Schools of Philosophy

Epicureanism

ep-ih-kyoo-REE-uh-niz-uhm

Citation Formats

General Reference

Philosophy Atlas. "Epicureanism." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://philosophy.interactiveatlas.org/schools/epicureanism.

APA Style

Philosophy Atlas. (n.d.). Epicureanism. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://philosophy.interactiveatlas.org/schools/epicureanism

BibTeX

@misc{philosophyatlas-epicureanism,
  author = {Philosophy Atlas},
  title = {Epicureanism},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://philosophy.interactiveatlas.org/schools/epicureanism},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A Hellenistic school of philosophy founded by Epicurus in Athens around 307 BCE, teaching that pleasure, understood as the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance rather than indulgence, is the highest good, and that a life of simple pleasures, close friendship and freedom from needless fear, especially fear of the gods and of death, is the surest route to it. Epicureanism held that the universe consists entirely of atoms moving through void, a physics adopted from Democritus, and used that physics to argue that the soul dissolves at death and that the gods, if they exist, are indifferent to human affairs. It stood as a direct rival to Stoicism for the rest of antiquity, the two schools disagreeing sharply over whether pleasure or virtue alone is the good, and over whether the world is governed by providential reason or by the chance collisions of atoms.

Facts

Start Year

307 BCE 1

End Year

300 2

By the late third century CE the school had all but disappeared, displaced by the growing dominance of Neoplatonism, Peripateticism and Christianity.

Region

Athens, later the Roman Empire 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Rejected Here

Stoicism

Epicureanism and Stoicism were rival Hellenistic schools that disagreed sharply over whether pleasure or virtue alone is the good, and over whether the world is governed by providential reason or by the chance collisions of atoms.