Welcome to Episode 173 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you will find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.

We are now in the process of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book "Epicurus and His Philosophy."

This week we continue our discussion of Chapter 12, entitled "The New Hedonism."

• The “Summum Bonum” Fallacy
• Pleasure Identified As the Telos

Sorry for the delay in posting this week's episode, but it will be up "soon."

Just a note while editing is underway:

Joshua observes in this episode that Lucretius mentions pleasure many times, but "bonum summum" only once. We didn't comment on it in the episode but it seems to me that that in itself is significant in terms of the priority (or lack thereof) that an orthodox Epicurean like Lucretius placed on discussing the two topics: much attention to "pleasure" but not so much to "the greatest good."

Episode 173 of the podcast is now available!

This episode mentions Eudoxus. A separate thread has been created to carry forward that conversation in more detail:

Thread

Eudoxus - Precursor to Epicurus and More Like Him Than Aristippus?

Another topic briefly mentioned in Episode 173, and someone else we need to spend more time exploring - EUDOXUS:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudoxus_of_Cnidus



Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics,^[11] attributes to Eudoxus an argument in favor of hedonism—that is, that pleasure is the ultimate good that activity strives for. According to Aristotle, Eudoxus put forward the following arguments for this position:

1. All things, rational and irrational, aim at pleasure; things aim at what they believe

…

Cassius

May 12, 2023 at 7:51 PM