Epicureanism

Pohjaan, että pahdalla on koko suuri jälkeen. Sain tarpeisiin. Sinä valitsevat maktuutuksen laajuuden, metari joa me maksuttaman etä elän lääkäriin sekä nopean suora korvauksen klinikan kanssalla. Luöllisää, akriapistetti! Pohjaan, että pahdalla on koko suuri jälkeen koko suurin, että pahdalla on koko suurin. Meidän on koko suurin, että pahdalla on koko suurin. Pohjaan, että pahdalla on koko suurin, että pahdalla on koko suurin. his followers were wary of politics and religion, cast off their fear of death and distressed the importance of friendship. Epicurian ideas were a major inflowential in ESL thinkers and offered a radical view of the universe that anticipated Father Latest scientific discoveries such as Darwinian evolution and even quantum mechanics. Dessertukken êtreme, fnekör photograph that exists with Epicurianism Angie Hobbes Professor of the Public Understanding at Philosophy at University of Sheffield David Segley Lawrence Professor of ancient philosophy at University of Cambridge And James Warren Rita in ancient philosophy also at the University of Cambridge Angie Hobbes "Would you begin by telling us about who Epicurus was and what's known about him?" Yes, he seems to be a very likeable, even lovable man He was born in 341 BC on the island of Seimos and he died in 270 BC in Athens As a young man he studied under a follower of Demokritus and who was of course one of the founders of the atomic theory and that was clearly going to be the basis of his future thought When he was 18 he moves to Athens for two years to do the compulsory military service and then he spent about 15 years traveling around the eastern Mediterranean teaching and setting up his own philosophical circles Then when he's 34 he comes back to Athens buys a house and the even more famous garden and sets up this philosophical community of friends including women and slaves and there they live this very simple life Epicurus says that "Cheese is enough to turn bread and water into a feast he treasures his friendships, he doesn't seem to have married or had children himself and he writes prodigiously he worked very very hard in this garden apparently there were 300 scrolls that he left so he wrote on physics, astronomy, ethics, psychology, theory of knowledge, theory of language so enormously prodigious output You mentioned the garden twice for listeners to know how significant the garden was his philosophical school was known as the garden Yes, yes I don't know if they did any actual gardening Can you give us, you began there but can you give us even more information about the range of his philosophical concerns Okay, so the primary natural good is pleasure and pleasure is the only thing that's good in itself and it's the criterion by which we judge the value of absolutely everything else including virtue even the maximum of pleasure is reached when we attain a state of tranquility where we're free from bodily pain and free from mental cares and anxieties, particularly religious superstitions about divine retribution and the fear of death We'll be coming to that in a moment but I was thinking of the range in terms of he seems to have studied physics and astronomy and written about a great number of different subjects Yes, we've got his remnants of his work on nature in which he talks about the physics we have he also touches on that in his one of his letters we've got the ethics which we have in his letter to manoeuvirce we've got astronomy in the letter to pithicles we've got the canon on epistemology yes an enormous an enormous range but the centre of it was this pleasure that you were then talking about James Warren, how much of epicures work has survived in what form? why do we know so much about him? we're very fortunate in the case of epicures because perhaps unusually compared with some of his contemporaries some complete works of his have survived Angie's already mentioned these letters letters to friends that set out there are three of them that we have in that are complete that set out in summary his major teachings in physics and theory of knowledge in natural philosophy and cosmology and then ethics those come down to us because they were cited in full by a later ancient writer who wrote biographies of the philosophers he was called d'Argine's Leircius and they've survived through the standard means of transmission by which these ancient works come down to us they were copied through later antiquity through the Renaissance and so on we also have works by epicures various epicurean followers perhaps most prominently the complete poem by the Roman poet Lucretius that was written in the first century BC that also came down in that similar transmission tradition but for epicureanism we also are fortunate to have two very unusual sources of evidence so first of all we have a more or less preserved library that was owned by a must have been a very rich Roman senator in his villa just outside Herculaneum in southern Italy now this was covered in the eruption of 79 AD and the scrolls of papyrus were carbonized and preserved in that way and they were discovered in the 17th century so this is a case of direct transmission of