Epicureanism

I start by reviewing the question of Lucretius' philosophical sources and argue that, in the case of Lucretius, this debate will likely be inconclusive and fruitless. In the second part of the paper, I turn to a consideration of how Lucretius, in the way he appropriates and presents his philosophical sources, might be considered original philosophically and not just poetically.

We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which ‘I’ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative under the heading ‘the mind-body problem’ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, “split off” the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substance – a split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of texts – neither a robust ‘tradition’ nor an isolated ‘episode’, somewhere in between – which have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (III, 327-330) that ‘the soul is to the body as scent is to incense’ (in an anonymous early modern French version); in other words they neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which ‘psychic’ or ‘intentional’ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (L’âme matérielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. By reconstructing some elements of the tradition of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, at the intersection of medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including sections devoted to Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled L’âme matérielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century such as Malebranche and Bayle, along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1748), we seek to articulate this concept of a ‘material soul’ with its implications for notions of embodiment, the nature of mental states, and selfhood.

What did Rousseau’s readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A
seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article
attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau’s contemporary
reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most
widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal
Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian
biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded
Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his antiprovidential
and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses
Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet’s positive assessment of Rousseau as a
critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau’s
critique of the reception of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man as an
Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau’s engagement with a
range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later
self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his
interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the
potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with
novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau’s Wise Materialism, using
his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the
neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau’s reception of Epicureanism
might be developed.

Diogenes Laertius lists in his catalogue of Epicurus' works (10.28) a treatise On Kingship, which is unfortunately no longer extant. Owing to the Epicureans' antipathy to politics, such a work might be viewed with surprise and presumed to be virulently negative in outlook. Indeed, Plutarch reports that the Epicureans wrote on kingship only to ward people away from living in the company of kings (.Adv. Col. 1127a) and that they maintained that to be king oneselfwas a terrible mistake [Adv. Col. ii25c-d). However, the scattered evidence that remains suggests the Epicurean views on kingship were both nuanced and sophisticated. In this paper I seek to reconstruct a viable account of the Epicurean position on kingship.

This paper crosses the borders of human geography to bring back two related bodies of work from experimental psychology that investigate, in an unusual and refreshingly precise way, long-standing human geographical concerns with tem-porality, place and subject formations, meaning-making and well-being. It is argued that the traffic of ideas and empirical findings between human geography and experimental psychology can be mutually profitable if, and only to the extent that, it encompasses a sustained epistemological, methodological and political critique of the disciplinary practices that have yielded those ideas and findings.

This is an uncorrected pre-proof version.

This paper outlines the full details of Lucretius’ treatment of parental love. It shows that Lucretius is faithful to Epicurus’ notorious claim that parental love is not natural: in addition to orthodox Epicurean hedonist concerns, Lucretius asserts that children do not “belong to” their parents by nature; as such, even though parental love is now ubiquitous and indeed a cultural norm, there is no basis for the naturalness of parental love. This model of the relationship between parents and children does not, however, apply in the case of certain animals, who do have natural parental love for their offspring. Focusing on two famous scenes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the forlorn heifer seeking her sacrificed calf, the paper argues that by highlighting the fragility of human parental love in comparison to that of the animals Lucretius brings to his Roman readers’ attention the relative weakness of the familial ties that bond human beings together, and at the same time he emphasizes the need to maintain them if social and political concord, with all its benefits, is to continue. It transpires that unlocking the details of Lucretius’ treatment of parental love brings a key lesson of the poem into clearer focus.

"Abstract In the Renaissance, Epicureanism and other heterodox scientific theories were strongly associated with heresy and atheism, and frequently condemned. Yet, when Lucretius's Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura reappeared in 1417, these associations did not prevent the poem's broad circulation.

This paper examines Horace's portrayal in Sermones 2.2 of Ofellus, the poet's rustic spokesman whose recent loss of property provides the opportunity for an ethical discourse on wealth administration. More specifically, it considers his advice on how to manage wealth within the context of Epicurean ethical doctrines, particularly those of Philodemus of Gadara, who was Horace's contemporary in Italy and who authored relevant treatises with the concerns of Roman landowners in mind. These concerns involve not only the proper acquisition and use of revenue, which is based on the Epicurean doctrine of observing a " measure of wealth " in connection with the pleasure calculus, but also advice on how to endure financial crises by drawing on the support of a network of close friends, all of which contributes to Ofellus' own equanimity in the face of misfortune. Keywords Epicurean ethics – economic theory – Roman satire – Horace A number of studies have elucidated the Epicurean undertones of Horace's portrayal of Ofellus in Sermones 2.2, although many of these connections tend to be limited to food. Various scholars, for instance, have noted the prominence in this satire of meagre fare and country living,1 both of which are staples of

