Epicurus' Human Beings: Beyond Person and Self [Hardcover]

Ancient philosophers developed a rich toolbox to better reach, teach, and affect their addressees or, indeed, practitioners, using fiction, letter-writing, mnemotechnic, or orality. This book analyses how Epicurus (3rd century BCE), the philosopher of pleasure par excellence, did just that: impacting his readers to make them happy.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Epicurus' philosophical project is predicated on its eudaimonistic efficacy. His letters and maxims not only describe a way of life but also instantiate his practice of care and reform. To memorise and understand them is meant to actually advance one's capacity to reach and maintain a state ofataraxia, i.e. the absence of troubles. They are written and designed to have an impact. Thus, to read Epicurus solely as a theoretical philosopher is to turn a blind eye to his agenda. In this book, Solmeng-Jonas Hirschi advocates a stronger reading that takes Epicurus' intentions at face value. It brings the doctrine closer to its application, through an examination of the readers and intended practitioners of Epicurus' philosophy: human beings.The main corpus of this study consists of the three letters and the doctrines written by Epicurus as transmitted by Diogenes Laertius in book 10 of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Each chapter is dedicated to one of these texts and subdivided into two main sections. In the first section, close readings and textual interpretations with a philosophical focus build a heuristic analysis of Epicurus' conception of what human beings are and do. In the second section, lexical analysis and a review of person deixis offer a text-centred counterpart. Together, they delineate the human beings as they are portrayed (theoretically) and addressed (linguistically) in Epicurus' written philolój