Epicureanism

This article argues that Rousseau’s autobiographies outline an account of personal happiness as an Epicurean memorial practice. For Rousseau, happiness is secured by an attitude to pleasure cultivated by practices utilizing the powers of memory and imagination. In describing these practices autobiographically, he hoped to teach his readers to avoid the false pleasures of vulgar sensuality and pursue instead the true pleasures of what he called ‘temperate sensuality’. This orienting idea of the autobiographies is a distinctly Epicurean ascetic practice—combatting the constant threat of vulgar hedonism to bring about a new relationship to the self. By reconstructing this account, the article provides a basis to reconsider the relationship between solitude, sociability, and citizenship in Rousseau’s political thought.

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher interested in pleasure or pursuit of it more than other ideals. He said, "No pleasure in itself is a bad thing, but the things that produce certain pleasures involve disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves." Epicurus tells us that the knowledge of which pleasures are good for us is wisdom. While this sometimes led to a negative view of his philosophy, in many regions of the world today the reality is that his thinking has been very advanced and developed, leading to his ideas becoming highly influential in modern thought. His simple philosophies of avoiding pain, living a simple life, and learning has made much of his philosophy appealing and influential. An important Indian philosophy called "Charvaka" is that this world is the only reality. Out of the four human values-Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha-they advocate the pursuit of karma only, and Artha merely as a means of facilitating the purpose. For Charvaka, the goal of human life is to achieve the maximum amount of pleasure in this life and to avoid as much pain as possible. Good life is the most enjoyable life. Good action is one that leads to a balance of pleasure, and bad action is one that causes more pain than pleasure. Today, consumerism is pervasive, the real spirit for any developing economy is to develop consumerism-driven products and marketing practices, and it is inevitable that the interests of consumers in general will be safeguarded. Consumerism believes that personal well-being and happiness depends to a very large extent on the level of personal consumption, in particular on the purchase of material goods. The idea is not simply that well-being depends on a standard of living above a certain threshold, but that consumption and material possessions are at the center of happiness. It is an attempt of this paper to see the relationship between these philosophies and to try to find common characteristics that lead man to live a happy and satisfying life.

Anàlisi i comentari de: "No hay una vida gozosa sin una sensata, bella y justa, ni tampoco una sensata, bella y justa, sin una gozosa. Todo aquel a quien no le asiste este último estado no vive sensata, bella y justamente, y todo aquél a quien no le asiste lo anterior, ése no puede vivir gozosamente".

Edição bilíngue integral do poema De Rerum Natura de Lucrécio
https://grupoautentica.com.br/autentica/livros/sobre-a-natureza-das-coisas/2025
https://www.amazon.com.br/Sobre-Natureza-das-Coisas-Lucr%C3%A9cio/dp/6559280799/ref=rvi_5/139-4214272-9123822?pd_rd_w=G2wIU&pf_rd_p=efdee74a-69c9-4b49-9f9d-7952b2b8eb2e&pf_rd_r=HXT9EQA1Z337M3Y5E2B1&pd_rd_r=14727686-9499-4a00-9540-631ae8bde5ab&pd_rd_wg=JQSJ2&pd_rd_i=6559280799&psc=1

En su diálogo titulado De vero bono, Lorenzo Valla cuestiona la admiración de los principios morales paganos por parte de sus contemporáneos. Con este propósito presenta un orador epicúreo que defiende la voluptas en contraposición al elogio estoico de la honestas. En las últimas décadas la crítica ha enfatizado el hecho de que el conocimiento del epicureísmo por parte de Valla era muy limitado al redactar esta obra, y también que su propósito no consistió en defender los postulados de esta escuela filosófica, sino en utilizarlos como un medio para lograr el objetivo de desestimar la importancia de la ética pagana en relación con la vida cristiana. Sin embargo, un análisis de aquellos puntos en los que el De vero bono de hecho se aproxima a las tesis epicúreas y de cómo algunas de las ideas allí presentadas se continúan en sus Dialecticae disputationes y en su Apologia permite observar que existieron aspectos de su obra inspirados en una visión positiva del filósofo de Samos.

