Many philosophers’ goals is to figure out if we do truly we exits and if we do why do we exist? Some agree that if we have the ability to question our existence then we must exist, or else we couldn’t question it. So once we have determined that we do in fact exist we must find out why we do. Is there a reason or a goal to our existence? Do the gods affect people on earth or care about as much as humans think? And what lies after death and should it be fears? Many Philosophes try and come to a conclusion, one of those was Epicurus.
Epicurus was a philosopher born in 341 BC in Samos and died 270 BC in Athens. During his lifetime he taught that the key to life was happiness and friends, that pain and irrational desires caused people to live an unhappy life. He believe in Ataraxia; peace from fear and Aponia; the absence of pain. He believed these two would act as building blocks to a happy life. He defined the two different pleasure as “pleasures of the flesh” and mental pleasures.
Epicurus in a way was an atheist but still believe the gods could exist but not in the way we believed. They were simply beings far away that were ultimately happy. This tired into his metaphysical beliefs, he didn’t believe in a after life and that everything was made of atoms and nothing more. This believe in atomism is explained as nothing really existing just atoms bouncing off of one another. That everything is atoms in a empty void. This is why he didn’t fear death, once we die out atoms would slowly disperse and nothing more would happen. Epicurus believed that the gods were made of atoms just like humans; this made them the same as humans. So we should forget about our worries with the gods and life a fulfilling life.
Epicurus felt that the ulti...
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...ould achieve maximum happiness. But humans are very emotional being out wants and desires will always get the better of us from time to time. Humans will be irrational; they will want things they shouldn’t. They might even worry themselves trying to achieve the four part cure, they could worry they aren’t achieving it quickly enough or that it might not be working for the. So while pleasure and happiness is natural for us so is fear and anxiety. But perhaps this was why Epicurus felt the gods were beings of unlimited happiness and not humans. So that we do work to be like the gods, we cannot truly be like them. People must learn that happiness is being able to deal with our anxieties rather than try and forget them. Acknowledging what makes you anxious and try and control it rather than think it can be fully rid of, because not all anxieties can be fully ridded of.
As said before, this is an unanswerable question, but to find a few conclusions it would be essential to look back at what Epicurus thought of what was life all about and to look back at what Gramsci meant about be a partisan. Equally important, is to look back at how these two philosophies influenced literature and art, by reading Sartre's thoughts on the engaged writer and by recalling to our minds some i...
Now that's done. Epicurius's argument is essentially that there is no point at which we are harmed by death, and therefore death is not bad. Specifically, he formulates his argument in the following way:
With any form of hedonism, one is committed to the concept that pleasure is the chief good. In an extremely generic form of hedonism, it seems as though the quality of sensual pleasure should be given no more weight than the quality of emotional pleasure and vice versa. Additionally, this sort of hedonism would hold that the acquisition of kinetic pleasures would increase overall pleasure to seemingly no end, a concept which Epicurus’ doctrine would reject. Even if we understand death to be a genuine ceasing to exist, we must conjecture that it is bad for a person to die in the sense that it terminates even the possibility to acquire more pleasure. Under this concept of hedonism, we must agree that a person who lives a pleasurable life for ...
Epicurus’s Death argument is very simple, and thus can be hard to refute. The basic premise is that is that no one feels any pain while they are dead, thus being dead is not a painful experience, so being dead is not bad for the one who is dead. My goal for this paper is to prove how those premises fails. In section 1 I will explain in greater detail Epicurus’s argument, in section 2 I will attack those arguments citing various theoretical examples, and in section 3 I will defend my attacks against potential rebuttals.
Epictetus made many excellent points on how he believes would be the best way for people to live though there were a point or two where I differed from his opinion on how life should be lived. One point of differing would be at passage eleven when he is saying that you should just believe that you are giving something back when it is taken from you. I don’t think this is quite the best way to go about anything since it would, more or less, just be someone saying that their own property or the people around them don’t matter to them in the least. I think that it is far too much an emotionless state to be in to think like this about everything around you.
Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, saw death as a total extinction with no afterlife to ensue, he regarded the universe as infinite and eternal and as consisting only of space and atoms; where the soul or mind is constructed of indestructible parts that can never be destroyed. He sought to free humanity from the fear of death and of the gods, which he considered the main cause of unhappiness.
