Show Notes
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Almost everyone has Epicurus wrong. The word “epicurean” has come to mean indulgence, luxury, and fine dining, but the real philosophy of Epicurus is almost the opposite: a quiet life, simple food, trusted friends, and freedom from fear. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Epicurus.
In this episode, we trace the full arc of Epicurus’s life and ideas, beginning with a displaced young man on the island of Samos and ending with a philosophical vision that twenty-three centuries of persecution could not destroy. We explore his radical atomism, the physics that made his ethics possible. We examine his argument that the gods do not care about human affairs, and his claim that death is nothing to us. We unpack the most misunderstood concept in the history of philosophy: Epicurean pleasure, which turns out to be not indulgence but tranquility, the state the Greeks called ataraxia. We walk through the tetrapharmakos, the four-part cure for the diseases of the human mind. We enter the Garden, the community that admitted women and slaves as philosophical equals. We follow the miraculous survival of his ideas through Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things and a manuscript rediscovered in a German monastery in 1417. And we ask the question Epicurus leaves behind: what would it actually look like to live without fear?
Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
(0:00:00) The Garden (0:16:31) Atoms and the Void (0:33:06) The Gods Do Not Care (0:49:22) Death Is Nothing to Us (1:05:03) Pleasure Without Excess (1:21:11) The Tetrapharmakos (1:37:10) Friendship and the Garden (1:53:23) The Poem That Saved the Philosophy (2:09:05) Two Thousand Years of Enemies (2:25:49) The Philosophy That Keeps Returning
SUGGESTED READING Epicurus, “The Art of Happiness” (translated by George Strodach, Penguin Classics): https://amzn.to/41zguEv Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things” (translated by A.E. Stallings, Penguin Classics): https://amzn.to/4entswF Stephen Greenblatt, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”: https://amzn.to/4szpOmW Emily Austin, “Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life”: https://amzn.to/4cIM74K Catherine Wilson, “How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well”: https://amzn.to/4cbpXrJ Diogenes Laertius, “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers” (translated by Pamela Mensch): https://amzn.to/48BAuu3
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All research and writing is done personally.
Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded
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