Epicurus born on Samos 341 to 270 BC

x Epicurus Born on Samos. Describes himself as self taught.

Saw most educaon 3 2 as indoctrinaon: too 1 constrained to the master’s way of thinking.

Put him at odds with most other philosophers of his me. Epicurus modifed Democritus’ atomism • Gave atoms weight (source of downward moon) • Added swerve: random deviaon from predicted moon • Developed the idea of emergence: atoms do not possess properes but these properes develop in structures composed of many atoms. Platonists and Aristotelians

• Taught in big publically supported instuons: geometry, dialeccs and rhetoric. • Epicurus rejected these schools as sources of indoctrinaon. • Rejected Plato’s theory of forms (geometry) which postulated a perfect and eternal world. But studied and appreciated his contemporary, Euclid’s, geometry. Plato’s rhetoric and dialeccs

• In Plato’s dialogues Socrates plays down his knowledge of the world and asks quesons in the end leading his interlocutors to his posion. • Epicurus cricized this ironic perspecve as basically dishonest: Socrates was hiding his expert skills as a debater. Plato’s dialeccs and epistemology

• Reason as the arbiter of truth • Sensaons are misleading • Phenomena (appearances) decepve • Ideas are real and eternal

Reason as the charioteer with horses represenng appetes and spirit www.epicurus.info

• An excellent web source of informaon on Epicurus. • Includes all of the extant wrings of Epicurus as well as wrings about him and his philosophy.

8th Principal Doctrine

• No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but some pleasures are only obtainable at the cost of excessive troubles. Epicurus and Democritus

• Karl Marx 1841. The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, with an Appendix. Published 1902.

• Understood Epicurus’ embrace of dialeccal thinking which later formed a centerpiece for Marxist analysis of human affairs. Swerve. Emergence

• Democritus: sensaons are misleading. E.g. a sweet drink may taste bier to a sick man. • Epicurus: sensaons are not inthemselves misleading though our interpretaon of them is. Atoms are not sweet or of a certain colour. These properes only emerge through their interacon to produce more complex structures AND our percepon of such structures. Epicurus’ Epistemology

• We never sense the object in itself but rather we sense the object as it dies away. • Sensaons are not decepve; all are equally valid. We are deceived instead by our interpretaons of sensaons. • We apprehend the world through “prolepsis” (preconcepon), which is compared/modified with the object perceived.

Epicurus and Plato

• Plato believed in “a priori” knowledge which he thought came from our past lives. • Epicurus’ concept of prolepsis involves a preconcepon built through our individual lives. We learn and modify our concepons according to perceived nature. This leads us to truth.

Epicurus at odds with Aristotle

• Rejected teleology: e.g. Aristotle: woodpecker has a well developed bill to allow it to find grubs and insects in wood and under bark. • Epicurus: because woodpeckers use their bills to search for insects in wood, those that have survived have well developed bills (cf Empidocles) God and Gods

• Aristotle idenfied 40 or more unmoved movers (endowed with circular moon) in the skies • Epicurus: Gods are perfect and fully sated beings and therefore have no interest in humans. They are irrelevant to human affairs.

On the nature of the mind and soul

• Aristotle: the soul is a disnct substance; Aristotle was a pluralist. • Epicurus was a materialist: the mind and the soul are like any other objects composed of atoms. The mind is in the chest and extends throughout the body as a spirit (reminiscent of central and peripheral nervous system) Epicurus was the first pragmast

• Thought and reason do not funcon to directly perceive and describe reality. • Rather they are tools we use to find our way in the world, which we can never know directly. • Empirical skepcism • Epicurus engaged and publically challenged other philosophers early in his career. • Was openly contemptuous of the idea of eternal and perfects forms. • Put him at odds with the establishment thinkers. Later in his career

• Became more reclusive and advised one not to prod or challenge one’s enemies. • To avoid those who might wish you harm.

39) He who desires to live in tranquility with nothing to fear from other men ought to make friends. Those of whom he cannot make friends, he should at least avoid rendering enemies; and if that is not in his power, he should, as much as possible, avoid all dealings with them, and keep them aloof, insofar as it is in his interest to do so. Epicurus’ Metaphysics

• Nothing comes from nothing; nothing disappears to nothing (conservaon law) • Tiny incremental changes reach crisis points leading to major changes. Quantave changes result in qualitave changes. (emergence) • Chance (swerve) renders our futures unpredictable. (free will and chance) • Our understanding comes from appreciang the world through preconcepons that are changed in response to perceived nature. Percepon as a creave act. Epicurus’ wrien legacy

• Of 300 books only small fragment remain • hp://www.epicurus.info/etexts/PD.html • Check out: Principal Doctrines, Leer to Menoeceus • Lucreus’ On the Nature of Things is taken directly from Epicurus. • Books IV,V concerns aspects of biology Dialeccal thinking

• Interdependence/interpenetraon of opposites. • Quantave change leads to qualitave change: i.e. qualitave change emerges out of iterave quantave change • Nature is best understood through processes and their relaonships rather than through things, causes and events.