Abstract. In his dialogue entitled De vero bono, Lorenzo Valla questions the admiration of pagan moral principles by his contemporaries. For this purpose he presents an Epicurean speaker who defends voluptas as opposed to the stoic praise of honestas. In recent decades critics have emphasized the fact that Valla's knowledge of Epicureanism was very limited when he wrote this work in 1431, and that its purpose was not to defend the principles of this philosophical school, but to use them as a means to achieve his objective of underestimating the importance of pagan ethics in relation to the Christian life. However, an analysis of those points where the De vero bono in fact approaches Epicurean thesis and how some of the ideas presented there are continued in his Dialecticae disputationes and in his Apologia show that there are aspects of his work inspired by a positive view of the philosopher of Samos. Sumario: 1. Introducción. 2. El epicureísmo en el De vero bono. 3. La Dialectica y la Apologia. 4. La defensa del término voluptas y el debate Bruni-Cartagena. 5. Referencias bibliográficas. Cómo citar: Vilar, Mariano (2017): «Huellas epicúreas en el pensamiento de Lorenzo Valla», Cuader-nos de Filología Italiana, 24, pp. 131-148.

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

This present article argues against three comparisons of Epicurean thought and Buddhism: that Epicurean Atomism and the Buddha's teachings of physical reality are similar, that Epicurus' insistence that one should not fear consequence after death and the absence of god in the Buddha's teachings are similar, and that Epicurean minimalism and the minimalism taught by the Buddha are similar.

De rerum natura, Lucrèce insiste sur la permanence qui caractérise la summa summarum. Pourtant, il souligne également le changement perpétuel qui affecte toutes choses. Dans la Physique lucrétienne, la nouveauté est étroitement liée à la déclinaison, qui garantit la liberté humaine sans outrepasser les lois naturelles. La nouveauté est également présente dans la conception lucrétienne de l'histoire, qui allie cependant aux progrès techniques la permanence de la nature humaine. La seule véritable nouveauté réside donc dans la philosophie épicurienne, que Lucrèce choisit de transcrire au moyen d'une poésie nouvelle afin de répandre la lumière sur le secret des choses. Le poète associe ainsi la nouveauté poétique et la tradition issue d'Empédocle. EPITOME.-In carminibus De rerum natura, T. Lucretius Carus saepe dicit summam summarum eamdem semper manere. Scribit tamen omnes res perpetuo mutari. Nam Lucretius in Physica coniungit cum nouitate clinamen, quod seruat libertatem et simul paret naturae foederibus. Lucretius autem, cum humani generis historiam narrat, nouitatis rationem habet quia, hominum natura eadem manente, progredientis mentis experientia nouas artes semper adfert. Ergo una et uera nouitas in Epicuri ratione consistit. Quam Lucretio exponere placet nouis carminibus, quae lumina diffundant rebus occultis. Itaque poeta ueterum scriptorum morem, ab Empedocle traditum, cum poetica nouitate iungit.

The article aims to analyze the section of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura concerning the problem of the color (II, 730-864) from a double perspective : firstly, it will confront the passage with other sources about the Epicurean doctrine of color, in order to verify the orthodoxy of Lucretius’ presentation ; secondly, it will try to highlight the literary, rhetorical, didactic strategies the Latin poet carries out to adequately and persuasively display that doctrine to his public.

ART OF LIVING: Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault promoted the idea that ancient philosophy is essentially an art of living. In particular, this thesis is usually applied to the big philosophical schools deriving from the Hellenistic period. Epicurus, most notably, is often read as a philosopher who only aims at the improvement of one's individual life.
In this article I articulate my doubts about this one-sided reading of ancient philosophy in general and Epicurus in particular.

„Lebenskunst und Naturforschung bei Epikur”, in: Gerhard Ernst (Hg.), Philosophie als Lebenskunst, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2016, 33-65.

