Core Theses
Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life — but the highest pleasure is the absence of pain and disturbance.
Everything is atoms and void; the soul dies with the body.
The gods do not intervene in the world.
Live unnoticed (lathe biōsas); friendship is the greatest of goods.
Its rival was Stoicism; their debates fill Cicero. Rediscovered through Lucretius in the Renaissance, Epicureanism shaped early modern science and the Enlightenment.
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Epicurus
The gentle materialist who taught that pleasure — understood as the absence of pain and fear — is the goal of life, and that death is nothing to us.
Lucretius
Roman poet whose single masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, set Epicurean atomism to hexameter verse — and, rediscovered in 1417, helped kindle modernity.
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related by shared connectionsHow Should We Face Death?
Naciketas at Death’s door, Socrates’ hemlock, Epicurus’s argument, the Stoics’ rehearsal, Hamlet’s skull, Ivan Ilyich’s scream, Heidegger’s being-toward-death.
Cārvāka (Lokāyata)
India’s materialist school — only perception is knowledge, only matter is real, there is no soul, no rebirth, no karma and no God, and the purpose of life is pleasure. Its own books are lost; we know it through the furious refutations of every other school.
Seneca
Roman Stoic, playwright and statesman — tutor and adviser to Nero — whose letters on time, death, anger and friendship are among the most readable works of ancient philosophy.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.
Meursault and the Chaplain
On the eve of execution, Meursault explodes at the prison chaplain’s certainty — and finds peace in the “gentle indifference of the world”.
The Universal Form
Arjuna asks to see Kṛṣṇa’s true form — and beholds the whole universe, all beings, all gods, and all the warriors rushing into Time’s blazing mouths.