Argumentative Essay On Epicurus

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Epicurean teaching is designed to combat two key cults that dominated the ancient world: the fear of the gods and the fear of death. Epicurus’s appreciation of physics dispels these anxieties, by arguing that the universe consists of atoms in a void, thus bearing no effect on us. Epicurus’s ethics follows from this naturalistic approach, as we reflect on these conditions and then cultivate our wisdom on the basis of our discoveries. This allows us to attain a more authentic life, entering a state of ataraxia, shunning our empty desires. I will argue that although the relation is intuitive, when considered in light of Nussbaum’s medicine model there are some problems.

Epicurus is typically portrayed as a hedonist, as his teaching centres on …show more content…

Instead, the elementary sensations of pleasure and pain are the fundamental guides for us, as this is what we are attracted to and repelled by. He argues that this is manifest empirically as we can observe it in the animal world where pleasure is pursued and pain is avoided. Therefore, nature and intelligence are not in conflict with one another, as pleasure is the natural end. This is “our first innate good, and this is our starting point for every choice and avoidance… we come to this by judging every good by the criterion of feeling.” (Epicurus, 1994:30) Epicurus focuses on the good in the sense that pleasure is the good of all goods because we desire it. This is clear through our immediate experience as we cannot desire or fear anything that would not invoke a feeling of pleasure and pain. Although Epicurus uses intuitive reasoning, his argument could be seen as problematic, as it doesn’t show us why we ought to follow pleasure. However, this isn’t detrimental, as the only sense of the desirable we have is the one that we observe and is therefore necessary to see what people actually do desire. As Mill notes “the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.” (Mill,

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