ancient texts and this library contained some more text of epicures that we didn't otherwise have but also text by other epicureans perhaps later epicureans including some like Philodemus that we'll perhaps talk about later the second unusual case is an enormous wall from southwest Turkey that was set up sometime probably in the middle of the second century AD by a well-meaning citizen of the town who decided what his town's people really needed was an 80 meter long three and a half meter tall wall inscribed with various of epicures teachings and indeed his own epicurean thoughts on the world and now how did that survive? when it's already astonishing that lava and lead to the Suvius his work to and now to have great benefits in that case and we may find but how did the walls survive? well it survives in fragments it's not they're intact and various painstaking efforts have been made to try and excavate and then read and reconstruct what we have some of it was reused and you can go to the village and see bits fit on the floor still lying down so we're very fortunate in that it hasn't been more disturbed than it is his philosophical system was it was it founded on the idea that everything we see consists of atoms if so where did it get it from and where did it lead him to? yes his physical system sets out with the idea that everything in the world is either a body or it's void or it's some combination of these two this isn't novel with him there were people hundreds or years before him including democratists that I think we've already mentioned who may have originated this idea but we have from Epicurus the first detailed exposition of his argument for this view and it's rather interesting he sets out from the idea that our senses tell us that there are bodies in the world there's no doubt about that and they also tell us that there must be void because otherwise there'd be no way for the bodies to be and the bodies wouldn't be able to move because everything would be full up and there'd be no motion possible if you add to this two other thoughts the first that nothing can come to be out of nothing and the second that nothing ever disappears entirely out of nothing plus the idea that we see things around us change and grow and decay the idea is that those things that we see around us can't be these fundamental bodies they must be made up of further tiny and indivisible bodies of which there are innumerable numbers of them they they've lasted forever the void goes on forever spatially and temporally and our cosmos is just happens to be a collection of them that's around at the moment it seems and David said this idea of discovering atoms by thinking that it was like that rather than by any examination obviously no microscope obviously none of the machinery as it were technology a velocity of 400 years is an astonishing active thought isn't it but he had this atomic thought that there were a great number of atoms did he think there were infinite number or a finite number that they swerved around they collided with each other and and they made up everything they made up the gods they made up the humans they made up everything and therefore there was no division between the gods and the humans well in in you know yes that there's a lot in that first of all yes there are infinitely many atoms moving around in infinite space o fo mengthough sy/ddai am lleidwl Mannon saf. 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Mae rolo pan gystalig, ond fel oes fywodod wneud, tot yn rhan ford incrediblyu, mae caigau yn sry ran lmryd yn eiulect التيolol inna fyd yn rydym syr wi'n mewn, at mae'r OME job yna ddod Fel Watch i bod ade кам mae'r oesirfes i 'n llynnariaw dweud. D STEVE y Coli ei ac mae yngfallion fel bod o hynn neu eichel ahaethau erânau i g office o hynny, mae'r gwasio ac mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud, mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud, mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud. Mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud. Mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud, mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud. Mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud, yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud. Mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud. Mae'r gwasio yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud yn y llynnariaw dweud. Mae'n mych chi gychdelwy craesidents enrheif yn borodat daeng labi amdonar adon yn diolchised ulu? Mae'r renau' yn diwynt yn gwaith,edd cwbarwch rangingais diidod pan o mo i'n'n bl Rabb, mae safely o'r Lleytid Brind Break hostletu, oherwydd yn trwy'n hon Does gyhollo ond chi wedi un redbl sydd yn gallwch. Mae'r gefnogi ar gy- Filiaeth i hyn i'n fan. Eweryd, mych chi'n genan Łiegaith Mosheire��i, am maen心 dislive petio perpanoliol pandiwys instynch y digwydd. TI PIPACIS view of how we can come to knowzza by the world. Ok so we need to emphasise, again that absolutely everything is composed of attange involved including our souls and our minds, absolutely everything. So it's a mechanistic theory it's an Olymp persist theory and it has a basic trust in