Epicurus Life and Philosophy

[Music] all right I think we're about ready I think everybody is more or less here thanks for coming particularly when I forgot to put it in the paper so uh I appreciate I don't know how you all found out or you must have remembered and be the good scheduler so I appreciate that um tonight we're going to be working on epicurus who is in some ways the greatest philosopher ever because this is the entire collected works of epicurus right here wow that is what we look for and a lot of this is is extraneous data so so you know forget forget Aristotle he wrote too damn much you know just he just wears you out Socrates no yeah we like somebody who leaves a little bit actually what's what's what's very nice about um epicurius is he left us summaries of his own works so that is that is a very rare event literally in philosophical history for someone to have left you uh primarily their own summaries um the only works were moderately certain that ex survived from epicurus um were a series of letters he wrote to students and supporters uh these were collected and summarized and reproduced in diogene lear's lives of imminent philosophers volume 10 um followed uh that was but that was about 500 years after uh after epicurus Liv so diogenes who we'll talk about a little bit is 3rd Century ad epicurius is is 2 and 3dr Century BC so there's about 500e gap between uh epicurus's life and the first surviving writings we have that are attributable to epicurus um since diogenes's time um we've also been in the 1780s and again in 1850s in the Vatican Library uh discoveries were made of some uh texts that are attributable to either epicurus or some students probably a generation after epicurus and so there's also a new collection of fragments uh that have come out in the last 50 years that are translations and sort of pinning these together recently well recently being in the 1970s uh some badly damaged t T were found in an excavation um around uh oh now I can't remember where the excavations were around what was the city that was destroyed by the volcano in Italy was pomp Pompei yes thank you outside of Pompei there is a city that was not ...