David Brooks (in the New York Times) on anti- semitism: “On college campuses, many young people have been raised in a climate of moral relativism and have no experience with those with virulent evil beliefs. They sometimes assume that if Israel is hated, then it must be because of its cruel and colonial policies in …
Continue reading ‘Managing to keep two issues separate in one’s mind’ »
Epicurus believed in the connection between learning and happiness. To him the purpose of education was to attune the mind to the pleasures of life, whether that meant a long lunch with friends or an afternon on a tropical beach, under a coconut palm. The mind that has ceased questioning and learning is a mind …
“You are pleased to think [Epicurus] uneducated. The reason is that he refused to consider any education worth the name that did not help to school us in happiness. Should he have spent his time, as you encourage Triarius and me to do, in perusing poets, who give us nothing solid and useful, but merely …
The aim is not only to live a pleasant life, but, if possible to participate in the creation of a counterculture that gives you a pleasant life, as un-stressful as possible. This process has to be ongoing because of the corruption of society. We live in a consumerist society where empty desires and values are …
“Some Athenians saw Epicurus and his ideas as a threat to social stability. A philosophy that set personal pleasure as life’s highest goal and that openly advocated self-interest could dissolve the glue they believed held the republic together: altruism. Epicurus’s brand of self-centeredness, they argued, did not make for good citizenship”. (Travels with Epicurus, by …