human sensation and a deniel of mine body dualism. Epicureus says we all have sensations and he asserts as far as I can see without argument though David and James might correct me here that the causes of these sensations must come from things outside the sensations themselves. What are these things that cause our sensations? He says well there are these very thin atomic films which are usually effluences from the surface of physical objects though not always but usually which float off from those surfaces and enter into our bodies, enter into our sense organs, then through a complex process which we can return to if we want. Those, that sort of philmic input is converted into what we call a sense of impression, a phantasyre. Now the phantasyre is an accurate and true report and the same word in Greek, alephesis means both accurate or true and real. It's an accurate and true report of the atomic films at the stage they are when they enter our bodies and we're accurate about our impressions of those films when they enter our eyes or ears. And these films is emanations from say that bottle of water in front of me. Exactly, but that does not mean to say that the films which enter our sense organs are exactly in the same state as they were when they left the physical body because it might have been some distance away and the intervening medium air or water might have altered the atomic structure. So what we can say for sure is that our sense impressions accurately report the films as they enter us. There's still a plenty of room for error in how we interpret those sense impressions with the mind and we can get all sorts of things wrong. We may not realise that the straight awe in water is going to appear bent to us over the distance. We may have become confused and think that the rainbow is actually represents a solid object that we can slide down or that the mirage really does indicate a pool of water that we can drink from. So there's plenty of room for error at that stage, but not at the stage of the sense impressions themselves. James Warren, can we take many Greek philosophers with skeptics? They believe that in a sense it was impossible really to know anything. How does that play, if I can use that, disgraceful really word, comes in. With what Angus has been saying? With the way Angus explained it is, Epicurus is physical doctrine of perception and how that might bolster his confidence in the way our senses were. And in the way we gather knowledge. That's right. That's the track we're on at the moment. But you're quite right that for a long time various Greek philosophers, in fact most Greek philosophers would have been skeptics of one stripe or another. They vary from people who say we can't know anything at all, to people who say on occasion our senses might be a little wonky and not quite tell us the truth. Now let's remember that at some point in his establishment of atomic theory, Epicurus is relied on the senses. He said our senses tell us that there are bodies in the world and they tell us that things move. And to better not be solely on the basis of that atomic theory that he then tells us that's why we can rely on our senses. Otherwise there'd be something of an argumentative circle there. He goes on the attack against the skeptics. He says really, if you look at how a skeptic lives their life, they don't really disbelieve what their senses tell them. No one really doesn't leave the room by the door or walks out into the road in front of moving traffic because they really don't believe the way their eyes are telling them things. So he has a pragmatic attack on the skeptics. He also takes on their various arguments because some of them are based on the supposition that two sense impressions might conflict and if two sense impressions conflict these skeptics argue they can't both be true. So at least one of them is false. And if we can't tell which is false then we ought to be careful which ones we believe to come back just to help and then please go and one of Andrew's examples of the ore in the water. We know it's a straight blade of wood going into the water but we see it as a bent wood in the water. That's right. And you might take that as a suggestion that at least one of our senses must be telling us something that's not true. One of our senses tells us it's bent and the other one says it's not. But Epicurus says if you think carefully they're not really conflicting. It really does look bent at least the part of it that enters the water as it, as we would say the light refracts makes it look bent but if you run your finger along it it would feel straight. But these don't conflict. It looks one way and feels the other. There's no logical conflict between those two. David said central goal of his life, I call him Epicurus, is pleasure. This is the most people remember and you began to talk about it earlier on. What did he mean when he used the word pleasure and why and let's just start with that. What did he mean about when he used the word pleasure? oeddwn i'r ffeithio. So we don't expect him to answer the question as the plays I would have done with the definition. Rather, he says, "Pleasure is an immediate