Ep

Epicurus (341-270 BC)

Founder of the Epicurean School of philosophy which rivalled Stoicism for 5 - 600 years. Epicurus taught a materialist doctrine, in which the Gods inhabited only a space "between worlds" and did not interfere in the affairs of this world, which were governed by mechanical law or by chance. His logic set out three general principles for the establishment of the truth of a proposition. Sensation is infallible he said, for it proved the reality of outside things; preconceptions are required to cognise through sensation and thus reason. Pleasure and pain constitute the third principle. Epicurus based his physics on Democritus's atomism, but modified it with the introduction of "swerve" which provided an escape from the determinism which followed from Democritus's theory.

See Hegel on the Philosophy of the Epicureans.