Epicurus
341 – 270 BCE · Samos; Athens
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.
Key ideas
Epicurus held that pleasure is the only thing good in itself, but the pleasure he meant was quiet: freedom from bodily pain and from mental disturbance (ataraxia). Lavish pleasures bring anxiety and dependence, so the wise person lives simply, among friends, and satisfies only natural and necessary desires. This makes him a founder of hedonism, though his life was the opposite of what the word now suggests.
He also argued that fear of death is irrational. When we exist, death is not present; when death is present, we no longer exist. Since there is no experience of being dead, being dead cannot be bad for us. The argument is the starting point of the death entry and is still debated through the deprivation account.
His physics was atomist: the world is atoms moving in the void, and the gods, if they exist, take no interest in us. To leave room for free choice he proposed that atoms sometimes swerve unpredictably, an early attempt to reconcile physics with free will.
“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 (1925)
Life, briefly
Epicurus grew up on the island of Samos and set up schools in Mytilene and Lampsacus before moving to Athens around 306 BCE. There he bought a house and garden, and the school took its name, the Garden, from it. Unusually, it admitted women and slaves. He died after a painful illness, writing on his last day that the memory of past conversations with friends outweighed the pain.
Major works
- Letter to Menoeceus
- Letter to Herodotus
- Principal Doctrines
- On Nature (fragments)
Schools of thought
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epicurus
- WikipediaEpicurus