Les épicuriens et les stoïciens sont connus pour avoir mis l'analyse du désir au coeur de leur éthique, mais également pour l'avoir ancrée dans deux physiques matérialistes différentes. Contrairement à leurs prédécesseurs, ainsi qu'à bon nombre de leurs successeurs, ces philosophes jugèrent qu'il n'existait, dans l'âme, aucune source irrationnelle d'où le désir tirerait son origine. Car si le désir, par l'insatisfaction duquel tant d'hommes sont malheureux, est l'un des enjeux prioritaires de la philosophie, car elle seule est capable de garantir la vie heureuse, sa nature complexe doit être accessible à la raison, pour le réguler, le réorienter, le suspendre ou le supprimer. La philosophie, elle-même désir de comprendre, devra instamment revenir sur le désir lui-même, sur son origine, sa formation et son contrôle. Si la structure fondamentale du désir est le manque, le désir ne dit pas ce dont il est manque, mais rend tout ce que l'homme désire désirable, et, par la confusion que lui octroie sa puissance, lui fait croire qu'il faut obtenir ce dont il ne manque pas, en le conduisant au malheur. Convaincus qu'on ne peut désirer que le bien apparent, mais que, la plupart du temps, nous désirons mal le bien véritable, ces philosophes s'emploient à déterminer le critère naturel permettant de distinguer désirs raisonnables et désirs vains, pour réorienter la raison vers l'obtention de son bien véritablement désirable.

Epicurus declared it all starts with the "pleasure of the stomach", and yet twentieth-century rationalist philosophy found him dis-interested in epicureanism in the small-e sense. Wrong! Epicurus made a diner's sense of the world.

This is Chapter 1, ‘Epicurus – the foodies’ philosopher’, pp. 13-30, in Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe, eds, Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry, Malden (MA, USA): Blackwell Publishing, 2007

Original abstract:Conventional academic wisdom detaches the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus from the love of eating and drinking that bears his name. He should not be associated with ‘epicureanism’ in the sense of either irreligion and debauchery or, more positively, the display of refined sensibilities. According to principal interpreters (including Bailey, Diano and DeWitt), the hedonism of Epicurus was altogether more abstract.
Yet the popular usage for more than two millennia is closer to the mark. Epicurus’s contemporaries took his to be a meal-centred philosophy, and some notable contributors to the Western tradition have identified with it. The available evidence is that his school, the Garden (meaning kitchen garden), held regular banquets and, according to a neglected ancient passage, kept notes of the food, drink and guests. Although most of his writings are lost, several surviving statements make the ‘pleasure of the stomach’ central. His claim that he could be content with just a good piece of cheese might have come from a modern gourmet. Generally, a meal-centred philosophy, such as Brillat-Savarin’s in the Physiology of Taste, looks like Epicurus’s. Foodies, too, value the material world, the senses, empiricism over ideology, pleasure within limits, friendship and ‘living unknown’.
The modern scholarly purging belongs to the platonic dismissal of eating and drinking, a long-running campaign faced by Epicurus himself. With the restoration of foodism over the past two decades, an ancient social revolution has been resumed.

This article examines three sections of the proem to Lucretius' De rerum natura: the so-called hymn to Venus (Lucr. 1.1-43), the praise of Epicurus (1.62-79), and the Iphigenia passage (1.80-101). The article's goal is to show that distinct, interconnected political echoes are perceptible in these three sections of Lucretius' proem, and that Lucretius intertwines his philosophical teaching with Roman political culture in such a way as to make his Epicurean message more acceptable to Roman audiences. The article demonstrates Lucretius' interaction with the use of myth in political language in Rome in the 60s and 50s bce. It analyzes the relevance of the Mithridatic wars to Roman discussions of imperialism and Lucretius' exploitation of this conflict's iconic status. This article suggests that Memmius' political action in the 60s may have made him a particularly suitable addressee for Lucretius' poem. It also explores the implications of this new reading of the proem for the date of Lucretius' De rerum natura.

This paper explores Hobbes's relationship to Lucretius. Building on scholarship dealing with Hobbes's knowledge and use of Lucretius, I show that Hobbes decisively rejected central features of Lucretius' argument in Leviathan. Hobbes's rejection of these features, in turn, highlight the distinctiveness of key features of his argument about the passions and language, the distinctively authoritarian version of his contract theory, and his ultimate rejection of Lucretius' Epicurean project.

