January 2014 Meeting

This will be our first meeting for 2014 at our new venue in Potts Point. I am suggesting we consider the follow topic as a basis for discussion:

Stephen Harvey-Brooks (https://www.facebook.com/Mequa?hc_location=stream)(Cross-post from "Naturalism" Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2218407727/ )

A philosophical project: I'm wondering in what ways, if any, the ethics of Epicureanism would need to be modified to fit into a modern scientific naturalistic worldview. ("Ethics" in this sense being the classical sense of "the art of living" or "the good life".)

Apart from the antiquated cosmology (including its purely physical theology), the major sticking point of difference between Epicureanism and modern scientific naturalism is the former's insistence on contra-causal free will, which Epicurus attempted to give a purely physical basis for (and also suggested it was found in other animals too) - a very different kind of free will theory to the later Christian one. Still, I don't find this form of free will tenable in a modern scientific naturalism (despite attempts to root contra-causal free will in quantum theory, which I don't think works).

If, then, one were to formulate a neo-Epicureanism based on the same kind of hedonic calculus and hedonistic virtue ethics of the pleasant life that Epicurus formulated, yet fit into a deterministic or compatibilist worldview without the aspect of contra-causal free will (yet still rejecting fatalism as psychologically dangerous), in what ways in practice would this path differ? It seems that there would be some subtle differences from classical Epicureanism in terms of how freedom and control is conceptualised and exercised.

Much of Epicurus' theory of happiness seems to have been vindicated by modern scientific research, as seen here: http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/12/hedonist-philosopher-epicurus-was-right.php