This article argues that in order to understand the form of modern political freedom envisioned by Rousseau, we have to understand his theory of taste as refined Epicureanism. Rousseau saw the division of labour and corrupt taste as the greatest threats to modern freedom. He identified their cause in the spread of vulgar Epicureanism – the frenzied pursuit of money, vanity and sexual gratification. In its place, he advocated what he called ‘the Epicureanism of reason’, or refined Epicureanism. Materially grounded on an equitable proportion of needs and faculties, this was a hedonist theory of self-command designed to cultivate the temperate enjoyment of sensual pleasure. I argue that Rousseau hoped that a shift from vulgar to refined Epicureanism would secure political freedom in modernity by grounding the politics of the general will in an economics of balanced growth and a reinvigorated appreciation of natural beauty. This perspective provides a new way of both clarifying the role of economic justice and aesthetic judgment in Rousseau's republican state theory, and of assessing the consistency of his moral and political thought.

Yeni kültürlerin ve yerlerin birbiriyle temas kurmasıyla evrensel olana dair eski
tespitlerin değiştiği bir geçiş döneminde Epiküros bireyi yeniden keşfetmek istemiştir. Acıdan uzak durma ve bir amaç olarak haz ve dostluk kavramlarıyla Epiküros’un kurmaya çalıştığı yeni dünya, döneminin dalgalanmalarından ve kargaşasından bireyi uzak tutma ve kendini bulma arayışıydı. Epiküros’un farkı bu pratiklerin merkezine bireyin duyumlarını alması, ancak bu duyumların tek başına bir kurtuluşu değil mutluluk verici bir topluluk ilişkisi içinde temkinli ve dingin bir düzeni kurmak fikrini desteklemesidir. Reddettiği siyaset ise geleneksel ve o dönem için yerleşik olan türden olan siyasettir. Bu açıdan Epiküros, bugün hakikatin ne olduğunun yeniden tartışıldığı ve manipülatif yönlendirmelere açık olduğu bir geçiş döneminde yeni çıkış/kaçış arayışları için imkanlar sunmaktadır.

Paul the apostle seems to have considered philosophy as a rival more than an enemy: when he approached the Athens Aeropagus to explain the Christians' new faith, he tried to make his discourse fit in with the language of philosophy, and we may even think ourselves justified in detecting in that discourse Epicurean tones.

When Michel de Montaigne criticizes different forms of knowledge in his Essays, geometry gets a decidedly bad rap. Geometrical assertions rely on abstract thought, and the essayist would rather we concentrate on concrete measurements of the world around us. While we have until now made much of the philosophical consequences these criticisms engendered, namely that Montaigne was heavily persuaded by skepticism, we have not looked at the extent to which Montaigne was fascinated by the language of geometry and even, in his writing, obsessed with a particular geometrical debate that dates back to the very first commentaries on Euclid: the necessary, infinite separation between parallel lines and between asymptotes and their hyperbola. Montaigne's writing produces counter proofs to non-incident lines by forming parallels and asymptotes into demonstrable, everyday actions, expressing them in a more colloquial, French equivalent, and proposing the essay as a parallel figure that challenges theorems of infinite separation. The following will read these moments in Montaigne's writing as conscious and unconscious instances of his geometrical language and, in Lucretian terms, his swerve [clinamen]. Montaigne's explicit opposition to lines that never cross, specifically his aversion to the asymptote proposed to him by Jacques Peletier and the parallel lines asserted in Epicurus' atomist discourse, constitutes a geometrical language in which crossing and contact are moral imperatives that promote social togetherness and exchange.

Classical Quarterly 67: 149-162. This is an uncorrected pre-proof version

Epicurus denies that human beings have natural parental love for their children,  and his account of the development of justice and human political community does not involve any natural affinity between human beings in general, but rather a form of the social contract.  The Stoics to the contrary assert that parental love is natural;  and, moreover, they maintain that natural parental love is the first principle of social οἰκείωσις,  which provides the basis for the naturalness of justice and human political community.  The Stoics are, therefore, obliged to refute Epicurus’ denial of the naturalness of parental love in order to support their own theory of social οἰκείωσις; and we have good evidence for the arguments that they employed against the Epicureans on this account.  Likewise the Epicureans are obliged not only to defend their own position but also to undermine the competing Stoic theory of social οἰκείωσις; and the foundational premise of a natural bond between parent and child is an obvious target. However, beyond dogmatically restating Epicurus’ denial of natural parental love, the evidence for the Epicurean line of attack against the Stoics is currently unclear. In this paper I argue that we can go some way to uncovering it via an analysis of some fragmentary passages from an unidentified work of the Epicurean Demetrius of Laconia (c. 150–75 B.C.) that contain a puzzling discussion of Epicurus’ stance on parental love.