The purpose of our collection of essays is to frame Shakespeare’s representation of human moral choice within the context of intellectual history. The contributors extend the Cambridge method of moderate contextualism from its origins, the study of political philosophy, to a parallel study of Shakespeare’s thought about ethics, situating Shakespeare’s ideas within contemporary debate about rival, overlapping moral paradigms. Christianity, Skepticism, Epicureanism: these and other such schools of thought serve as examples of Pocock’s “languages,” but in the realm of moral philosophy, rather than political. The collection also places Shakespeare in dialogue with a representative Continental analogue, Montaigne. Our animating premise is that Shakespeare's ideas about ethics can be best understood within a larger historical frame: sources, paradigms, and problems already extant and even highly elaborated, well before Shakespeare himself ever set pen to page. The terminus a quo is just as important as the terminus ad quem: as Bacon writes, “Things in themselves new will yet be apprehended with reference to what is old." Shakespeare’s perspective on morality does not emerge ex nihilo, the product of an inexplicable rupture, but instead draws upon a rich variety of intellectual traditions, Christian as well as classical, even in its moments of most ardent critique. The choice of the term “Renaissance” for the title, for example, rather than “early modern,” is deliberate: our hope is to foreground the resurgence of classical paradigms in this period. Over the course of Shakespeare’s life, new moral systems such as Neo-Stoicism and Epicureanism challenged prevailing ethical assumptions, began to contest the preeminence of Christianity, and laid the groundwork for what we now call “modernity”: Charles Taylor’s “secular age.”

ABSTRACT

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche develops his account of the role philosophy should play in the making of a human life. Nietzsche adopts the common Hellenistic position that the goal of philosophy is eudaimonia or human flourishing. Whereas he endorses the therapeutic orientation of Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, Nietzsche characterises Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism as failed therapies: they reinforce the philosophical sicknesses they purport to cure. He objects to both the form and content of Hellenistic therapies: because they adopt a single, universal ideal of human flourishing, they fail to account for the full scope of human diversity; and, by adopting ataraxia or tranquillity as the goal of philosophical practice, they contract, deaden, and impoverish the lives of their practitioners. Nietzsche’s alternative post-Classical therapy seeks to redress the failures of previous eudaimonistic philosophies. To achieve this end Nietzsche suggests we need to experiment with different beliefs and practices to test the bounds of what we can successfully ‘incorporate’ into a flourishing life. In this essay we chart a third way between (i) naturalistic interpretations of Nietzsche as a philosopher who prescribes moral laws on the basis of stable natural facts and (ii) artistic and postmodern interpretations that see him as an advocate of the ex nihilo creation of values. In contrast to both, we argue that Nietzsche works to discover the natural limits of value creation through experimentation. For Nietzsche value experimentation holds the key to human flourishing.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

The novel Bonjour tristesse was published in 1954, when its author Françoise Sagan was only 18 years old. The book can be considered a philosophical, Epicurean-leaning novel. The main character, Cécile, and her father Raymond live a dolce vita, which constitutes a banalized application of Epicurean ethics. The novelist seemingly had access to Classical philosophical sources, especially Lucretius. Against this Epicurean attitude, the character of Anne, who tries to guide the lives of the father and the daughter, embodies the Socratic-Stoic position. Both visions of the world conflict with each other. With the aim of getting rid of Anne, Cécile tries to handle the course of events. The unwanted, tragic outcome explains the sadness of the novel, which in its turn evokes the pessimism of Lucretian philosophy.

Le roman Bonjour tristesse a été publié en 1954 alors que son auteur, Françoise Sagan (1935-2004), n’avait que 18 ans. Nous pouvons considérer le livre comme un roman philosophique épicurien. La protagoniste, Cécile, et son père Raymond mènent la dolce vita, qui constitue une application banalisée de la philosophie épicurienne. Il est très possible que l’auteur ait eu accès aux sources classiques de l’épicurisme, à Lucrèce par exemple. Opposée à l’épicurisme, le personnage d’Anne, figure de l’attitude socratique et stoïcienne, tente de canaliser et de diriger en ce sens les vies du père et de la fille. Ainsi, les deux manières d’aborder la vie s’affrontent-elles dans le roman. La protagoniste met en œuvre un plan pervers pour se débarrasser d’Anne mais le résultat est tragique. La fin explique la tristesse du roman qui nous évoque le pessimisme propre à la philosophie de Lucrèce.