![]() Only three letters written by him-the letters to Menoeceus, Pythocles, and Herodotus-and two collections of quotes-the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings-have survived intact, along with a few fragments of his other writings. Of the over 300 works said to have been written by Epicurus about various subjects, the vast majority have been destroyed. He openly allowed women and slaves to join the school as a matter of policy. Epicurus and his followers were known for eating simple meals and discussing a wide range of philosophical subjects. Influenced by Democritus, Aristippus, Pyrrho, and possibly the Cynics, he turned against the Platonism of his day and established his own school, known as "the Garden", in Athens. ![]() He was born on the Greek island of Samos to Athenian parents. إپيقور ( Epicurus ؛ باليونانية: Ἐπίκουρος code: grc is deprecated Epikouros؛ 341–270 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and sage who founded Epicureanism, a highly influential school of philosophy. Hit the banner below to access it now.Seneca the Younger, Hermarchus, Diogenes of Oenoanda, Lucretius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Metrodorus, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philodemus, Gassendi, Jun Tsuji If you’re looking to delve deeper into the teachings of Epicurus, we’ve created a short Epicureanism explainer, as well as a reading list of the best works of and about Epicureanism. ![]() What do you think of this analysis? Do you think Epicurus is right in declaring death is nothing to fear? Or is the prospect of non-consciousness, of being deprived of experience and time, rightly feared? So, Epicurus advises, don’t worry about being dead: it won’t even last a millisecond. Our last conscious experience would have seemed but a moment ago. If after death our consciousness was to be magically resurrected millions of years in the future, we’d have no sense of the time that had passed. As the Roman philosopher Lucretius also advises in his beautiful reflection on mortality, just like before we were born, in death we won’t experience anything that happens - no pleasure, no pain, no anxiety, no fear - for the conscious self simply isn’t there. We characterize anything outside the block as eternal blackness or oblivion, because that’s a tempting conception of ‘nothingness’.īut, by contemplating unconsciousness and dreamless sleep, we can recognize that nothingness isn’t like that. We struggle to comprehend our lives as a finite block of time because we live only inside the block. Join 5,000+ subscribers enjoying one nugget of profundity per week. The non-existence of consciousness thus feels like an outrageous impossibility. We learn objectively that the universe existed before we were born, and that it will continue after our deaths, but from our subjective perspectives all that’s ever existed is our consciousness. Consciousness is all we’ve ever known, and all we ever can know. The reason we struggle to imagine what this state is like is because there is nothing it is like to be in it. There will be no consciousness there to experience silence, darkness, or the passing of time. But death means the experiencing subject no longer exists. So, though on the naturalistic view death is often characterized as an eternal abyss, a black silence, a terrifying nothingness, this characterization is misleading, for it suggests we’ll experience this eternal blackness. Though hours may have passed, we did not experience their passing: we just jumped to the next conscious episode. We do not experience unconsciousness - in dreamless sleep, for instance, we wake in the morning, and our most recent memory is the last thing we did at night. To fully grasp Epicurus’s point, consider what happens when we’re unconscious. And once it does come, we no longer exist.įrom this doctrine arose the epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not I was I am not I do not care) - which is inscribed on the gravestones of Epicurus’s followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.Ī marble bust of the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus (341 - 270 BCE). As such, he believed being dead is not to be feared, for none of us will ever experience it.Īs he puts it in a famous aphorism (from Diogenes Laertius’s celebrated survey of ancient Greek thinkers, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, compiled in the third century CE, and also featured in Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines):ĭeath does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. He rejected the existence of an immaterial soul, or of anything non-physical, and said that the gods have no influence on our lives. Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus advocated an atomic, naturalistic view of the universe. ![]()
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