![]() What I thought I could do was reintroduce a more detailed and closer attitude to the ancient texts, because I think in some ways they were more sophisticated than some of the discussions that I saw happening gave them credit for. There was a lot of really important work, in particular a beautiful 10-page essay by Thomas Nagel just called ‘Death,’ reprinted in his book Mortal Questions, which in many ways was my provocation to write this, and which also encouraged a lot of really interesting work from people who aren’t specialists in the ancient texts to engage with the arguments. I wasn’t innovative in this, I should point out. It’s one of those cases where you can bracket out some of the particular bases for his premises, but supply something equivalent that we would accept, and then it’s very straightforward. And, as you say, it’s one of those cases where there was a very direct and immediate kind of conversation to be had between these ancient texts and the particular arguments that Epicurus is raising, that are supposed to justify what he thinks is the correct attitude to death, but are fascinating and relatively easy to carry across without anachronism and without talking at cross-purposes between a modern sensibility and a modern approach and his own ancient world view. It emerged out of some work I was doing while I was a student and was one of those cases where it seemed to be unfinished business for me, after I’d finished writing the essay that I had to write. You’re not putting philosophy in a museum in this book-you’re showing how ancient philosophy can be relevant to our lives now. Not all present-day classical philosophers do that. Obviously, this is founded on deep knowledge of Epicurean philosophy, but in this book you discuss Epicurus’s attitudes to death as if he’s making a contribution now to current thinking about how we should live in relation to death. ![]() Since you’ve mentioned Epicurus’s attitude to the time after death, this might be a good point to mention that you wrote a brilliant book called Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics which shows that this isn’t just a scholarly interest for you. When we come to it, perhaps we can talk about how in his ethics (he’s a hedonist) he has a particular view about pleasure and certain things follow from that, that are probably independent of any particular view about the physics of pleasure. ![]() Otherwise, sometimes the ethics looks as if it’s separable in certain important ways from the physics. ![]() Other cases involve for example him thinking that a proper appreciation of natural phenomena and natural processes-particularly understanding that they’re not directed by any divine agency or for any particular natural good-will allow you to stop fearing, or being concerned unnecessarily about, certain things that might happen around you in the world. Now, Epicurus thinks that certain direct ethical implications follow from that, for example, about how you should view the time after your death and so on. So for example, understanding that the world and everything in it is generated out of atoms moving around in a void: that leads you to believe correctly, says Epicurus, that you too are a combination of atoms that have come together at this particular point, but those atoms will disperse, and when they do, you will cease to be. We might come to some specific cases in which a particular understanding about the nature of the world generates an immediate ethical output. So is the idea that the metaphysics is the foundation for the ethics, so that you understand the way the world is and that allows you then to live well? Epicureanism became a universal kind of philosophical view on the world, the commitment to which was supposed to give you the truth about how the world is, how it works, and also to give you a recipe for living a good life as a human in that world. So, he had a view on natural philosophy he had a view on what he called ‘canonic’ or logic, which includes epistemology for us, and also on ethics and political philosophy. Epicurus had developed a systemic view on what were, by that time, pretty much agreed to be the standard areas of philosophical inquiry. People would gather there and talk philosophy. That was a piece of land that he owned that was called ‘The Garden’ because that’s what it was. It has its origins in a school that was founded in Athens by Epicurus, after whom the school is named. Philosophically, it’s the death of Aristotle: they died within a year of each other, so that lines up rather neatly. It’s usually dated to the death of Alexander the Great. The Epicureans began as a school of philosophers in the Hellenistic period of Ancient Greece.
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