Happiness is often viewed as a subjective state of mind in which one may say they are happy when they are on vacation with friends, spending time with their family, or having a cold beer on the weekend while basking in the sun. However, Aristotle and the Stoics define happiness much differently. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes happiness as “something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action” (NE 1097b20). In this paper, I will compare and contrast Aristotle and the Stoics’ view on human happiness. Aristotle argues that bodily and external goods are necessary to happiness, while Epictetus argues they are not.
Aristotle’s account of a morally virtuous life is opposed to Epictetus’ Stoic approach. I do not think a defender of Epictetus could respond adequately to Aristotle’s criticisms. In this paper I will argue that Stoic beliefs contradict themselves. The Stoic approach to the good life according to Epictetus consists of focusing on what you can control and accepting the things you can’t.
Every person in the world wants to be happy and what makes us happy? Well that would be pleasure. Pleasure is a feeling of happiness and satisfaction physically through our body and mentality in our mind. Everyone in the world will do anything for pleasure no matter what it is. But should every pleasure we seek be desired because not everything is free, but comes with a price? Is pleasure going to be our most important goal in life? Well to answer those questions, you should read Letter to Herodotus by Epicurus, who is a philosopher, and maybe he could answer that question. Epicurus will tell us how to live a full and successful life. Epicurus made Epicureanism where we will learn the important of pleasure and the decision that we made that will lead to happiness or the destruction of
These properties of happiness, Aristotle says, can be acquired through learning and discipline, and are found in a triad of wisdom, virtue, and pleasure; unlike in honor, riches, reputation, and the like, which are the end of things that we do as means to attain them. “Virtue and wisdom are both states, whereas happiness is an activity. The activity that constitutes happiness is, however, the use or exercise of [moral] virtue [alongside wisdom]” (Kenny 267). Pleasure is,
Happiness is perhaps the only clear ultimate end. Happiness is what we strive for by itself and not to get anything else. "So it appears that happiness is the ultimate end and completely sufficient by itself. It is the end we seek in all we do.';(Aristotle, 461) Mans' good is related to his purpose; the purpose of a man involves the actions of his soul (the soul being a part of his reasoning). By carrying out the activities of his soul and doing so with proper excellence and virtue, man is able to reach a desirable end.
The pursuit for happiness has been a quest for man throughout the ages. In his ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness is the only thing that the rational man desires for its own sake, thus, making it good and natural. Although he lists three types of life for man, enjoyment, statesman, and contemplative, it is the philosopher whom is happiest of all due to his understanding and appreciation of reason. Aristotle’s version of happiness is not perceived to include wealth, honor, or trivial
Aristotle feels we have a rational capacity and the exercising of this capacity is the perfecting of our natures as human beings. For this reason, pleasure alone cannot establish human happiness, for pleasure is what animals seek and human beings have higher capacities than animals. The goal is to express our desires in ways that are appropriate to our natures as rational animals. Aristotle states that the most important factor in the effort to achieve happiness is to have a good moral character, what he calls complete virtue. In order to achieve the life of complete virtue, we need to make the right choices, and this involves keeping our eye on the future, on the ultimate result we want for our lives as a whole. We will not achieve happiness simply by enjoying the pleasures of the moment. We must live righteous and include behaviors in our life that help us do what is right and avoid what is wrong. It is not enough to think about doing the right thing, or even intend to do the right thing, we have to actually do it. Happiness can occupy the place of the chief good for which humanity should aim. To be an ultimate end, an act must be independent of any outside help in satisfying one’s needs and final, that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else and it must be
... our society, where good deeds are preformed with the hope of being rewarded, it is more than evident that personal happiness dominates. Personal happiness is not always bad, however, it just seems that the majority of times in our society it is dominated by self-interest. The domination of self-interest is seen everyday in the modern business world with companies unfairly using monopolies to eliminate their competition and also governments trying to invade other countries or regions in order to maximize their territory. It seems that unless the motive of self-interest is eliminated from the pursuit of happiness, we most likely will not experience the type of well being that Aristotle was describing.
Happiness can be viewed as wealth, honour, pleasure, or virtue. Aristotle believes that wealth is not happiness, because wealth is just an economic value, but can be used to gain some happiness; wealth is a means to further ends. The good life, according to Aristotle, is an end in itself. Similar to wealth, honour is not happiness because honour emphases on the individuals who honour in comparison to the honouree. Honour is external, but happiness is not. It has to do with how people perceive one another; the good life is intrinsic to the...