Damascene Philosophy

Schools of thought

Epicureanism

From c. 307 BCE

The school of the Garden, which taught that a simple life among friends, free from fear of death and the gods, is the happiest one.

The core idea

Epicurus founded his school in a garden in Athens. Its goal was happiness, understood as pleasure, but the pleasure it prized was calm: freedom from pain in the body and disturbance in the mind. This makes it a form of hedonism that recommends moderation, friendship and withdrawal from politics.

Its physics supported its ethics. The world is atoms and void, the soul disperses at death, and the gods do not intervene. So there is nothing to fear after death, and no reason to be anxious about divine punishment. The Roman poet Lucretius gave the school's teachings their most famous expression.

What they hold

  • Pleasure, understood as absence of pain and anxiety, is the highest good.
  • Only natural and necessary desires should be satisfied; the rest bring trouble.
  • Death is nothing to us, since where death is, we are not.
  • Friendship is among the greatest goods of a happy life.

The main criticisms

Stoic and Christian critics accused the Epicureans of selfishness and of reducing human life to animal pleasure, a reputation that still clings to the word 'epicure'. Philosophers also question whether death really cannot harm us, as the deprivation account argues.

“Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”

Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 2, trans. R. D. Hicks

Key figures

341 – 270 BCE

Epicurus

The philosopher who made pleasure the goal of life, defined it as freedom from pain and fear, and argued that death is nothing to us.

c. 99 – c. 55 BCE

Lucretius

A Roman poet who set out Epicurus' philosophy in a long poem, including the argument that death is no more to be feared than the time before we were born.

Where it comes up

Question

Should we fear death?

Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us: when it comes, we are gone. Few have found the argument convincing, and fewer have refuted it.

Thought experiment

Would you plug into the experience machine?

A machine can give you any experiences you want, indistinguishable from reality, for the rest of your life. Would you plug in?

Question

Does life have meaning without being given one?

If no one designed us for a purpose, is a human life meaningful anyway, or do we have to make meaning ourselves, or is the search itself the problem?

Question

Should you only care about what you control?

The Stoics divided the world into what is up to you and what is not, and argued that peace comes from caring only about the first.

Further reading