When1: -306
When2: -30
Who: Epicurean
What: philosophic school
Where: Greece
Detail: Epicurus founded school that developed from Cyrenaic School and included Hermarchus, Polystratus, Metrodorus, Zeno of Sidon, Phaedrus, Apollodorus, Siro, Philodemus, Amafinius, Lucretius, and Colotes. Epicureans lived in communities including slaves, women, and poor.
Epistemology
Concept contents come from perception persistence. Concepts are perception images. Language is material substance that participates in images. Imagination unites images.
Perception contents are the same, so people have same basic ideas. Memory, prediction, hypothesis, or perception clearness and vividness make a criterion for truth. If two clear perceptions exist, two causes exist.
Opinions depend on both concepts and consequences, so perceptions can only refute them.
Ethics
The highest good is pleasure, which comes only from senses. Freedom from all desires, and thus from their pains, is best, because then pleasure is permanent and restful. People should avoid pain, fear, and injury from others. Absence of anxiety and fear {ataraxia, Epicurus} and absence of pain are the highest pleasures. Both together make the objectively good life {eudaimonia, Epicurus}, not just subjectively good or happy.
Active pleasure is desire satisfaction. Passive pleasure is satiation or well-being state, which has no pain and no desire.
Wants can be natural and unavoidable, so people should find as much satisfaction as possible in them. Wants can be artificial, and society can cause wants, so people should avoid them. Most wants are in-between. People need knowledge and insight to judge pleasure and pain and to renounce them if they do not give satisfaction or have too much pain. People should satisfy such wants as much as possible to gain more pleasure.
Mental pleasures, such as beauty and friendship, are better, because people can control them and they are more restful.
Prudent pursuit of pleasure, beauty, and culture is the ideal. Actions should have nobility and morals.
Social duty and responsibility are not important. Individual morals are best.
Immortality does not exist. Religion is not good, because gods do not care about people. Religion and immortality cause fear.
Metaphysics
Atoms are independent and controlled only by themselves. All events are mechanical. Events have no law, necessity, or purpose. Uncaused actions can happen. Because time is infinite, all possible atom combinations have already happened and will repeat again. God and magic do not exist.
Mind
Soul has fire-atoms that scatter from body at death, precluding immortality.
Politics
Societies form only to gain advantage or utility. States are agreements among people not to injure each other.
People's advantage determines laws, not ideas about right and wrong.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Ethics
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0224