Epicurus
AncientAs Your Guide
“Epicurus will help you shed unnecessary fears — of death, of gods, of the future — until only simple tranquility remains. He sees the good life as friendship, reflection, and freedom from anxiety. Choose him if you want a guide who treats philosophy as medicine for the soul.”
Who They Were
Founder of Epicureanism. Taught that pleasure (understood as absence of pain) is the highest good.
How They Saw the World
Epicurus builds a garden — literally and philosophically — walled off from the anxieties of political life, where friends gather to practice the art of simple pleasure. The universe is atoms and void, nothing more; the gods exist but care nothing for human affairs, and death is merely the scattering of what was temporarily assembled. True pleasure is not indulgence but the absence of pain in the body and turmoil in the mind, a state he calls ataraxia. Fear of death and fear of the gods are the twin diseases of the soul, and philosophy is the medicine that cures both.
What They Left Behind
Words that outlived their authors.
What Haunts Them
These are the questions that wouldn't let them rest.
Their Echo
What they left rippling through everyone who came after.
Materialist tradition, therapeutic philosophy, happiness studies