Epicurus College

In this session we will set the stage for you to understand where Epicurus and the Epicurean school fit into the history of philosophy.

1. The Historical Background of Epicurean Philosophy
1. Epicurus was born on the island of Samos, a Greek island off the coast of Asia Minor (now called Turkey), in 341 BC. This was seven years after death of Plato and seven years before Alexander conquered Persia.
2. Few commentators over the ages have been neutral about Epicurus.  Epicurus was at the same time both the most revered and most reviled of all founders of Greco-Roman philosophical schools.  Those schools which opposed him eventually won out, and as result many of ancient Epicurean texts were lost, and many commentaries that have survived are slanted against him.
1. For seven hundred years Epicurus was very popular throughout the Greco-Roman world.  Statues of Epicurus were erected, his handbooks memorized and carried by his students, and on the twentieth of every month his followers assembled in his name.
2. Throughout the same period Epicurus' enemies ceaselessly worked to undermine his school.  Epicurean philosophy was attacked by Platonists, Stoics, and Christians, and his name was an abomination to the Jews.
3. As a result of these controversies, much of what has been written about Epicurus in both the ancient and modern world is wrong.
4. This same warning is the opening argument of the modern scholar most responsible for recovering Epicurus from these controversies. The classicist Norman DeWitt, in his 1954 study Epicurus and His Philosophy, opens by telling every reader to "think of [Epicurus] at one and the same time as the most revered and the most reviled of all founders of thought in the Graeco-Roman world" – and to read every ancient testimony about him with the awareness that most of it was written by people who hated him and had reason to misrepresent him. DeWitt's method, followed throughout this course, is simple: read what Epicurus himself wrote first, and treat hostile secondhand accounts with corresponding caution. DeWitt makes exactly this point about Cicero by name, in a 1939 review: "Cicero was a crafty old trial lawyer and he deliberately argued to make points… I do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it completely."
3. Epicurus employed teaching devices which are important in understanding his philosophy.
1. Setting The 'Attitude' or (diathesis in Greek). This device stresses that the attitude to take toward the subject at the beginning is very important.  For example, the first set of Principal Doctrines establish the attitude to take toward gods, death, pleasure, and pain.
2. Starting With An 'Outline' or 'Synoptic View.' This means starting with the 'big picture' before proceeding to detailed discussion of the finer points, so that the fine points are kept in perspective. Epicurus' teachings were therefore presented in order from the general to the particular.
2. Warning:  View The Literature On Epicurus With Great Care
1. Little remains of the trustworthy texts other than a small amount of original material from Epicurus, supplemented by the poem of Lucretius. The secondary literature is mostly hostile and cannot be accepted at face value. Most modern scholars prefer follow a single orthodox approach, and they accept the criticisms of Epicurus' enemies, as a result of which the picture of Epicurus dominant today is greatly distorted.
2. Another device used by Epicurus was to clearly set out and contrast “True Opinions” against “False Opinions,” which we will now do in regard to Epicurus himself.  You will see many of these false opinions repeated throughout the internet and wherever the orthodox views of Epicurus remain unchallenged.
3. True and False Opinions About Epicurus
1. Epicurus’ Place In Greek Philosophy:
1. True:  Epicurus came immediately after Plato (idealism; absolutism) and Pyrrho (the skeptic). Platonism and Skepticism were among the views that Epicurus fought against the hardest.
2. False: Epicurus taught his views as a response to Stoicism.  This is historically false because Epicurean philosophy was fully developed before Zeno began teaching Stoicism in Athens.
2. Epicurus’ Attitude Toward Learning:
1. True: Epicurus was well educated and a trained thinker
2. False: Epicurus was against the study of science and literature, and was an enemy of all culture. This charge rests on a single line attributed to Epicurus by hostile sources – "flee from every form of culture" – that Diogenes Laertius himself frames as slander, surrounding it with testimony from Epicurus's own bitter enemies, including Timocrates, the disgruntled brother of Epicurus's closest friend Metrodorus, before delivering his own verdict: "these calumniators are all mad." Even taken at face value the line cannot mean what the charge claims, since Epicurus's own genuine surviving Letter to Pythocles is itself a systematic work of scientific instruction addressed to that very student. What Epicurus actually rejected, by his own account of his education, was the standard Greek curriculum of poetic mythology about the gods that could not give a true account of nature – not learning, history, or culture as such.
3. Epicurus’ Goal For Himself And His Work:
1.  True: Epicurus was not only a philosopher, but was also a moral reformer rebelling against his teachers and against prevailing norms in Greek society.
2.  False:  Epicurus did nothing more than copy the work of others, and to make matters worse he was ungrateful to those from whom he copied.
4. Epicurus’ Place in Greek Scientific Thought:
1. True: Epicurus saw himself as was returning to the Ionian tradition of studying nature by observation, rather than through abstract logic.  This tradition had been interrupted by Socrates and Plato, and Epicurus therefore became a strong Anti-Platonist.
2. False: Epicurean scientific thought simply copied Democritus.
5. Epicurus’ Role As a Systematizer:
1. True:  Epicurus considered a sweeping range of issues and attempted to create a synthesis and improvement of all prior philosophical thought.
2. False: Epicurus was a sloppy and unorganized thinker whose system-building is not worth attention.  Epicurus is worthy of study only because he defined pleasure as absence of pain, thereby confusing and misleading philosophy students of all ensuing ages.
6. Epicurean  Dogmatism:
1. True: Epicurus taught that knowledge was possible, and that certain conclusions should be held with confidence.  Epicurus' goal was to establish a system by which we could be confident of our conclusions, and he detested skepticism, which the Epicureans imputed even to Plato and Aristotle.
2. False: Epicurus' was a fool because he renounced inquiry and suggested that his students take his word that he was right.
7. Epicurus' View of Truth:
1. True: Epicurus revolted against Plato and those who preached that "reason" is the standard of truth and has a divine existence of its own.  Epicurus taught instead that Nature provides the norm of truth, and the sensations when properly used are the source fordetermining that which we consider to be true.
2. False: Epicurus was an "empiricist" and declared that sensations are the only source of knowledge, and that all sensations are "true."
8. Epicurus' Method For Determining Truth:
1. True: Epicurus taught reasoning chiefly by deduction. For example, atoms cannot be observed directly; their existence and properties must be determined by deduction.  The principles thereby deduced from these unseen and unsensed atoms serve as standards for assessing truth. 
2. False: Epicurus was a strict "empiricist" in the modern sense, and taught that reasoning must be conducted by starting with particular sensations which we accept as fully true.
9. Epicurus' As A Man of Action
1. True: Epicurus founded a truly missionary philosophy. Epicurus' disposition as combative and he was a strong leader, organizer, and campaigner.
2. False: Epicurus was a pacifist, a quietist, effeminate ,and a moral invalid.  Epicurus taught retirement from and non-engagement with the world. This picture cannot survive contact with Epicurus's own biography or the historical record of his followers. Epicurus deposited his own philosophical works in the official public archive of Athens and dated them by the reigning magistrate exactly as any citizen's legal documents were dated, and he left a will, valid under Athenian law, providing for his school, for his friends' children, and for the freeing of slaves – the conduct of a fully engaged citizen, not a man in retreat from the world. His followers included some of the most consequentially engaged political figures of antiquity: the diplomat Cineas of Thessaly, who served as King Pyrrhus's chief adviser; Atticus, the great Roman banker and confidant of Cicero; and Gaius Cassius Longinus, who led the conspiracy that assassinated Julius Caesar and corrected Cicero's own misreadings of Epicurean doctrine directly, in a letter written from the war camps of the Roman civil war: "in my next letter I shall let loose upon you such a rabble of Stoic boors that you will proclaim Catius a true-born Athenian… Epicurus himself, from whom all the Catiuses and Amafiniuses in the world… derive their origin, lays it down that 'to live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice.'" The "retirement" Epicurus actually counseled was retirement from the anxious, never-satisfied chase after fame and power for their own sake – not from public life, civic duty, or engagement with the world, exactly as Diogenes Laertius describes the conduct of the Epicurean wise man in his own biography of Epicurus:

   “Nor will he take part in public life… He will engage in lawsuits and will leave writings behind him, but will not deliver speeches on public occasions… he will gather together a school… He will give lectures in public… He will pay court to a king, if occasion demands.”

   Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus
10. Epicurus' View of Self-Interest
1. True: Epicurus taught that we should make friends wherever possible.
2. False: Epicurus was a totally egoistic hedonist and followed a narrow view of his own self-interest above all.
4. The Traditions That Have Distorted Modern Readings of Epicurus
1. Because so much ancient testimony about Epicurus was written by his enemies, the distortions did not end in antiquity. Five identifiable traditions have shaped, and frequently misled, the way Epicurus has been read ever since, and a careful student should be able to name each one and recognize its fingerprints in a given description of the philosophy.
2. Stoicism imposes duty, cosmic citizenship, submission to fate, and the suppression of emotion as the standards by which a philosophy of life should be judged, and treats Epicurus's rejection of these standards as a deficiency rather than the deliberate position it actually was.
3. Platonism posits a "truer" world of ideal Forms standing behind the world we actually experience, demotes the senses to mere opinion, and elevates virtue and the abstract care of the soul above pleasure as the goal of life.
4. Supernatural religion treats pleasure itself as morally suspect and inner tranquility as the highest good, and reads Epicurean teaching through a monastic or ascetic lens it was never meant to fit. Judaism's Talmud names the followers of Epicurus specifically – as "Apikorsim" – among the small number of positions whose holders are excluded from the world to come, precisely because Epicurean teaching denies divine providence and judgment after death. Christianity's opposition went further still: the scholar Norman DeWitt argued at length that the very name "Christian" was coined at Antioch specifically to distinguish that new movement from the disciples of Epicurus, and that Paul's warning against

   “the weak and beggarly elements”

   Galatians 4:9
   is a direct sneer at Epicurean atomic theory, using the Greek word for "elements" that was also the recognized term for atoms.
5. Skepticism, in both its Academic and more extreme Pyrrhonist forms, holds that genuine knowledge is impossible – a position Epicurus treated with open contempt, since it makes confident, happy living impossible.
6. Humanism substitutes rational self-restraint and service to others for pleasure as the foundational good, while frequently absorbing Stoic and Christian moral assumptions without acknowledging where they came from.
7. Therefore, any modern description of what Epicurus taught should be checked against a simple test: if the description would fit comfortably inside a Stoic, Platonic, religious, skeptical, or Humanist framework, it is probably not an accurate description of what Epicurus actually taught.