Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

The Epicurean Cure

Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):

We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.

He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:

God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.

This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:


Posted

in

,

by

Tags: