Talk:Epicurus

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"Highly influential"

Template:Ping This wording still kind of feels a bit like unnecessary puffery to me, but I am willing to go along with it. We will see what the GA reviewer says about it; if the reviewer thinks it is fine, we will leave it. If not, we can revise it. Meanwile, I am still working to try to incorporate the information you added about Epicurus's influence on Karl Marx into the last section of the body. Unfortunately, the main source I use for most of the "Legacy" section, the chapter on "Epicurus and Epicureanism" in The Classical Tradition (2010) never mentions Marx, but I see you provided one source and I am looking for others. --Katolophyromai (talk) 13:32, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

I think I just wanted some more direct and straightforward way of highlighting his stature within ancient Greek philosophy. The current lead sort of does that towards the end, but I wish it would do it more in the beginning.

As for Marx: the guy did his doctoral dissertation on Epicurean physics, so it's not hard to see the influence.

For specific sources discussing the relationship between Marx and Epicurus, you can refer to the following:

John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000)

David Gordon, David Suits, Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance (2003)

Diego Fusaro, Marx, Epicurus, and the Origins of Historical Materialism (2018).UBER ^(talk) 10:53, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Template:Ping I added a new paragraph about Epicurus's influence on Karl Marx yesterday, with this edit, using one of the sources you list here, but thank you very much for the help anyway. Maybe I will add some of these other sources to the article as well. --Katolophyromai (talk) 13:05, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

"Golden Rule" quote

Template:Ping The quote you keep trying to add to this article ("Template:Tq") Is already in the article (albeit in the form of a slightly different translation), quoted just two sentences before the place where you keep trying to add it in. There is no reason at all to quote the same statement twice in the same paragraph.

Also, you keep trying to add a statement claiming that this is an expression of the "Golden Rule," but it really is not, because the Golden Rule is an injunction to treat others the way you would want to be treated (i.e. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."). This quote from Epicurus, however, is not a command at all, but rather a justification for the reason why he believed people should be good to others, which is the inherent joy of doing good and the personal guilt that arises from doing wrong. In this quote, Epicurus is saying that a person should live "sensibly and nobly and justly" because doing so will make that person happy; whereas not doing so will only lead to poor decisions with unpleasant consequences and feelings of guilt and shame over ignoble or unjust actions. He is basically saying that, if for no other reasons at all, we should be good to others because doing so will make us feel good about ourselves. It is not a "rule" in any real sense, but rather an explanation of the selfish justification for why people should be good to others.

Also, the source you keep citing in the article to support this statement ("Epicurus Principal Doctrines 5 and 31 transl. by Robert Drew Hicks". 1925.) is just a translation of the Principle Doctrines and it does not actually call this quote an example of the "Golden Rule." The source you cited on my talk page ("Henry Epps, The Universal Golden Rule, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 17, 2012) p.27") is self-published and therefore not a reliable source. In order for us to call this quotation an example of the Golden Rule, we would need a reliable, scholarly source that has been through secondary publishing that explicitly calls it that. --Katolophyromai (talk) 22:01, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. Paul August ☎ 22:03, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Being happy about doing the right thing does not exclude a consideration of reciprocity, key to a Golden Rule, as in preventing "being harmed by another" and in the 2nd clause of the primary statement, the benefit of better behavior from those living pleasantly. I'd hoped that it'd be so obvious as not to have to contest it. Kolyvansky (talk) 06:43, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

You are correct that being happy about doing the right thing does not necessarily exclude the idea that one should treat others the way one would like to be treated, but nothing about the statement in question implies the notion that one should treat others the way one would like to be treated. The passage you keep adding reads: "Template:Tq" It say nothing whatsoever about reciprocity. When Epicurus says that a person needs to live "justly" in order to live "pleasantly," he is most likely saying this because, as his other quotes illustrate, he believed that feelings of guilt over one's own unjust actions would cause a person to suffer terribly and that that guilt and suffering would nullify any pleasure one might have received from those actions. Epicurus is indeed saying something very wise here, but it is not the Golden Rule. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:00, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Nope, you are correct as far as you go, but it's not far enough. Epicurus had a reciprocal view of justice in mind. "Epicurus suggests a view of justice as reciprocity in his Kuriai Doxai (or 'Key Doctrines')." wrote Allen Buchanan, "Justice as Reciprocity versus Subject-Centered Justice", Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer, 1990), pp. 227-252. Kolyvansky (talk) 21:17, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

The tag to expand the section on politics

Hello! It was pointed out to me by Aircorn that someone has added a tag saying that the section on Epicurus's politics needs expansion, but I am not currently aware of any specific reason why it would need expansion. Personally, I think the section as it is mostly covers everything, since Epicurus doesn't really have a whole lot to say about politics anyway, apart from "Stay away from it." If no one responds within twenty-four hours with a specific piece of information that they think the section needs to include that it doesn't include already, I am going to just remove the tag, since I do not currently think that it is necessary. —Katolophyromai (talk) 00:33, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I could easily imagine wishing we had more of what the ancient Epicureans wrote on politics, but what we have here seems to match the info we have. I'd suggest swapping the order of the two paragraphs, though.Teishin (talk) 01:41, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Question:

