Epicureanism

Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Epicureanism is a school of philosophical thought founded by Epicurus in the 4th century BCE, continuing well into the 3rd century CE. Its central ethical doctrine places personal happiness as the supreme good, to include freedom from fear, worry and pain.

This is not the path of unbridled hedonism, as some of its medieval Christian opponents suspected (most likely due to developments among subsequent Epicurean followers combined with Epicurus’ disbelief in an afterlife).

Epicurean cosmology regarded the universe as an aggregate of atoms, indestructible and randomly patterning themselves throughout eternity in a void, not being directed by any kind of providence—i.e. without a “hand of God.” However, Epicurus believed in the existence of the gods, seeing them as composed of finer atoms than the stuff of the visible world. But he didn’t believe in the Platonic Forms nor, as mentioned, in an afterlife.

Related Posts » Epicurism

Related articles

• Why Does Epicurus Think That His Radical Views Will Be Persuasive To The Average Person? (timlshort.wordpress.com)
• How Are We Getting Epicurious? | Philologos | Forward | 27 February 2012 (forward.com)
• The Stoics and the Epicureans on the soul (philosophyafterdark.wordpress.com)
• “An Epicurean Voyage through Pakistan” (dawn.com)
• Could everyone have a philosophy and even religion of their own? (beinghuman.blogs.fi)
• Modern Epicureans (veritasmizzou.wordpress.com)
• The Epicurean Birder Reveals: Five Places to Get Fat While Birding – a New Series for Culinary Review (prweb.com)

Epicurus

Epicurus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Epicurus (c.341-270 BCE) was a Greek materialist philosopher, born on the island of Samos who founded a school at Mitylene in 310 BCE. In 305 BCE he opened a school of philosophy in Athens, leading an exemplary life of simplicity and temperance.

From a few extant letters and fragments, we learn that Epicurus believed that happiness was the highest good and that life ended at the point of death. This was not the path of wanton hedonism, as some medieval Christian opponents suspected, but rather deliverance from pain and worry.

The Christian disdain for Epicurus, aside from his disbelief in the afterlife, was exacerbated by some of his followers who advocated sensual pleasure-seeking as the highest goal in life. While Epicurus did see pleasure and pain as standards against which to measure a successful or unsuccessful life, he also advocated restraint. And his understanding of pleasure was more akin to the notion of tranquility than a succession of ephemeral thrills.

Related Posts » Epicureanism, Epicurism

Related articles

• Epicureanism (earthpages.wordpress.com)
• How Are We Getting Epicurious? | Philologos | Forward | 27 February 2012 (forward.com)
• Epicurus (fermentation.typepad.com)
• Why Does Epicurus Think That His Radical Views Will Be Persuasive To The Average Person? (timlshort.wordpress.com)
• Stoicism, Epicurism, Hume, and Death: Can Only an Atheist Experience Resurrection? (18thandfairfax.wordpress.com)
• Epicurus: The Greek Philosopher We Shouldn’t Have Forgotten (findingthenextstep.wordpress.com)
• Happiness and Death (phl2121.wordpress.com)

Epicurism

Epicurian Postcard / Epicure de Rappel (Photo credit: Pierre Metivier)

Today, epicurism usually means the pursuit of pleasure, as in fine cuisine, wine-tasting, etc. This everyday usage distorts the original doctrines of the philosophical school of Epicureanism.

Related Posts » Epicurus

Related articles

• Epicureanism (earthpages.wordpress.com)
• How Are We Getting Epicurious? | Philologos | Forward | 27 February 2012 (forward.com)
• London’s Finest Food To Feature At Quintessentially Epicure (prweb.com)
• CEO Corner: Epicure Market’s Jason Starkman (miami.cbslocal.com)
• Stoicism, Epicurism, Hume, and Death: Can Only an Atheist Experience Resurrection? (18thandfairfax.wordpress.com)
• Quintessentially Epicure Presents An Unforgettable Culinary Experience (prweb.com)

Fatalism

choose determinism by alyceobvious via Flickr

Fatalism (also called determinism) is the philosophical and religious belief that life (and by implication history) is strictly predetermined or unalterable, governed by the laws of necessity. There’s no room for free will here. All apparent choices are perceived as resulting from past influences.

