Catherine Wilson Quotes
The Epicureans denied that the gods had created the world and also denied that they played any role in it.
The higher the coefficient of inequality (Gini coefficient) in a society, the worse things tend to be for those at the bottom.
I think we do have a better understanding now of how moral thought and discourse function.
A moral rule is essentially 'advantage-reducing.' It prohibits you doing something you could do that would serve your interests at someone else's expense.
There's nothing a priori good about equality. One person has three televisions, the other has two, so what?
It used to be that nobody would really argue with a woman, because what she thought (unless it was by way of providing helpful comments about one's own work) just didn't matter.
We need grief as a precursor to emotional refreshment, and so consume it vicariously in somewhat titrated but powerful enough form through engagement with the arts.
There are people who organise the contest, winners, losers, and people who benefit from the contest taking place.
The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.
Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.
Even if the gods did exist, the Epicureans argued, they didn't care about us. Rather, everything comes from nature, and all that really exists are atoms and void, moving and congregating.
I had the idea that there were secret laws of the universe that could explain the baffling human reality around me, and that philosophers maybe had the key to them.
I have to say that some philosophers such as the late Bernard Williams, and I would include myself in this group, would say that tranquillity is overrated as the goal of life.
The (atomic) soul is mortal, and the best life is the one with the least pain and the most pleasure.
Claims like 'Slavery is wrong' are not fully common-sensical, so they must be at least partly theoretical.
Epicurus was not at all interested in what we would call the problems of mass society, and he thought civic politics was just trouble and to be avoided by the wise.
Epicurus thought of justice as an agreement to prevent people harming and being harmed.
Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals.
'Contract' succeeded 'status' as the basic organising principle in modern political vs. ancient society.
We have to gamble, and sometimes lose as George Ainslie argues; this keeps the appetite for life sharp.