Philosophy

Epicurus

341 to 270 BC, Samos and Athens

Pleasure as tranquillity: the Garden, the swerve, and freedom from fear.

Lessons

Atoms and the Swerve

Epicurus’ physics: he took Democritus’ atoms and void but added a single, momentous innovation - the swerve ( clinamen ), a tiny, unpredictable deviation in the fall of atoms that breaks strict determinism and makes roo…

Pleasure, Rightly Understood

Epicurus’ much-misunderstood ethics: pleasure is indeed the highest good, but the greatest pleasure is not indulgence - it is ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (freedom from bodily pain), a serene st…

Death Is Nothing to Us

Epicurus’ celebrated argument that death is not an evil and should not be feared - because death is the end of all sensation, and where there is no sensation there is no one to be harmed: ‘where death is, we are not; wh…

The Gods and the Fourfold Cure

Epicurus’ liberation of humanity from the fear of the gods - the gods exist but are blissful and indifferent, taking no part in the world - and his ‘fourfold cure’ (tetrapharmakos): don’t fear god, don’t fear death, goo…

Friendship and the Garden

Epicurus’ exaltation of friendship as the greatest of all the means to a happy life, his community of friends in the Garden, his counsel to withdraw from the turmoil of politics (‘live unknown’), and his account of just…