What is philosophy? How does it differ from science, religion, and other modes of human discourse? This course traces the origins of philosophy in the Western tradition in the thinkers of Ancient Greece. We begin with the Presocratic natural philosophers who were active in Ionia in the 6th century BCE and are also credited with being the first scientists. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines made bold proposals about the ultimate constituents of reality, while Heraclitus insisted that there is an underlying order to the changing world. Parmenides of Elea formulated a powerful objection to all these proposals, while later Greek theorists (such as Anaxagoras and the atomist Democritus) attempted to answer that objection. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates insisted on the importance of the fundamental ethical question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, developed elaborate philosophical systems to explain the nature of reality, knowledge, and human happiness. After the death of Aristotle, in the Hellenistic period, Epicureans and Stoics developed and transformed that earlier tradition. We will study the major doctrines of all these thinkers. Part I will cover Plato and his predecessors. Part II will cover Aristotle and his successors.
Therapeutic Philosophy
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Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors
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Epicureanism
Epicureans return to the atomism of Democritus, and find no purpose in nature. Philosophy is a therapeutic practice that removes fear and anxiety and provides us with the tranquility (ataraxia) of the gods.
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Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
Therapeutic Philosophy.
Epicurus conceives of philosophy as an extremely practical discipline.
There would be no point to engaging in the study of nature,
figuring out how the world works and whether the gods play any role in it, for
example, if it didn't make us better off.
For example, Epicurus thinks once we realize that the gods have no role to play
in the operation of the cosmos, it should be a source of great relief to us.
We won't be worried that the gods might get angry at us and smite us
with lightning, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, or other forms of affliction.
Or that they might intervene human affairs to frustrate our ambitions or
destroy what we hold dear.
Fear of Gods,
the Epicureans believe is one of the four greatest fears that afflict us.
The other three, by their accounting, are fear of death, fear that we might
fail to achieve the good, and fear that unbearable suffering may befall us.
Can you think of anything that you fear or
that someone might fear that doesn’t fall under one of these four headings?
Epicurean philosophy is supposed to deliver us from all of these fears and
thereby give us what they call ataraxia or freedom from distress.
Since fear is a kind of distress or disturbance of the mind.
Distress in Greek is [FOREIGN] and the in Ataraxia is a negative prefix.
Now the four teachings that are supposed to deliver Ataraxia are sometimes referred
to as the Tetrapharmakon, or the four-fold remedy.
Tetra means four in Greek, and a pharmakon is a drug or medicine.
It's the root of our word pharmacy.
As it is summarized by the later Epicurean, Philodemus of Gadara,
a Roman Epicurean of the first century BCE, the Tetrapharmakon goes like this.
Don't fear God.
Don't worry about death.
What is good is easy to obtain, and what is terrible is easy to endure.
Epicurus' letter to Menoeceus is organized roughly around these four teachings,
and they are summarized in bullet form in the first four of the principle doctrines.
Let’s look a little more closely at the remedy for
fear of the gods in the first principle doctrine KD1.
What is blessed and indestructible has no troubles itself, nor
does it give troubles to anyone else, so
that it is not affected by feelings of anger or gratitude.
This short and memorable phrase is supposed to remind the Epicurean
of a line a line of thought that Epicurus spells out more fully in other texts.
The basic idea is this.
Our conception of the gods is of perfectly happy beings.
Recall from our discussion of Aristotle that happiness is eudaimonia or
living well.
Thus to say the gods are perfectly happy or blessed, macharios which
is a superlative of eudaimon, is to say that they live the best possible life.
This is a point that we have seen Aristotle insists on as well.
When in Book X of the Ethics he attributes
life of uninterrupted intellectual activity to the gods.
Now Epicurus
doesn't have such a high-browed conception of what the best life is.
He maintains the our goal in life is to archive what he calls ataraxia,
freedom from distress.
Later on we'll examine his reasons for thinking that ataraxia is our goal.
But for now, what's important is seeing why he thinks that a being
who enjoys continual and uninterrupted ataraxia will
not do the sorts of things we might fear the gods will do to us.
The basic point is that intervening in the natural world would
involve a lot of work and bother.
Indeed, the Epicureans make fun of their Stoic rivals on this front.
So such interventions would compromise the gods' ataraxia.
It is incompatible with their status as blessedly undisturbed that
they should get their hands dirty so to speak
in the machinery of the cosmos by sending earthquakes and plagues against us.
More importantly, the Gods have no motivation to send earthquakes or
other plagues our way.
If they were angry at us or displeased at us,
that might give them a motive to strike out at us.
But anger or displeasure are disturbances.
Think of how uncomfortable it is to be angry.
So, contrary to what traditional stories or popular religion might teach about
the gods, it is completely contradictory to their happy and
blessed status that they should ever be angry with us.
That, an outline,
is the Epicurean argument that the gods are not to be feared.
We can summarize it like this.
1, The gods are perfectly happy, that is blessed.
2, So, they are in a state of Ataraxia, undisturbed.
3, Troubles, anger and the like are disturbances.
4, So, the gods are never angry with us.
5, So, they will never cause us any trouble.
Note that this argument doesn't invoke the detailed apparatus of the atomic motions,
the infinite worlds and so forth and other features of epicurean natural philosophy.
Rather, it appeals to a simple set of considerations that anyone
can understand if they grasp the concept, the anoia of god.
The basic idea is that if we examine our basic pre-conception of God,
we will see that it is incompatible
with the hypothesis that the gods intervene in the natural world.
Or that they are ever angry with human beings.
So this is an easy and accessible way to get to the conclusion that you could
also get to by studying atomic theory, the doctrine of many worlds, and so on.
And this focus on ease of memory and
understanding is also characteristic of Epicureanism.
Epicurus wrote letters to Epicure and
communities with the summaries of core points of doctrine.
And the same function is served by the collections
of maxums like the principle doctrines.
You can imagine them as something you keep in your back pocket or
at your bedside, ready for quick consultation in times of need.
If you feel fear or anxiety coming on.
As Epicurus says at the end of the letter to Menoeceus.
Practice these and related precepts day and night, by yourself and
with a like-minded friend, and you will never be disturbed either when awake or
in sleep, and you will live like a god among men.
That's the kind of remedy Epicureanism offers to each of the four
principal fears, something short, simple, memorable and recitable.
Something that captures the essence of a lot of more detailed philosophical
argument.
For Epicurists, philosophy should be broadly accessible,
not the specialized province of experts who devote their life to its study.
As we continue our tour of the tetrapharmicon, however,
we will be dipping into the philosophical arguments that are the iceberg floating
below these small, but effective, pointers toward the life without distress.
Next up will be the remedy for the fear of death.
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