Category: Epicureanism
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The Horror of Death and its Cure
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other. While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.…
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Epicurus in One Sentence and the Comforts of Materialism
When we are, death is not; when death is, we are not. Some say people hold to religion because of its comforts. A superficial way of thinking given religion's moral demands and the fears it inspires. It was precisely such fears for which Epicurean materialism was prescribed as anodyne. Materialism has its comforts too. Will you…
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Bad to Die Young but Not Bad to Die? An Aporetic Dyad
Herewith, a rumination on death with Epicurus as presiding shade. The following two propositions are both logically inconsistent and yet very plausible: 1. Being dead is not an evil for anyone at any time. 2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some. Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be…
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Advice on Sex from Epicurus
Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple: I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste…
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Death as a Relational Harm?
Here is some Epicurean reasoning: 1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption)2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm. (Conceptual truth)3. Nothing is a subject of a harm at a time at which it does not exist. (Plausible principle)Therefore4. No dead person…
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The Dead and the Nonexistent: Meinong Contra Epicurus
Are there nonexistent objects in the sense in which Meinong thought there are? One reason to think so derives from the problem of reference to the dead. The problem can be displayed as an aporetic tetrad: 1. A dead person no longer exists.2. What no longer exists does not exist at all. 3. What does not…
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The Epicurean Death Argument and Nihilism
A reader suggests that the "Epicurean argument leads to nihilism. Why live if death is not an evil to you? (assuming there is no one to grieve you)." In Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus makes the point that death is ". . . of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when…
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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,…
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Comatose at Rest, Mad in Action
Epicurus, et al. Vatican Sayings XI (tr. Geer): Most men are in a coma when they are at rest and mad when they act.