data of experience from birth. Every human newborn infant, probably every other animal as well, from the moment of birth, recognizes pleasure as the good and pain as the bad." So he says it's as obvious what pleasure is and what it values as it is that snow is cold and that fire is hot. None of that needs justification. But what Epicurus, so what he contributes beyond that, is a much, a gradually refined idea of what kinds of pleasure there are and what their relative values are. And that's how his hedonist system is going to be built up. So if I could just elaborate a bit, the familiar notion of pleasure, the one that everyone experiences from birth is positive sensory stimulation of a welcome kind and pain is a negative sensory stimulation of a certain kind. That's what we start from. And Epicurus calls those, has a technical term for it, he calls them kinetic pleasures. But what is not initially clear but becomes clear is that actually the simple removal of pain is itself a kind of pleasure because although the process of let's take drinking, suppose though the process of quenching thirst is itself a pleasure as it moves your drinking, the pleasure, sorry I should say the state, having your thirst now quenched so that you're not in pain in that respect, is itself a pleasant state, not only is it a pleasant state, but the remarkable claim he makes, which I want to be a good deal of criticism from other schools is that it is as pleasant as a kinetic pleasure. He calls these static pleasures and there are two kinds, there's the static pleasure of not being any bodily pain, if you're not hungry or thirsty or cold, then you are in a state of static pleasure. And what most people think quite incorrectly according to Epicurus is that you can in a third enhance that state by adding, for example, luxuries. If you already hadn't enough to eat, if you have a box of chocolates as well, most people would think you've added an extra pleasure, a kinetic one and that increased some total of pleasure. Not so according to Epicurus, what the additional pleasures do, the glass of port after dinner or the chocolate is vary your state of pleasure but they don't actually increase it. I think this is his, although this is counterintuitive, it's his way of putting a point that's often put in popular thought by saying that being rich doesn't make you happy, it just enables you to be miserable and comfort. Nearly adding, people think that you can have the pleasantest life simply by accumulating as many kinetic pleasures as possible, one luxury after another. Actually, the height of pleasure is achieved when all the pain is gone. Now, I just have to add one more distinction, which is of great importance to him. We've so far been talking about bodily pleasures and those are the ones through which we learn the nature of pleasure, but the ones that are really important are mental pleasures. Mental pleasures are superior partly because with your mind you can enjoy all your past pleasures and all your future pleasures. You can look forward, you can reminisce. So the mind is a much more powerful source of pleasure in the body. Moreover, the most pleasant state that you could possibly achieve would be one of mental painlessness. If you get rid of all the fears you have, the fear of God, the fear of death, any other fears of what the world can throw at you, then you are in the highest state of pleasure. That is really the essence of Epic, or the basis from which he develops his account of a good life. And you, can you take that on? How do we set about obtaining these pleasures? And this is where the connections between the different aspects of, sorry, of Epicurus is writing are so important because he's going to make it very clear that though the goal of his philosophy is this life of pleasure conceived as freedom from care, you can only attain that if you understand the nature of things, if you understand the physical structure of the universe and the nature of the gods, and that if you understand that the gods have no control over our lives, have no control over what happens after our deaths because our deaths are simply going to be the dispersal of our souls and death is going to be nothing to us. Once you've come to understand those things, then you can set about achieving contentment and satisfaction in this life without worrying about what the gods have in store for you. Now of course many people have not felt that Epicurus has got rid of the fear of death by saying we're going to be obliterated at death, but he thought he had. So reason and understanding are crucial here and so are the virtues. The virtues, as we've seen, are not good in themselves, they're good as means to the life of tranquility. So prudence, self-control, courage, these are all things that are going to help us understand the nature of things. Do the hedonic calculus way up the pleasures and pains in our own life so we might accept a short-term pain and to get a long-term greater good and vice and avoid a short-term good because we think it would bring us a greater long-term pain and also in order to help us deal with pain and evil and suffering in the right way and to understand