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- Welcome (Make Any Suggestions For Additions to Agenda Here)
- Review Of Latest Forum Posts and New Participants
- Review of Recent Events
- We’ll start new series of Key Quotes
- In future we may do the same thing for the Comparison Chart
- We will return to Epicurea Discussion when Bryan Returns
- Epicurea Discussion - start U227b
add a ! here [[EPICUREA 2026 -01.pdf]]
- Tonight: Nothing Comes From Nothing Or Goes To Nothing
- Idealism vs Realism - What is the Issue?
- Godfrey - Epicurean gods. Not a lot of background info.
- Steve - Epicurus reacts to Platonism. Idealism was a secret knowledge for the elite. Epicureanism is real-world and concrete and for everyone.
- Kalosyni - Consciousness is at center of issue - religion is idealism vs “physicalism”
- Tau Phi - Agrees with oil and water description. Idealism focuses on supremacy of mind; materialist / realist is focus on observation. Idealism bores him because it is fairy tales. Fancy ideas muddy the water. He sees a trace of this in Epicurean philosophy such as “the sage” and of “gods.” He might prefer the physicalist term.
- Martin - Idealism in Plato sees a true world and this world is emmanation of that one. HE thinks the blog page is wrong in that it sees materialists as pessimistic Chart is completely worthless
- Joshua - The definitions in the article are poor. Ontology - What Exists? Idealism, Realism, Materialism/
- Idealism is the claim that the universe of experience does not exist apart from mind’s capacity to perceive/reason about it.
- Realism is the claim that things exist independently of our experience.
- Materialism is a realist position that answers the question of what that real world is made of.
- Epicurus both a realist and a materialist.
- Question of intersection of “conceptual thinking” vs “idealistic thinking”
- Joshua - You don’t have to be an idealist to talk about concepts.
