Hermann Karl Usener published his monumental Epicurea in 1887. The volume is a collection of Epicurean texts and citations from a wide range of classical authors including Arrian, Cicero, Diodorus, Euripides, Plato and Seneca. The volume includes critical texts of Epicurus' most important letters: Letter to Menoeceus, Letter to Herodotus and Letter to Pythocles, preserved by the third-century compiler Diogenes Laertius. The letters give important summaries of Epicurus' philosophy. Usener's pioneering work represented the first attempt to deal critically with the (...) manuscript traditions behind Epicurean texts. His reconstructions of the texts included in this volume are based on a thorough understanding of the trajectories of textual transmission. Each text is supported by a detailed critical apparatus, and another apparatus records manuscript glosses and scholia. This work provided for the first time accurate and reliable texts for the critical study of Epicureanism. (shrink)

This study examines various inconsistencies in Epicurus' ethical theory and attempts to trace them to a common source, namely, his claim that eudaimonia is entirely up to us and invulnerable to outside intrusions. The first chapter discusses his hedonism and shows the effect of this claim on his conception of pleasure. In attempting to equate ataraxia, a pleasant state entirely up to us, with eudaimonia, Epicurus fails to capture central intuitions which locate happiness in states and activities not always in (...) our own control. The second chapter shows how this claim underlies his theory of responsibility and describes his attempt to accommodate it in the framework of his physical theories. Various indeterminist theories of action and character needlessly have been attributed to Epicurus. We need to ascribe indeterminism to his theory only at the microscopic level of explanation, since he thinks that macroscopic explanations are not strictly reducible to explanations at the micro-level. ;Two subsequent chapters describe Epicurus' attempt to account for other-regarding features of morality. Epicurus endorses a Socratic view of the virtues. He argues that all the virtues are species of knowledge and infallibly secure ataraxia. Surprisingly, he attempts to give a contractual defense of justice. It seems, however, that an agent has reasons for being just which are independent of the contract. Moreover, if eudaimonia is entirely up to us and invulnerable to outside interference, there would be few compelling reasons for contracting with others. Similar difficulties arise in his account of friendship. Epicurus concedes that friendship is choiceworthy for itself regardless of instrumental benefit. He also argues that friendship requires valuing others for their own sakes. This is inconsistent with the claims of his hedonism. If happiness is entirely up to us and friendship is an external good not always in our control, Epicurus should weaken his commitment to friendship. By refusing to do so, he is forced into an inconsistency. ;These inconsistencies in Epicurus' thought are of historical interest, in that we see a hedonist attempting to return to Socratic conceptions of happiness and rational agency. Of philosophical interest is Epicurus' inability to give a plausible account of happiness without valuing states and activities not entirely subject to our own control. (shrink)

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and (...) recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today.The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today. (shrink)

"Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind" is an elegant survey of Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the soul an introduction to two ancient schools whose belief in the soul's physicality offer compelling parallels to modern approaches in the ...

In this wide-ranging, richly detailed, and philosophically provocative volume, Annas presents not a history of ancient ethics but a study of "the form and structure of ancient ethical theory". Ignoring Plato and his predecessors almost entirely, and thinking Aristotle overrated, Annas concentrates on post-Aristotelian moral philosophy. She is thoroughly at home in the new work on Hellenistic philosophy that scholars, herself included, have been publishing in the last couple of decades. Here she provides the fullest overview to date of Hellenistic (...) moral thought, beginning with Aristotle and covering the later Peripatetics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Cyrenaics, and the Skeptics both Academic and Pyrrhonist. (shrink)