that if they can be born with fortitude and as David was saying we always have recourse to memory of past pleasures and if you think you're going to live you have the anticipation of future ones. So in all these ways we can use our rational understanding and our virtues to help us achieve this life. It's a very self-disciplined life. It's not remotely the the cyber-itic excess of indulgence that it was later portrayed as by by Christians and others. Before I turn to James Warren just to put it up with the piece if I may to what you're saying Angie, he doesn't think that the gods have anything much to do with this because they must be successfully happy and why would they want to bother with us a lot if they were happy because we'd give them nothing but trouble. Exactly. He says you've got to choose. You've got this view that the gods live this life of utter blessedness and peace and freedom from care and then you've also got this view that the gods are concerned with human affairs and bother about rewards and punishments. You can't have both which is the most important belief and he says surely the crux of your belief is that the gods are supremely blessedly happy and peaceful. So they're not going to bother with messy old humans. Well, back to the messy old humans here. James, one, would you explain the importance of friendship in Epicurinism which caught a lot of people's attention and pancy for adventurous? That's right. So it's obvious that friendship played an important part in the way the Epicurin community was structured and also Epicurinism places a great stress on friendship as one of those sources of mental pleasures that David was talking about. That having friends to talk to, to discuss philosophy with, to chat over dinner is going to be one way in which you can maintain your mental tranquility and feel happy about your own lives. Some people have found that there might be a problem with this though because as we've been developing his view of the good life, the idea seems to be that each person should be doing their best to structure their lives and their desires and their beliefs and so on in order to make sure that they live a life that's as pain free as possible and as full of pleasure as possible. Now people's friendships differ obviously but sometimes it seems that friendships involve putting yourself out on behalf of a friend and some people have worried whether Epicurus can make room for a genuine sense of altruism within his what seems like an egoistic, hedonistic recipe for an individual's happiness. There's some evidence I think that some of the ancient Epicurins felt some pressure to give an account of this too. There's a sequence of thoughts in a work by Cicero who is no friend of Epicurus where he relates various possible stories that Epicurins came up with about how to make room for friendship within their good life. Some of them say, "Well perhaps you start out in a sort of contract with a friend. I agree to help you out when you need help and you agree to help me out when we need help and we both benefit." But over time perhaps a genuine sense of other regard might develop. Whatever you think about that, it's clear that the Epicurins do want to say that there's some genuine positive, hedonic value, a genuine pleasure to be had in genuine friendship in having that confidence that your friends are there when you need them and engaging in the kinds of activities that friends do for one another. That's part and parcel of how they will see a good, happy human life. Then it's said Epicurus encapsulates in a formulation known as tetrafarmacos. That is correct. What does that mean? It means the full-fold remedy and it's actually a metaphor borrowed from medicine. There really was a kind of medicine with four ingredients known as the tetrafarmacos, but Epicurus adapted it to the idea that philosophy is also kind of medicine, namely the medicine of the soul. Epicurus devoted a large part of his ethical rising to… attempts to show how we can actually memorize and master the principles which will heal the soul and heal it above all the fear because fear of death and fear of God, he thinks these are the two great things that that blight our lives and here's how it goes. God holds no fears, death holds no worries and while good can easily be attained so too evil can readily be endured. Now all of the content of that has already been covered by things we've said but are just sort of very briefly say what they are. God is not to be feared that's because as Angus explained once you understand the true divine nature you realize no divine being would take an interest in you let alone be malevolent towards you. The death holds no worries well this is because the whole battery of arguments designed to show that since the human soul is simply made of atoms when the body is destroyed the soul will be dissipated with it. There is no survival of death therefore death is non-existence, non-existence is not to be feared because you can't experience it you're not there to experience it. So that's the second item the third one good can be easily be attained that's because all you have to do in order to achieve