Combining a wide range of visual and literary sources, The Epic City traces the evolution of Greek and Roman attitudes towards the natural environment. The creation of gardens, nature appropriated for human use, is the means by which Greeks and Romans negotiated the relation of their towns to the surrounding countryside. In general, the Greeks from the time of Homer to the death of Alexander the Great approached nature as a violent, unpredictable force. Their ideal social order, constituted by the utopian polis ‘city-state’, depended on the exclusion or taming of nature. Urbanized Romans, meanwhile, came to experience an overwhelmingly nostalgic feeling towards nature in the face of protracted socio-political upheaval. As a result, they attempted to reintegrate nature into their lives in villas and gardens. Vividly expressed in the epic poems of Lucretius and Virgil, this sense of nostalgia also led to increasing concern about the negative impact of urbanism on the natural environment.

Aesthetic disinterestedness is one of the central concepts in aesthetics, and Jerome Stolnitz, the most prominent theorist of disinterestedness in the 20 th century, has claimed that (i) ancient thinkers engagement with this notion was cursory and undeveloped, and consequently, (ii) the emergence of disinterestedness in the 18 th century marks the birth of aesthetics as a discipline. In this paper, I use the extant works of Epicurus to show that the ancient philosopher not only had similar concepts, but also motivated them in careful and complex ways. I argue that, in the Epicurean theoretical framework, arts belong to the category of 'merely natural' desires, and this classification, combined with what we know of Epicurus' rejection of art criticism, shows he had carefully worked out reasons supporting the idea that art ought to be approached terminally, rather than instrumentally. Finally, I compare the notion of aesthetic disinterestedness with Epicurus' views on arts and argue that in many ways the latter are not inferior to the former, and therefore ought to belong to the history of aesthetics.

La Mettrie is best known for his L’Homme-Machine, about which there has been a tenacious malentendu for many generations, partly tied up with the influence of German Idealism, then Hegelian Marxism, on the historiography of materialism: namely, that a work entitled Man a Machine is, of course, a statement of mechanistic materialism. Recent scholarship has shown not only that is this not true about La Mettrie in particular, who is interested in living, organic bodies and uses machine metaphors both loosely and heuristically, but more broadly, that there may be no such thing as a mechanistic materialist, certainly not in the eighteenth century. La Mettrie’s materialism focuses on, and is motivated by, the existence of animate matter. Slightly less known is La Mettrie’s contribution to moral thought, his Anti-Sénèque ou Discours sur le bonheur, which is a few years posterior to L’Homme-Machine. It turns out that most of the scandals associated with his name, most of the opprobrium attached to it, even by fellow materialists such as Diderot or d’Holbach, was in reaction to this work, which defends a particularly radical brand of ‘modern Epicureanism’, i.e. hedonism. My interest here is to articulate a connection – and a coherent, doctrinal connection – between La Mettrie’s materialism and his moral (or immoral) work; I claim that it is under the aegis of Epicureanism that the two come together. That is, La Mettrie is not a materialist about mind, body, soul and medicine, and an Epicurean about ethics as the pursuit of happiness understood as pleasure. Rather, he is what I term a ‘medical Epicurean’ (in the tradition of Gassendi and Lamy) for whom an understanding of ‘animate bodies’ applies equally to metaphysics and to ethics. As he asks in the Discours sur le bonheur, if man were not a machine, why would we need doctors?

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.

""Recent scholarship in Classics and related fields has shown great interest in letters and epistolary literature of all forms (e.g. Morello and Morrison 2007; Trapp 2003; Rosenmeyer 2001).  The use of embedded letters to advance the narrative in genres such as historiography and the novel, and the potential for real or pseudonymous letters to function as biography (real or fictionalized), autobiography, or historical fiction, mean that letters in antiquity play a crucial role in the development of narrative literature of many kinds.  The apparent popularity of letters as reading matter rather than merely tools for communication, especially in the Imperial period, makes it essential that we pay attention to this genre, as we assess the reading practices and literary preferences of antiquity. The literary qualities of Greek letters are often overlooked, despite the fact that they display the same kind of awareness of generic conventions and self-consciousness of their literary nature as other narrative genres. 
Letters are always about narrative, among other things, whether directly – narrating events to absent correspondents - or indirectly – presenting fragments of an underlying narrative that the reader attempts to reconstruct.  This collection of essays explores the inherent narrative quality of letters and its use by Greek authors in a variety of genres and time periods, as well as the limited and sometimes even willfully obscure nature of epistolary narratives that omit vital information in the name of verisimilitude.  A series of case studies, with topics ranging from Classical poetry and historiography through to Philostratus and Christian martyrs, asks why particular authors choose the letter form; how an embedded letter relates to its narrative environment, and, conversely, the effect of the epistolary form on the narrative it contains; and how each author manipulates the epistolary tradition.  It explores various types of epistolary forms:  individual letters (embedded or free-standing); collections of continuous epistolary narrative; and letters presenting fragmented or discontinuous narrative.  It pays close attention to the self-consciously literary or fictional qualities in Greek letters, including intertextuality with other literary texts and particularly allusions to earlier letters as literature.  A chronological organization of the volume encourages the reader to consider epistolary narrative as a kind of literature that develops over time, growing in popularity and in the variety of forms it takes.  ""