Some who believe in the illusion of free will argue that fatalism and the belief in free will are the same. The argument goes as follows:

Most theologians will tell you that you are free to choose but God knows in advance how you are going to choose. That means that you may believe you’re choosing but your’re really not. Why? Well, because God created you in the first place, knowing, all along, how you’d make your choices in life.

So where’s the free will? critics of the belief in free will will ask.

Defenders of the belief in free will usually reply as follows, appealing to ethics:

God made human beings free, otherwise they would be of no value. The presence of evil in the world enables us to learn why it’s good to choose the Good and shun the bad. If we didn’t have free will, we’d be no better than mindless machines.¹ And God, being Good, made us better than machines. That is, God made us free.

I might add to this debate that the fatalist critique about God creating us in the first place is an argument bound up in the human idea of linear time. The Swiss psychiatrist and thinker Carl Jung falls into this trap when talking about God in his Answer to Job. Jung is not strictly a fatalist but his many comments about God complicate his outlook. Sometimes he seems like an innovative Christian. Other times he comes off like a New Age pantheist. And when talking about being inconsistent, he simply asks, “who isn’t inconsistent?”

I mention Jung’s approach because it highlights the difference between those who have it all figured out by an official church teaching vs. those who want to figure things out for themselves. That is, Jung illustrates the difference between the passive acceptance of dogma² vs. individual investigation. Interestingly enough, each camp tends to demonize the other.

—

¹ This argument is now complicated by the fact that some software can appear to learn and “choose” new routines. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

² This in contrast to those who say they accept dogma after much thought and experience, all of which, they say, supports the dogma. An example here would be someone who believes they receive a revelation about the Christian Trinity. Also, some say that the belief in a dogma is a “divine gift” (without the need for a great revelation), so this debate can get complicated.

Related Posts » Determinism, Epicureanism, Providence, Soteriology, Teleology, Theodicy

Related articles

• Carl Jung and Real Estate (buy-miamirealestate.com)
• Paul Rudd, Carl Jung, And God (mikefriesen05.wordpress.com)
• Freedom slumbers (knotsinmythinking.wordpress.com)
• Is Free Will an Illusion? (3quarksdaily.com)
• On Meeting Carl Gustav Jung (psychologytoday.com)
• Carl Gustav Jung – The World Within (dphilosophy.wordpress.com)
• A Dangerous Method whips up a fantasy with a female archetype (guardian.co.uk)
• ArtEsoteric Promo FIVEBLUEAPPLES (fiveblueapples.wordpress.com)

Hellenistic Civilization

Ancient Greek buildings and structures in Athens via Wikipedia

Hellenistic civilization refers to the ancient Greek people and their culture after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE.

In sharp contrast to today’s Greece, struggling to fight off social and economic collapse, ancient Greece was a highly respected cultural powerhouse whose influence spread throughout the ancient world.

In those days, cultivated people spoke both Latin and Greek. And the Hellenistic age was, for all intents and purposes, a highpoint in Greek civilization, in terms of both its creative output and its general influence.

Hellenistic civilization was preceded by the Classical Hellenic period, and followed by Roman rule over the areas Greece had earlier dominated – even though much of Greek culture, religion, art and literature still permeated Rome’s rule, whose elite spoke and read Greek as well as Latin.¹

Bust of Ptolemy I Soter, king of Egypt (305 BC–282 BC) and founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty via Wikipedia

The Hellenistic Age extends from Alexander’s death to the beginning of the Roman Empire in 31 BCE.

A series of dynasties, including the Ptolemies and Seleucids, dominated the region between Greece and Northern India.

Hellenistic philosophy was based in Athens from approximately 300 BCE to 200 CE. Among the many subjects explored, its chief concerns were to outline the ideal life and to develop empiricism. Hellenistic philosophy’s most prominent branches are Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism.

But Hellenistic culture was diverse. It wasn’t just about hard-headed thinking. Some believe that the roots of astrology can be traced to Hellenistic Egypt.