epicurian pleasure is to satisfy your basic natural and necessary desires and those are very easily satisfied and what that leaves is the one that we haven't really touched on much which is an evil can be endured that's to say pain can be endured because that's the one remaining fear an epicurian is in danger of having what if I suffer in an illness with intense pain the answer is that there are strategies for enduring pain. Epicurus on his own deathbed described in a letter he wrote intense pain he was suffering but he said that was completely outweighed by the pleasure he got in reliving past conversations with his friends. So that's one of the strategies you use the power of memory to overcome bodily pain and the other is this is something on which Epicurus has not been found generally convincing in these in modern times although they were they had his ancient admirers on the point severe pain can be endured because it doesn't last long. Mild pains are tolerable anyway if the pain of severe enough it'll be short lived and that presumably what he means it'll kill you so you can deal with that as long as you realize that you're going to pass very quickly to a state of painlessness. James Orren what competing philosophical systems existed at that time? What's he. well that's a question. Well in Athens of his day there were still followers of Plato about of various sorts in the academy. Aristotle's school was still a going concern the Lyceum and then perhaps a generation after Epicurus stoicism came on the scene again a philosophy during its inspiration from Socrates like many others at the time but that became perhaps its major competitor for the remainder of the Hellenistic period and on into the Roman world. Sturcism in many ways is quite different from Epicurus on all major philosophical topics so they believed that our world is unique and it's governed thoroughly and maintained by a rational divine force that makes sure everything is for the best. They stressed the importance of living virtuously in harmony with this cosmic nature rather than living for pleasure and so on. So in many ways the Epicurians and they were easy to set against one another in terms of debates or in terms of discussions. There are also various kinds of skeptics still on the scene urging us not to form knowledge because it's much too difficult and we can never be sure about the world. Can we just talk about how his influence, how his teachings move through from 300 BC into the Roman Age and what it encounters, what it takes to itself and so on? Well the Epicurians were regarded in their own day as very conservative in the sense that they were thought to be a very committed to the the word of the founder of the school. It wasn't actually just Epicurus but Epicurus and his three leading associates, Polyionus, Metridoras and Hermarchus. Their words were treated as kind of canonical. So the outside perception was that the school didn't really adapt very much. It simply went back to the Epicurian Gospels but the reality is very different from that. It did actually, it moved into the Roman world as particularly around starting to run around 100 BC, the power of Rome in the Mediterranean had grown, Athens which had been where the center for philosophical schools was in decline. And Philodemus who James mentioned earlier was a very good example of the way that Epicurianism adapted itself to the Roman world. Philodemus had studied and lived and worked in Athens but sometime in the early first century BC he moved westwards, set up a school in the Naples region. This was probably a Herculanium and there that was a very well chosen spot because it was where wealthy and powerful Romans went to spend a leisure time campania the area around Naples. And there he won the ear of many influential Romans for example Pyso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, Horus and Virgil. The poets had Epicurian backgrounds in the Naples region at that time. So we could get a very clear sign of not only of Epicurianism adapting to different geopolitical circumstances but also adapting itself to the cultural interests of the Roman world. We see Philodemus wrote many works on aesthetics for example which had not been a preoccupation of the early school. His most important influence was Angie Hubses. Was that on Lucretius and if so why? Well I don't know why Lucretius felt that Epicurus spoke specifically to him but yes, De Raram Natura on the nature of things is it's a work of genius I think. I mean Cicero who as we've heard is no friend of Epicurianism but he said it has elements of genius in it of it calls it sublime. I mean it is the most fabulous hexameter poem at the power of its imagery, the vividness of the depictions of human fears of death and anxious human squabbles over power and wealth. He really really moves you to want the kind of salvation that he believes Epicurus is offering. Is he paying tribute to Epicurus throughout this poem? Do we know? Oh yes no question about it. I mean he treats Epicurus I would say as an quasi. He says he was a god. A god. I mean of course that's a loaded thing to say given what the Epicurians felt about the gods. So it's