Epicureanism

the philosophical teaching derived from the ideas of Epicurus.

The philosophical school (called the Garden) that Epicurus founded in Athens was one of the most influential intellectual currents of the Hellenic age along with Stoicism, its constant opponent in philosophical debate. The most famous members of the early Garden (fourth and third centuries B.C.) were Metrodorus, Polyaenus, Hermarchus, and Colotes; those of the middle period (second and first centuries B.C.) were Zeno of Sidon, Phaedrus, and Philodemus of Gadara. Phaedrus (who taught Cicero) and Philodemus (who may have been Lucretius’ teacher) brought Epicureanism to Rome. The outstanding achievement of Roman Epicureanism is Lucretius’ narrative poem On the Nature of Things (first century B.C.). The Epicurean school remained in existence until the middle of the fourth century.

A revival of Epicureanism (especially its ethics and its atomistic teachings) occurred during the Renaissance; its ideas continued to spread during the 17th and 18th centuries and were most consistently developed by P. Gassendi. Epicureanism was also frequently understood in the vulgar sense—that is, as the cult of sensory pleasures (for example, in ancient Rome, among the philosophers of the Renaissance, and during the Enlightenment in France).

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A. L. DOBROKHOTOV

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References in periodicals archive

If the piglet at the Villa dei Papiri, like the Boscoreale cups, symbolises Epicureanism, it may also, like them, equate the philosophy with simple hedonism.

PLEASURES PRINCIPLES: The Epicurean texts discovered in the library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum raise as many questions about the life of a wealthy Roman statesman as they answer

From that angle, however, the meeting of Joshi's argument and mine is more dependent on the compatibility between Platonism and Epicureanism than it is on the content of Lovecraft's work.

"LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE IS A KIND OF MADNESS": COMPETING PLATONISMS IN THE UNIVERSES OF C.S. LEWIS AND H.P. LOVECRAFT

Vitruvius's philosophical eclecticism shows what may have been a common approach to Epicureanism in Augustan Rome.

Transcending Lucretius: Vitruvius, Atomism, and the Rhetoric of Monumental Permanence

"Though an old man," Jefferson wrote in the years when he was working on the school, "I am a young gardener." (56) The university lawn--and the areas he planned for a school of botany and an experimental farm--would help connect students to the earth and teach them the agrarian virtue that was central to his version of Epicureanism.

The Greeks and America's founding fathers, Part 1: The Greek Frame

Thomas More, in a dazzling display of circular logic, embraced Epicureanism and then denounced it as pernicious to faith in his celebrated "Utopia".

The Middle Ages have not ended

He is 'pinned down' by his Epicureanism, egocentricity and carnal lust and has forgotten to perform his necessary ritual suicide.

Proverbs as cultural semiotics in Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

With such a variety of different philosophical world views, why did modern science and modern attitudes latch on to Epicureanism?

The metaphysics of modernism

At the onset of the book, Corbett systematically provides a detailed panorama of how Epicureanism is received and represented throughout medieval thought, effectively preparing the reader for his contextualization of Epicurus in Dante.

George Corbett. Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfillment

Indeed, Bergson speculates that Lucretius would not have written his text if he had seen in Epicureanism little more than a dry and self-centred doctrine, 'contrived for the purpose of bringing to man the calm placidity of the beast and ridding him of his most noble anxieties' (1959: 80-1).

Affirmative naturalism: Deleuze and Epicureanism

"Laclos' Anthropology of Pleasure." Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism, 128-148.

Le libertinage feminin de Mme de Merteuil dans Les Liaisons dangereuses: une "revolution manquee?"

It is a stretch, but Corbett makes it, starting with Dante's reception of Epicureanism, and eventually his reception of the secular man.

Dante and Epicurus; a dualistic vision of secular and spiritual fulfilment