Epicurus is one of the first social contract theorists, holding that justice is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed. He also says that living justly is necessary and sufficient for living pleasantly, which is the Epicurean goal. Some say that there are two accounts of justice in Epicurus—one as a personal virtue, the other as a virtue of institutions. I argue that the personal virtue derives from compliance with just social institutions, and so we need to attribute only one account of justice to Epicurus. I show how this interpretation makes sense of claims about justice by Epicurus and his followers, including Hermarchus, Lucretius, and Diogenes of Oinoanda.

This is an uncorrected pre-proof version.

I reconstruct the Epicurean philosophical position on civil strife and examine Lucretius’ engagement with the topic against it. I challenge the scholarly consensus and argue that there is in fact no compulsion to explain Lucretius’ concern with civil strife by appeal to a preoccupation with contemporary events.

Je reconstruis la position e ́picurienne contre la guerre civile et j’analyse l’opinion de Lucre`ce a` ce sujet. Je conteste le consensus universitaire en soutenant qu’il n’y a en fait aucune ne ́cessite ́ de recourir aux e ́ve`nements contemporains pour expliquer l’inte ́reˆt de Lucre`ce pour la guerre civile.

The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Archibald Campbell is now largely forgotten, even to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet his work is worth recovering both as part of the immediate reception of Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson’s rival moral philosophies, and for better understanding the state of Scottish moral philosophy a decade before David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. This paper offers a reading of Campbell as deploying a
specifically Epicurean philosophy that resists both the Augustinianism of Mandeville, and the Stoicism of Hutcheson. This leads him onto ground later claimed more conclusively by Hume, whilst helping us to better conceptualise the deployment and recovery of Hellenistic thought in the early modern period.

The file uploaded is the final proof of the Introduction to the volume. The essays collected focus on the role played by the philosophy of the Hellenistic (from Theophrastus and other Peripatetics, Epicurus, Sceptical Academy and Stoicism, to neo-Pythagoreanism and the schools of Antiochus and Eudorus) in Philo of Alexandria's works. Despite many authoritative studies on Philo's vision og Greek philosophy as an exegetical tool in allegorizing the Scripture, there is not such a comprehensive overview in Philo's treatises that takes in account both the progress achieved in the recent interpretation of Hellenistic philosophy and analysis of ancient doxographical literature

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.

Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy is a book-length study of the concepts of subjectivity and personhood developed or implied in various Roman writers from the late Republic and early Empire, especially Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca.  It starts from the fact that Roman accounts of personhood feature the personification  of grammatically feminine abstractions – nature, wisdom, beauty, pleasure, and even philosophy "herself."  When "Nature," for instance, is described as making the Roman who he is by attaching him to himself and his community, “she” exhibits many of the attributes that Romans associated with women in the process: embodiment, dependency, vulnerability, maternity, and a surprising (at least grammatical) agency, if not domination.  Contrary to the general tendency of ancient philosophy to valorize the masculine-identified virtues of self-sufficiency and invulnerability (“Socratic Ideals”: Gill), then, such instances of feminine agency suggest a secret Roman recognition of the importance, not only of the care provided by subaltern others ("the care of the self" - *by others*), but also of those others' possible, even peremptory agency in the Roman’s account of his identification with himself. 

With its attempt to balance both philosophical and literary approaches to these texts, the study offers a corrective to dominant, argument-centered methods of interpreting ancient philosophy and explores the possibility of the literary in particular and the aesthetic in general as autonomous categories of ancient experience and cultural production.  By attending to the dimensions of *gender* implied in the Latin noun and of *power* implied in the Latin verb, the study demonstrates the importance of Roman philosophy for literary histories of metaphorical figuration and for intellectual and political theoretical histories of gender, power, and feminism.

This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe studies the unnoticed connection between, on the one hand, a purposeless and ephemeral beauty, and, on the other hand, the disinterestedness and the spontaneity ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of “primitive” civilizations. The book highlights how, in those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness is a source of beauty. An innovative theoretical and cultural framework at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy allows me to reexamine the works of O. Wilde, G. D’Annunzio, and J.-K. Huysmans, and to claim the crucial role of neglected authors like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee in what I trace as the emergence of a proto-theorization of gift-exchange in the European fin de siècle culture. The pervasiveness of symbolic economy in those writers establishes a new dynamic relationship between decadence and modernism, and also exposes the limits of the allegedly disinterested forms of expenditure that will soon lure the modernists to go “primitive”.