I. Philosophy, the Beginning - Seventh Class

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Hellenistic Philosophy
(Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics), and Neoplatonism

Hellenistic Philosophy
Deepest spiritual crisis in Greece:
- (Alexander the Great:) End of the polis/beginning of empires (Macedonia; Syria;
Egypt…):
- From citizens to subjects;
- From civic virtues to technical bureaucratic skills;
- Collapse of traditional values;
- Big turn in moral and political thought;
- Cosmopolitism: falls down the distinction between Greeks and barbarians… and (to a
certain extent) between man and women (Epicurus would accept women in the
Garden)…
New philosophical systems:
- Materialism;
- Individualism: from citizens to individuals: education aims now, not at forming
citizens, but individuals; separation between ethics and politics; selfishness, in a
sense;
- Need for ethics (secular faiths)… grounded on (poor) physics… grounded on (poor)
logics;
- More phronesis than sophia;
- Consistency between (philosophical) doctrine and life;
- Return to Socrates:
§ autonomy and self-sufficiency;
§ peace of the spirit (happiness through detachment and renunciations);
§ idealization of the wise(s): the true man… similar to God… all founders of
the new great systems were divinized…

End of Minor Socratic Schools and decay of Plato and Aristotle’s schools: (end of the IV
century b.C.)
- Cynicism/(Antistene) Diogenes (I’m searching for the man): attempt to free himself
from every convention and induced need of society… license of free speech and
actions… public scandals… (Cratete);
- Academy;
- Peripato;

Epicureans (Epicurus, Lucretius)
Epicurus against Platonism’s metaphysics, religious and transcendental view, political
approach centered on the polis;
- Plato’s path to the truth: gradual detachment of the soul from the sentient world by
way of reasoning: First step: mathematical knowledge; Second step: dialectic… till
the knowledge of the ideas themselves;
- Epicurus: sensation/sentient knowledge as the highest criterion of truth. Reasoning
leads as away from the truth: it hides the truth instead of reviling it.
Epicurus: first very well aware materialist;
Philosophy as a system, not as specific issues and problems;
Ethics is superior to metaphysic, physics, and ontology;
Physics;
- Nothing comes from the nothingness and nothing goes to the not existence…
- The whole is made of bodies and emptiness;
- Bodies are either composed or simple (atoms);
- Atoms are in a constant falling-down movement:
- doctrine of deviation (clinamen); mechanical movement but also… random/free
source of movements in the universe;
- no rationality but also no necessity (determinism): just randomness…
- Soul as a group of atoms… air-shaped and windy; mortal…
- Amazingly enough, Epicurus does not deny the existence of the gods.
Logics: it’s really a kind of philosophy of knowledge: an attempt to figure how we know
correclty starting with experiences.
- Three criteria/principles of truth:
- (1) Sensation: always true: it receives the atomic representation (image) of the thing;
- (2) Mental representation of the atomic structures received by the senses: what
remains in our memory… Names indicate these representations.
- (3) Feelings of pain and pleasure: (moral) sensations that determines what is good
and what is evil (to avoid): they can never be wrong;
- Opinion: it can be true or false because of the reasoning: unlike the other three
elements, they are not self-evidently true. They are true only when confirmed by
experience.
Ethics;
- The essence of man is material… material must be also his end;
- Human good: feelings of pleasure (hedonism);
- No need of reasoning to achieve the end;
- Unlike Cynicism: Absence of pain as the highest pleasure;
- Unlike Cynicism: pleasures of the soul higher than pleasures of the body;
- Utilitarianism: prudential reasoning applied to the maximization of pleasures…
Calculation of the best rank of pleasures; Prudence as supreme virtue;
- Pleasures (kinds and rank):
§ Natural and necessary (e.g.: eat, drink…);
§ Natural but unnecessary (e.g.: to eat well, refined drink, etc.);
§ Not natural and not necessary (e.g.: desire to be rich, to be honored,
powerful, etc.).
- Avoiding worries: (a) time… fleeing; (b) pain… that might always come; (c) death.
Absence of pain as supreme good… detach ourselves… Vice as ignorance of these
things…
- Political utilitarianism: utility as the main ground of justice;
- Friendship: special role… special pleasure…

Stoics (Zeno)
Refusal of Epicureanism: man not just atoms… moral good not just pleasures;
No atoms but logos;
Logics: sensation/representation – dialectic – rhetoric
Freedom and necessity.

Skepticism and eclecticism