Belief — Epicureanism

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle All 1 →

E Epicurus — the man who left money for a dinner. His will freed slaves, provided for the children of a dead colleague, and paid for the school to keep eating together once a month. It is a strikingly institutional document for a philosophy about withdrawing from institutions. Domain Pleasure correctly understood as the absence of painStanding Wrote some three hundred rolls; three letters and forty doctrines survive intact Meet them — context →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum All 2 →

The shared center — held across the tradition

Death is nothing to us. Where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not. The fear is of an experience that by definition has no experiencer. Go deeper — context →

The gods exist, and they are not thinking about you. A blessed and indestructible being has no business with anger or favour. Prayer is therefore not wicked but pointless, and the fear of divine punishment is the largest avoidable source of human misery. Go deeper — context →

Cosmos & Afterlife

how reality is built, and what follows death

The nature of reality

Atoms and void, infinite in extent, with no design and no designer

After death

None. The soul is atomic and disperses at death, so there is no subject left for anything to happen to.