no surprise to me that when the Renaissance does as we're hearing probably in a bit rediscoveres Epicurianism it does so through Lucretius it's a poem that really grabs you and the rhythm and the cadences of its verse and it's just talking about the nature of things. Yes absolutely. It's absolutely about everything really. Yes I mean it is yes it's in a hand he and it's also the power of the arguments and we owe to Lucretius our understanding of certain key elements of Epicurianism. He may well have I'm sure he did get them from Epicurian texts which are lost to us but we only know about the swerve that we were hearing about earlier which may or may not create a space for free will. We only know about that from Lucretius. The intricate mechanism whereby the images the the filmic atomic films that enter our sense organs get transformed into sense impressions that that very intricate mechanism is from Lucretius. Did the gods orn did the arrival did the growth and arrival in spread of Christianity have an effect on Epicurianism? It's hard to tell whether it had an effect on Epicurianism but they weren't I think comfortable bedfellows it's very hard to see much common ground between these two views of the world or views of human condition. We've already touched on more than once the idea that Epicurus says we should be made confident not in the knowledge that this life is all that we have and when you die that's it that's annihilation and that's a good thing for you to come to terms with. And God will not do not interfere in human affairs that's another different. They don't interfere in human affairs they didn't create the world there is no retribution for doing wrong there's no reward for doing right in this life. So every basic tenet of Christianity more or less it is challenged Epicurianism on the other way around. Absolutely there are many other ancient philosophies that are much more friendly to that kind of Christian outlook. Platonism for example had a much easier ride. Did this therefore was this one of the main factors in the ebbing of the influence of Epicurus at that time in the early years of the AD years? I think it's quite possible. I mean we know that nevertheless various ancient texts that talk about Epicurianism continued to be copied and [BLANK_AUDIO] otherwise we might not have had them at all. But there was I think an unease dealing with Epicurian thought. I've got to push forward about 1,000 or 1,200 years just for the final question. When did Epicurianism reemerge in the West, in the knowledge bank as it were and become effective to get? Can we go around the table? I thought we'd do that. In 1417, Podgeo, who was a former papal secretary of the now disgraced Pope John XXIII had time on his hands and he went traveling in Germany, visiting the German monasteries, searching for the pagan texts that were his private hobby. We think in the Benedictine Abbey of Fulder, he just by chance pulled down a copy of Deirera and Duturra, which had been gathering dust for hundreds of years. He was the man who reintroduced it into the West. Initially, there was a very interesting debate between Christians and followers of Epicurus about whether Epicurianism could be assimilated into the Christian faith and more in Erasmus have a fascinating discussion about that. But it's really with the rise of the new science at the end of the 16th and in the 17th centuries that you get the philosopher scientist like Bacon, Galileo, Gassendi and France, thinking that Epicurianism was extremely congenial to the mechanistic theories of the universe that they were developing. James Orrin, do you want to add to that? No, but I would add just that even in the 17th century when there was more of an interest, perhaps as a result of Gassendi's commentaries on Dagenese Leircius and so on, even then I think there was an attempt to try to accommodate some idea of divine causation in our cosmos within the Epicurian system. So there weren't going to revive this wholesale. There were still quams that were strong enough that meant that they really had to qualify what was the unadulterated Epicurian worldview. Sorry. No, Gassendi says that God created the atoms and God has ordained all the movements of the atoms. Go, David Tudley. Well, not much to add to what's just been said, but it is worth saying that Gassendi, who's just been mentioned, is a particularly important figure because not only is he a leading scientific and philosophical thinker of the 17th century, but he was also a scholar of Epicurian texts and he brought the two together as no one previously had managed to do. Well, thank you very much, Angie Hobbs, James Warren and David Tudley. And next week we'll be talking about ice ages. Thank you for listening. There are many more Radio 4 Arts and Discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at bbc.co.uk/redu4. There's a magical place where the desert meets the sea. Oh my goodness, this is amazing. Brimming with history and culture. There's no place on earth for our like this. Busting with flavors. I can smell the spices and basking in luxury. Might have you here in paradise. 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