Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance (review)

This volume presents papers of a conference held in 2002 at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After a superficial introduction, eight chapters trace the legacy of Epicureanism from Philodemus, the philosopher who took up residence in the Roman town of Herculaneum in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, to C.S. Peirce and, rather cursorily, eighteenth-century Russian theology. Three further chapters deal with Epicurus' ideas of friendship and death, and the last provides a brief description of the wall-sized Epicurean inscription in the ancient city of Oenoanda (in modern Turkey), dating to the second century AD.

David Armstrong, one of the philologists currently editing the papyri buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD, offers an elegant survey of their discovery and publication, followed by a detailed analysis of Philodemus's treatise, On Death. Since Epicureanism identified the fear of death as the major source of human disquiet, and further affirmed that "death is nothing to us," the topic is highly significant, and Philodemus's essay provides important new evidence that Epicureans addressed the pain of survivors with tact and sympathy. The fourth-century Christian writer, Lactantius, in contrast to both Stoics and Epicureans, defended the idea, in On the Anger of God and elsewhere, that anger and other emotions are in themselves morally neutral, and good when put to good use; James Armstrong argues that Epicurus's teachings on anger were a significant stimulus to Lactantius's radical revision of classical views. Lloyd Gerson examines the neo-Platonist Plotinus's critique of Epicurus's empirical epistemology, and more particularly his claim that not all cognition can be representational: "The central point is that unless we are the sort of entities that can and do have knowledge of Forms . . ., we could not make any judgments whatsoever about sensibles" (78). This chapter, like the preceding, recovers the catalytic role of Epicureanism in the thinking of later opponents.

Gassendi's debt to Epicurus is manifest, and Veronica Gventsadze shows that, despite the conflict in Gassendi between his Christian views and his commitment to Epicurean atomism (he held that the atoms were created, and he rejected the indeterminate atomic swerve), Gassendi produced a plausibly Epicurean account of the rational soul (anima); he failed, however, to explain its interaction with the immaterial divine mind. I am not convinced that Gassendi's "rolling motion" (vis evolvendi) of atoms within compounds is really an innovation: Epicurus too held that atoms inside molecules vibrate. That rolling motions "can be seen as a will to freedom on the part of the atoms" (88) seems odd for a materialist thinker. Bishop Butler mentions Epicurus explicitly only three times, but David White argues that his "whole effort in arguing against Epicurus was to avoid any appeal to religious or theological sentiments that Epicureans would not accept" (114). Paul Schafer provides a particularly clear discussion of Karl Marx's Hegelian dissertation on free will in Democritus and Epicurus (sadly, he provides no bibliography), showing how "the human being is like the atom because it becomes actual only when it frees itself from relative determination and relates itself to itself" (136). If this is confusing, read Schafer. David Suits investigates parallels between Epicurus and Peirce, both of whom were "empiricists, atomists, and antideterminists" (139). More problematic is Suits's claim, developed at length, that "Epicurus's notions of pleasure in motion [kinetic] and pleasure in rest [katastematic] have their analogs in Peirce's concepts of doubt and belief" (143).

How did the Epicureans reconcile their belief that individual tranquility was the supreme good with their high valuation of friendship? Daniel Russell argues that "Epicurean hedonism is not the thesis that all intrinsic goods are pleasures, but the thesis that pleasure is our final end" (177); it is perfectly consistent to pursue some goods that are not pleasures, provided they do not upset tranquility. M. R. Wheeler, in turn, argues that friendship, as a stable or katastematic pleasure, is "an emergent...