Epicurus

Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE) was born on the island of Samos to Athenian
settlers and came to Athens around the age of thirty-five, where he
purchased a house with a garden that gave its name to his school. The Garden
admitted students of every class, including women and slaves, an openness
unusual among the philosophical schools of antiquity and one that earned the
movement both loyalty and suspicion.

Epicurus taught that the goal of life is pleasure, but his conception of
pleasure has little to do with the indulgence the word "epicurean" later came
to suggest. The highest pleasure, he argued, is the absence of bodily pain
(aponia) and of mental disturbance (ataraxia) — a serene, self-sufficient
contentment rather than a heap of intense sensations. To this end he
distinguished natural and necessary desires, such as for food and shelter,
from those that are natural but unnecessary, and from the empty desires for
wealth, fame, and power that breed anxiety without satisfying it.

His physics served his ethics. Following the earlier atomists, Epicurus held
that the universe consists of indivisible atoms moving through void. To this
inheritance he added the famous "swerve," a slight, uncaused deviation in the
fall of atoms that breaks the chain of strict necessity and leaves room for
free action. If everything is atoms and void, then the soul too is material
and perishes with the body — a conclusion he embraced as liberating rather
than bleak.

From these premises followed his celebrated remedy for the fear of death.
"Death is nothing to us," he wrote, "for when we exist death is not present,
and when death is present we do not exist." Likewise the gods, though they
exist, dwell in untroubled bliss and take no interest in human affairs, so
there is no reason to dread their judgment. Freed from the twin terrors of
death and divine punishment, the wise person can attain tranquillity.

The fourfold remedy his followers distilled — that the gods are not to be
feared, death is nothing to us, the good is easy to attain, and the dreadful
is easy to endure — circulated for centuries. Through the Roman poet
Lucretius, whose poem On the Nature of Things preserved Epicurean doctrine in
luminous verse, these ideas reached the Renaissance and helped shape the
modern scientific imagination.