—

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_civilization

Related Posts » Tarot

Related articles

• After Alexander: The Temptations of Hellenism (thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com)
• Babylonian Dreaming (online.wsj.com)
• Alexandria and the Hellenistic World – Alexander the Great, library, inventions, Egypt, Macedonians (moyak.com)
• CFP: The Many Faces of a Hellenistic King (rogueclassicism.com)
• PHALANX VERSUS LEGION Analysis of the Greco-Roman conflict in the Hellenistic era (stefanosskarmintzos.wordpress.com)
• CONF: The Many Faces of a Hellenistic King (rogueclassicism.com)
• A parade? I’ll drink to that (thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com)
• Source Analysis of Plutarch’s The Life of Demetrius (socyberty.com)
• Charlotte Casiraghi Loves Ancient Languages! (rogueclassicism.com)
• * JOB: Hellenist @ UTennessee Knoxville (tenure track) (rogueclassicism.com)

Medieval

Depiction of St. Thomas Aquinas from the Demidoff Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli via Wikipedia

Medieval is a term that usually but not always describes a period of European history. Historical references are sometimes made, for instance, to Medieval India. So this makes the term a bit difficult to define.

The term is also difficult to define because it may be determined by various criteria. Are the dates for the Medieval period set by achievements in art, economics, technology, standard of living, morality, social issues or critical thinking?

Also called the Middle Ages, the Medieval period is generally seen as running from about 1000 CE to 1500 CE, a time when a relative few kings, notables, literati and Church leaders had a firm, exploitative and sometimes ruthless grip on the masses. As for the people who made up the masses, they for the most part were of dramatically lower economic and educational status.

Some say the Middle Ages differ from the Medieval period, with the former beginning about 600 CE. Others use the terms interchangeably, with the Medieval period also beginning in 600 CE or 1000 CE. And yet some see the Medieval period beginning somewhere between the Council of Nicea (313 CE) and the Sack of Rome (410 CE), and extending to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE.

The term ‘Middle Ages’ was first used in the 16th century by Renaissance writers describing the period from 600 CE to about 1400 CE because they viewed their own civilization as a reinstatement and elaboration of themes prevalent in ancient Greece and Rome.

Recent views of the Medieval period, whatever it may be, question the idea that it was backward. Several innovations were made, although they were not necessarily as dramatic, technologically speaking, as they were within the periods before and after medieval times. Medieval theologians such as Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, came up with some of the most amazingly subtle thinking, on a variety of topics, known to mankind. Likewise, Christian polyphonic devotional music underwent dramatic innovations during this time.

—

Search Think Free » à Kempis (Thomas), Alchemy, Archangel, Aristotle, Astrology, Avatar, E-mail, Epicureanism, Epicurus, Francis of Assisi, (St.), Henry of Ghent, Holy Grail, Homer, Judaism, Lewis (C. S.), Lilith, Marx, (Karl), Mercury, Narcissus and Goldmund, Occam’s razor, Proclus, Quiddity, Scholastics, Tokugawa, Vaisya, Werewolf, Zodiac

Related Articles

• Plan for New US Embassy Includes Design Features from Medieval Castles (neatorama.com)
• A Brief History of the Latin Language: Medieval Latin (brighthub.com)
• The Sims Medieval Announced (cinemablend.com)
• The Sims goes medieval in 2011 (geek.com)
• Inside The Medieval Mind: Knowledge (camelswithhammers.com)
• What’s ‘medieval’ about stoning people to death? (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• Get Medieval with New Series from EA’s Award-Winning the Sims Studio (eon.businesswire.com)
• Medieval legal history panel at the Kalamazoo medieval conference (volokh.com)
• Archaeologists say Hartlington Stones in Yorkshire Dales were Medieval furnaces (marklord.info)
• Sheep to Sheet (of Parchment) (finebooksmagazine.com)

Add more, report errors or voice your opinion by posting a comment

Providence

PUESTA DE SOL EN PROVIDENCIA / SUNSET IN PROVIDENCE: lcrf

Providence is a theological term referring to the belief that God is free to choose the course of temporal events in all of creation.

This idea stands in contrast to the idea of fate, which points to a fixed, unalterable sequence of events. It also differs from the concept of chance, which infers a random, unregulated universe.

Opponents to the idea of providence stem back to ancient times. St. Thomas Aquinas notes in his Summa Theologica:

Certain persons totally denied the existence of providence, as Democritus and the Epicureans, maintaining that the world was made by chance (“The providence of God,” Prima Pars, Q. 22)

Others ancients add an interesting wrinkle to the debate by claiming that natural events are ruled by God, but particular human events are not. To this idea St. Thomas replies according to standard Catholic teaching:

…all things are subject to divine providence, not only in general, but even in their own individual being (ibid.).

