Epicureanism did inspire libertine culture in isolated sects, but Epicurus himself rejected an ethics of sensory indulgence, and he would have disowned latter-day 'Epicureanism' as a fussy, expensive, unphilosophical approach to eating and drinking.

In the old systems, hierarchies emanate power from above to below through forms of line management and are ideologically supported by cosmologies and theologies featuring celestial rulers and their deputies - the 'rule of the best.'

Epicurus thought of justice as an agreement to prevent people harming and being harmed.

About 70% of what I've written about is centered on the clashes and conformities between the emerging life and physical sciences and older metaphysical frameworks in the 17th and 18th centuries. The other 30% consists of one-off essays or researches into other intriguing contemporary topics such as visual experience, aesthetics, social justice issues, and the epistemology of moral knowledge.

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.

There are people who organise the contest, winners, losers, and people who benefit from the contest taking place.

Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms.