Epicureanism one of the three leading movements constituting Hellenistic philosophy. It was founded by Epicurus (341–271 B.C.), together with his close colleagues Metrodorus (c.331– 278), Hermarchus (Epicurus’s successor as head of the Athenian school), and Polyaenus (d. 278). He set up Epicurean communities at Mytilene, Lampsacus, and finally Athens (306 B.C.), where his school the Garden became synonymous with Epicureanism. These groups set out to live the ideal Epicurean life, detached from political society without actively opposing it, and devoting themselves to philosophical discussion and the cult of friendship. Their correspondence was anthologized and studied as a model of the philosophical life by later Epicureans, for whom the writings of Epicurus and his three cofounders, known collectively as ‘the Men,’ held a virtually biblical status. Epicurus wrote voluminously, but all that survives are three brief epitomes (the Letter to Herodotus on physics, the Letter to Pythocles on astronomy, etc., and the Letter to Menoeceus on ethics), a group of maxims, and papyrus fragments of his magnum opus On Nature. Otherwise, we are almost entirely dependent on secondary citations, doxography, and the writings of his later followers. The Epicurean physical theory is atomistic, developed out of the fifth-century system of Democritus. Per se existents are divided into bodies and space, each of them infinite in quantity. Space is, or includes, absolute void, without which motion would be impossible, while body is constituted out of physically indivisible particles, ‘atoms.’ Atoms are themselves further analyzable as sets of absolute ‘minima,’ the ultimate quanta of magnitude, posited by Epicurus to circumvent the paradoxes that Zeno of Elea had derived from the hypothesis of infinite divisibility. Atoms themselves have only the primary properties of shape, size, and weight. All secondary properties, e.g. color, are generated out of atomic compounds; given their dependent status, they cannot be added to the list of per se existents, but it does not follow, as the skeptical tradition in atomism had held, that they are not real either. Atoms are in constant rapid motion, at equal speed (since in the pure void there is nothing to slow them down). Stability emerges as an overall property of compounds, which large groups of atoms form by settling into regular patterns of complex motion, governed by the three motive principles of weight, collisions, and a minimal random movement, the ‘swerve,’ which initiates new patterns of motion and blocks the danger of determinism. Our world itself, like the countless other worlds, is such a compound, accidentally generated and of finite duration. There is no divine mind behind it, or behind the evolution of life and society: the gods are to be viewed as ideal beings, models of the Epicurean good life, and therefore blissfully detached from our affairs.
Canonic, the Epicurean theory of knowledge, rests on the principle that ‘all sensations are true.’ Denial of empirical cognition is argued to amount to skepticism, which is in turn rejected as a self-refuting position. Sensations are representationally (not propositionally) true. In the paradigm case of sight, thin films of atoms (Greek eidola, Latin simulacra) constantly flood off bodies, and our eyes mechanically report those that reach them, neither embroidering nor interpreting. Inference from these guaranteed (photographic, as it were) data to the nature of external objects themselves involves judgment, and there alone error can occur. Sensations thus constitute one of the three ‘criteria of truth,’ along with feelings, a criterion of values and introspective information, and prolepseis, or naturally acquired generic conceptions. On the basis of sense evidence, we are entitled to infer the nature of microscopic or remote phenomena. Celestial phenomena, e.g., cannot be regarded as divinely engineered (which would conflict with the prolepsis of the gods as tranquil), and experience supplies plenty of models that would account for them naturalistically. Such grounds amount to consistency with directly observed phenomena, and are called ouk antimarturesis (‘lack of counterevidence’). Paradoxically, when several alternative explanations of the same phenomenon pass this test, all must be accepted: although only one of them can be true for each token phenomenon, the others, given their intrinsic possibility and the spatial and temporal infinity of the universe, must be true for tokens of the same type elsewhere. Fortunately, when it comes to the basic tenets of physics, it is held that only one theory passes this test of consistency with phenomena.
Epicurean ethics is hedonistic. Pleasure is our innate natural goal, to which all other values, including virtue, are subordinated. Pain is the only evil, and there is no intermediate state. Philosophy’s task is to show how pleasure can be maximized, as follows: Bodily pleasure becomes more secure if we adopt a simple way of life that satisfies only our natural and necessary desires, with the support of like-minded friends. Bodily pain, when inevitable, can be outweighed by mental pleasure, which exceeds it because it can range over past, present, and future. The highest pleasure, whether of soul or body, is a satisfied state, ‘katastematic pleasure.’ The pleasures of stimulation (‘kinetic pleasures’), including those resulting from luxuries, can vary this state, but have no incremental value: striving to accumulate them does not increase overall pleasure, but does increase our vulnerability to fortune. Our primary aim should instead be to minimize pain. This is achieved for the body through a simple way of life, and for the soul through the study of physics, which achieves the ultimate katastematic pleasure, ‘freedom from disturbance’ (ataraxia), by eliminating the two main sources of human anguish, the fears of the gods and of death. It teaches us (a) that cosmic phenomena do not convey divine threats, (b) that death is mere disintegration of the soul, with hell an illusion. To fear our own future non-existence is as irrational as to regret the non-existence we enjoyed before we were born. Physics also teaches us how to evade determinism, which would turn moral agents into mindless fatalists: the swerve doctrine secures indeterminism, as does the logical doctrine that future-tensed propositions may be neither true nor false. The Epicureans were the first explicit defenders of free will, although we lack the details of their positive explanation of it. Finally, although Epicurean groups sought to opt out of public life, they took a keen and respectful interest in civic justice, which they analyzed not as an absolute value, but as a contract between humans to refrain from harmful activity on grounds of utility, perpetually subject to revision in the light of changing circumstances. Epicureanism enjoyed widespread popularity, but unlike its great rival Stoicism it never entered the intellectual bloodstream of the ancient world. Its stances were dismissed by many as philistine, especially its rejection of all cultural activities not geared to the Epicurean good life. It was also increasingly viewed as atheistic, and its ascetic hedonism was misrepresented as crude sensualism (hence the modern use of ‘epicure’). The school nevertheless continued to flourish down to and well beyond the end of the Hellenistic age. In the first century B.C. its exponents included Philodemus, whose fragmentarily surviving treatise On Signs attests to sophisticated debates on induction between Stoics and Epicureans, and Lucretius, the Roman author of the great Epicurean didactic poem On the Nature of Things. In the second century A.D. another Epicurean, Diogenes of Oenoanda, had his philosophical writings engraved on stone in a public colonnade, and passages have survived. Thereafter Epicureanism’s prominence declined. Serious interest in it was revived by Renaissance humanists, and its atomism was an important influence on early modern physics, especially through Gassendi.
See also DOXOGRAPHERS , HELLENISTIC PHI- LOSOPH. D.N.S.