If God really is in control of everything, or, at least, has knowledge of how all events will unfold in the course of human history, many ask why so many bad things are found in our world. This leads to the problem of evil, a theological issue which scholars have called theodicy.

» Determinism, Epicureanism, Fatalism, Free will, Social Darwinism, Soteriology, Teleology

Add to this, report errors, suggest edits or voice your opinion by leaving a comment

Suffering

Thank you for your suffering: Locace / Lena

Suffering

Life usually involves some degree of suffering but human beings have interpreted the experience in diverse ways.

Some believe that suffering is meaningless and something to be avoided. This view is prevalent in Buddhism, where meditation is said to eradicate suffering.

For many Hindus suffering is a necessary teacher. As we work through our personal karma the unpleasant aspects of life can teach us not to do the ethically bad things that, so Hindus believe, caused the suffering in the first place.

Epicureanism attempts to minimize suffering through a life of prudence and termperance.

John Stuart Mill‘s utilitarianism minimizes suffering through a cost-benefit analysis of all actions, a position which Mill felt was ethically equivalent to Kant’s categorical imperative.

Freud saw suffering as an inevitable aspect of the human condition. He wrote that “Psychoanalysis can cure neurotic suffering but not normal human unhappiness.” For Freud individuals are, in effect, the walking wounded.

Catholicism recognizes the value of suffering, i.e. unavoidable suffering permitted by God, but doesn’t condone persecution nor advocate the pathological role playing of ‘victim’ or ‘martyr.’ For Catholics suffering may be redemptive and lead to increased purity and wisdom.

This notion of redemptive suffering differs from sheer depair or destitution in that the grace of God enables one to embrace one’s particular ‘cross of suffering’ with dignity and, with some exceptional persons like St. Francis of Assisi, even gladness and joy.

Along these lines, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, a prayer accepted by Catholics, asks God for a reasonably happy life here and a supremely happy one in the afterlife.

The idea of redemptive suffering has been further institutionalized by an organization called Knights at the Foot of the Cross (KFC) based on the life of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who died by lethal injection of carbolic acid in a Nazi death camp after willingly accepting the torture of a starvation bunker in place of another prisoner. KFC is an offshoot of The Militia of the Immaculata, an international evangelical movement founded by St. Kolbe in 1917 (http://www.consecration.com/).

Last, we have those positively-minded people who may hold no particular spiritual belief other than the idea that wisdom can come from suffering.

» Alchemy, Book of Job, Buddhism, Candide, Dukkha, Eightfold Path, Eve, Evil, Four Noble Truths, Karma Transfer, Kowalska (Maria Faustina Helena, St.), Magnetizers, Mental Illness, Nirvana, Ramakrishna (Sri), Sacks (Oliver), Skandhas, Teresa of Ávila (St.), Visistadvaita, Voltaire

Add to this, report errors, suggest edits or voice your opinion

Teleology

Do modernist teleologies go to heaven? by Quinn Dombrowski

Teleology (Gk: telos = end, purpose; logos = discourse)

This is the philosophical and theological idea that all of creation is directed toward and unfolds according to a meaningful and rational outcome.

In philosophy one of the most famous teleologies is that of G. W. F. Hegel, where a presumed World Spirit guides human history through successive resolutions of contradictions.

According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality—consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society—leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up (Aufhebung) to a higher unity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelian#Progress_through_contradictions_and_negations)

In social theory, Karl Marx is said to have ‘turned Hegelian theory on its head’ by creating a historical teleology devoid of spirituality that predicts the supposed inevitability of Communism.

Marx believed that human history went through definite socioeconomic stages:

1. Primitive Communism
2. Feudalism
3. Capitalism
4. Communism.

For Marx Capitalism inevitably passes into Communism.

In theology different teleologies have been devised. Some stress God as an omnicient and external ‘designer’ to creation while other say God is within the creation, learning and evolving as things progress through time.

On the Web:

• http://www.kheper.net/topics/cosmology/teleology.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

» Determinism, Epicureanism, Fatalism, Free will, Providence, Soteriology, Theodicy

Add to this, report errors, suggest edits or voice your opinion by posting a comment