Epicurus

341-271 BCE · Greek (Athenian citizen, born in the Athenian colony of Samos) · Ethics, Hedonism, Atomism, Philosophy of Death, Theology, Philosophy of Friendship

Don't fear god; don't worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure.

Born on the Athenian colony of Samos in 341 BCE, Epicurus established the Garden outside Athens by 306 — a philosophical community unlike any other in antiquity: women, slaves, and free men living together as friends, practicing a way of life rather than debating one. He died in 271 BCE from kidney stones, writing in his final hours that the joy of philosophical conversation with a friend outweighed the physical agony. It was the system in practice.

Topics Epicurus addresses

• pleasure as the highest good
• ataraxia
• aponia
• the four-part cure
• katastematic vs kinetic pleasure
• the desire taxonomy
• death is nothing to us
• the symmetry argument
• the canonic
• prolepsis
• atoms and void
• the swerve
• the material soul
• the gods exist but do not concern themselves with us
• the intermundia
• friendship as supreme practical good
• justice as compact
• live unnoticed
• against the fear of death
• against superstition and the fear of the gods
• the infinity of worlds
• emergent properties of macroscopic bodies
• the swerve and freedom of the will
• against Plato

Converse with Epicurus on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Epicurus's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.