Epicurus — "The study of nature creates men who are not only free from fear, but also from v…"
The study of nature creates men who are not only free from fear, but also from vanity.
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More from Epicurus
"Justice is a contract of utility entered into to prevent men from harming or being harmed by one another."
"The greatest good is to be free from pain."
"It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he does not understand the nature of the universe but still suspects something of the stories told in myths. So, wi…"
"The wise man is not perturbed by the most disturbing things."
"Since it is not possible to get rid of the fear of death without knowledge of the universe, we cannot enjoy unmixed pleasure."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.