Introduction Hellenistic political philosophy has had a bad press. In lectures published in 1983 the distinguished and influential ancient historian Moses Finley gave it as his view that Plato and Aristotle ‘were the first genuine political theorists of antiquity, and the last’. For only they attempted ‘a complete and coherent account’ of the ideal society ‘grounded in systematic metaphysics, epistemology, psychology and ethics’. Some thirty years earlier, in what remains an eminently serviceable general account of Greek political thought, T. A. Sinclair wrote as follows: Looking back over the political thought of the third century BC one cannot help being struck with its barrenness. This is of course due in part to the decline in the polis and in part to the loss of contemporary writings on the subject. But it is also due to the refusal or inability to relate political thinking to the material conditions in which men lived. Epicurus and Chrysippus did their best to help men to face life cheerfully, but the men whom they helped were the few, who had sufficient education to understand their message and sufficient leisure for lessons in philosophy. Finley and Sinclair are only echoing a long entrenched judgement which finds a classic formulation in the third volume of Zeller's great history of Greek philosophy, first published in 1852. For Zeller the Hellenistic period found the Greeks coping with a deterioration in their external circumstances, and particularly with loss of political self-determination as the monarchies of Alexander's successors eclipsed the city-state, by withdrawing into the inner world of self-consciousness.

Social and political thought

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Reason, causation and compatibility with the phenomena

Determinism and indeterminism

L'A. defend la these selon laquelle la conception epicurienne de l'amitie est compatible avec la these psychologique de l'egoisme et la these morale de l'hedonisme defendues par Epicure. Soulevant la question de l'altruisme a la lumiere du principe de charite, l'A. montre que l'amour de l'autre participe du propre plaisir du sage, qui est capable de mourir pour son ami.

Is Epicurean Friendship Altruistic

The purpose of this research was to uncover a structure of the lived experience of joy-sorrow using the Parse research method. Eleven women over 65 years of age volunteered to participate in the study by engaging in audio- and videotaped dialogues with the researcher about the phenomenon. The structure of the lived experience of joy-sorrow was found to be pleasure amid adversity emerging in the cherished contentment of benevolent engagements. Recommendations for further research and practice are specified.

Joy-Sorrow: A Study Using the Parse Research Method

The central thesis of this paper is that Epicurus held that swerves of the constituent atoms of agents' minds cause the agents' volitions from the bottom up. De Rerum Natura 2.216-93 is examined at length, and Lucretius is found to be making the following claims: both atoms and macroscopic bodies sometimes swerve as they fall, but so minimally that they are undetectable. Swerves are oblique deviations, not right-angled turns. Swerves must be posited to account both for cosmogonic collisions quite generally and for every "free volition," including those of animals. All volitions are fresh starts of macroscopic motion, caused by that "something in our chests" which later philosophers would call 'the faculty of will.' Since nothing can come to be from nothing, volitions must be caused from the bottom up by swerves, fresh starts in the mind's atoms motions caused by the atoms' inherent swerviness. This is what Lucretius is saying, and what Epicurus had to say in order to defend both libertarianism and atomism. Modern scholars are wrong, then, in rejecting the interpretation of Guissani and Bailey, which was crudely stated, but substantively correct. The rival interpretations of Furley, Fowler, and Englert do not do justice to Epicurus' libertarianism, and that of Sedley does not do justice to his atomism, which entails universal bottom-up causation. Epicurus did not himself draw much attention to his positive doctrine of the swerve, preferring to emphasize the untenability of the deterministic alternative. The notoriety of the doctrine in Cicero's day is due primarily to Chrysippus, who insisted that swerves cannot occur, since they would be 'uncaused' motions, and secondarily to Carneades and Zeno of Sidon.

Epicurus on 'Free Volition' and the Atomic Swerve

L'A. confronte deux fragments antithetiques d'Epicure sur la nature du but de l'existence, le plaisir, qui dans un cas est vu comme paix de l'âme et du corps (ataraxie), mais dans l'autre accepte le plaisir des sens et se rapproche de l'hedonisme. L'A., partisan de la seconde interpretation, explique ses convictions et commente la doctrine d'Epicure

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4182448.pdf

Jeffrey S. Purinton

Papers

Epicurus on 'Free Volition' and the Atomic Swerve

Epicurus on the telos