide feature is rather neat and has a feature for adding "notes' for each slide to assist in a presenter using the slides to give a talk. We can work on those too over time to allow for points that don't make it into the main outline.

And it's also easy to add hyperlinks .

So think of this one as more of a presentation aid in giving a talk, and an aid in thinking about what are the most important points to build out into longer presentations.

I should mention that this was prepared using the free Obsidian.md program, which not only makes it easy to produce an outline but also generates the slides.

Thanks again for the comments.

The lengthier comments may end up being best with a hyperlink to another location, but I should have mentioned earlier that this format has another feature:

When you are in the web window for the slideshow, you can press "S" on your keyboard and up will pop a "Presenter" page which features several extra things -

- a clock

- a timer (so you will know how long you are talking

- a panel for the "next slide" so you will know what you are about to talk about when you finish the current slide

- a panel for the current slide

- a NOTES section, where speaker notes can be included and used for the talk.

I think the intended use is perhaps to have two monitors, or if you are using a screen capture program, to capture the main panel only while you use the others to help your talk.

So for the moment I have add longer suggestions such as what Don wrote on Philodemus to the "speaker notes" section, which can be used as a reminder when giving the presentation.

I planned to record an audio track and then post the resulting video to youtube, but I haven't had time to get that done yet.

In the meantime and on into the future, i think that things like this could be helpful to those who might want to make their own videos or just get some practice in explaining things to others.

No - Obsidian is an electron app which is cross-platform and therefore runs on windows, linux, and apple. There are even smartphone versions.

Not to go too far on a tangent, but I am aware of two new free competitors in this space that seem very useful. At the moment I am preferring Obsidian, but LOGSEQ is very similar and does many of the same things.

Obsidian is more suitable for narrative compositions of several paragraphs as the basic unit of work, while Logseq is oriented toward outlining in which each point of the outline is the basic unit of work. If you're manipulating paragraphs then maybe obsidian works best; if you're manipulating bulleted outlines logseq has more features.

But both have the ability to produce formatted slides from the data.

And to sort of bring this back to what would be the most productive use of the thread, I am thinking about it in context that the best way to learn something is to study it enough to present it to other people.

It's pretty easy nowadays to put together things like this, and what really needs to be the next step is a "voice-over" talking through the points, which could of course be done in many different ways.

So having a platform that is easy to change and update and then use is a strong advantage to have. Customizing an outline has been something we've talked about for a long time:

Thread

Draft Your Own Personal Outline of Epicurean Philosophy

2024 Update

We have had many good discussions stemming from this suggestion to draw personal outlines, but here is one point of clarification: There are two goals of significance - (1) to improve your understanding of your own ideas, and (2) to improve your understanding of Epicurean philosophy. In other words, just as Thomas Jefferson did, you should be able to list out the ideas of Epicurus in a form that shows that you understand them. However that doesn't mean that your list constitutes

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Cassius

January 16, 2018 at 7:57 PM

Creating an outline, adding a narrative voice, and uploading to youtube is an obvious next step.

Does it need to be "shortly before" to be fair, or is there a better quick way to express it? It's not clear to me how many years were involved.

so at least five years - maybe more (?)