Why is Epicurus considered a sage? SpicyMemes123 (talk) 17:28, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Wright's A Few Days in Athens

No discussion of the legacy of Epicurus would be complete without a thoughtful discussion of Frances Wright's influential novel A Few Days in Athens (1822), sadly far too neglected today. The novel's greatest value is in the interesting debate over Epicurean morality dramatized in the middle. Given its extensive and compelling parallels with the burgeoning schism in American Quakerism during Wright's first visit to America, I suspect that Athens was her first (allegorical) treatment of the Orthodox-Hicksite clash over sexual morality. This is a matter she alluded to in her notorious New York lectures of 1829-30. I'm taking the liberty of attaching a precis of Wright's Epicurus-Zeno debate: Hicksight (talk) 18:22, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Here is a paraphrase of the relevant passages:

Theon (to his teacher Zeno): "Will ye suffer our youth to be seduced by this shameless Gargettian?

[Epicurus's disgraced student had just painted] him and his disciples in the blackest colors of deformity; revealing the secrets of those midnight orgies...

Epicurus: "Say, shall we not compassionate the moral disease of our brother, and try our skill to restore him to health?"

Theon: “But why then not answer [your accuser]?”

Epicurus: “And so I do. I answer him in my life. The only way in which a philosopher should ever answer a fool, or, as in this case, a knave.”

Theon: "He believes that you own no other law—no other principle of action—than pleasure.”

Epicurus: “He believes right.”

Theon: “Right? Impossible! That you teach men to laugh at virtue, and to riot in luxury and vice.”

Epicurus: “There he believes wrong.”

Theon: “You own then no pleasure but virtue, and no misery but vice.”

Epicurus: “Not at all: I think virtue only the highest pleasure, and vice, or ungoverned passions and appetites, the worst misery.

Epicurus: “Learn henceforth to form your judgments upon knowledge, not report. Credulity is always a ridiculous, often a dangerous failing: it has made of many a clever man, a fool; and of many a good man, a knave.

Theon (to his classmates in Zeno's Stoic academy):"Ask yourselves what would be your indignation at the youth, who for his vices being driven from this Portico, should run to the Lycæum, and accuse Zeno of that sensuality and wickedness which had here wrought his own disgrace, and his own banishment?"

[In Epicurus Theon found] no severity, no authority, no reserve, no unapproachable majesty, no repelling superiority: all was benevolence, mildness, openness and soothing encouragement. To see, was to love; and to hear, was to trust...

Zeno the Stoic: "I cast a prophet’s eye on the map of futurity. Our youth, dandled on the lap of indulgence, shall turn with sickened ears from the severe moral of Zeno, and greedily suck in the honied philosophy of Epicurus... Think not that men shall take the good and not the evil; soon they shall take the evil and leave the good... all that is vicious shall find a refuge. Effeminacy shall steal in under the name of ease; sensuality and debauchery in the place of innocence and refinement; the pleasures of the body instead of those of the mind... [S]uch of your followers as shall be like you in temperament may be like you in practice: but let them have boiling passions and urgent appetites, and your doctrines shall set no fence against the torrent. Tell us not that that is virtue which leaves an open gate to vice. Your Gardens shall be crowded, but they shall be disgraced; your name shall be in every mouth, but every mouth shall be unworthy that speaks it; our degenerated country shall worship you, and expire at your feet."

Epicurus: Zeno's severe eye looks with scorn, not pity, on the follies and vices of the world. "He would annihilate them, change them to their opposite virtues, or he would leave them to their full and natural sweep. ‘Be perfect, or be as you are. I allow of no degrees of virtue, so care not for the degrees of vice. Your ruin, if it must be, let it be in all its horrors, in all its vileness: let it attract no pity, no sympathy: let it be seen in all its naked deformity, and excite the full measure of its merited abhorrence and disgust.’ Thus says the sublime Zeno, who sees only man as he should be. [But t]hus says the mild Epicurus, who sees man as he is: With all his weaknesses, all his errors, all his sins, still owning fellowship with him, still rejoicing in his welfare and sighing over his misfortunes: I call from my Gardens to the thoughtless, the headstrong, and the idle.—‘Where do ye wander, and what do ye seek?—Is it pleasure? behold it here. Is it ease? enter and repose.’ Thus do I court them from the table of drunkenness and the bed of licentiousness: I gently awaken their sleeping faculties, and draw the veil from their understandings. ‘My sons! do you seek pleasure? I seek her also. Let us make the search together. You have tried wine, you have tried love; you have sought amusement in revelling, and forgetfulness in indolence. You tell me you are disappointed: that your passions grew, even while you gratified them; your weariness increased even while you slept. Let us try again. Let us quiet our passions, not by gratifying, but subduing them; let us conquer our weariness, not by rest, but by exertion... But you warn me that I shall be slandered, my doctrines misinterpreted, and my school and my name disgraced. I doubt it not. What teacher is safe from malevolence, what system from misconstruction?" Hicksight (talk) 18:25, 28 April 2025 (UTC)