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.

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.

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.

Morality has in the past made progress when we broadened the category of things we weren't permitted to harm (animals, 'infidels'); saw through some delusions and rationalisations about what harms are good for people themselves (prison punishment, hysterectomies for unhappy 1950s wives); and readjusted our for-the-good of others criteria so as to demand only reasonable sacrifices (ceasing to use children as handy chimney sweeps).

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.

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.

Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals.