Abstract
Epicureanism posed a unique challenge to dominant belief systems in the Renaissance, because of its attacks on Providence, divine action, planned creation, prayer, and the immortality of the soul, its atomist physics and self-sufficient materialist model of nature, its account of natural selection, its developmental account of the origin of society and government, and its focus on pleasure-seeking as a moral good. After being known in the Middle Ages mainly through attacks by early Christian apologists, knowledge of Epicureanism expanded thanks to humanist interest in reconstructing the classical world and the recovery of texts. Epicurean content in Cicero’s philosophical dialogs was followed by the recovery of Lucretius (1417) and Diogenes Laertius (translated into Latin 1433). In addition to figures who treated Epicureanism extensively, such as Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo Fracastoro, Giordano Bruno, and Pierre Gassendi, Epicurean influence can be seen in the works of figures including Niccolò Machiavelli, Marcello Adriani, Michele Marullo, Bartolomeo Scala, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, Henry More, Marin Mersenne, Margaret Cavendish, Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others. At the same time, heterodox Epicurean doctrines continued to be stigmatized and associated with atheism, hedonist sensualism, sodomy, and general irreligion, so Epicureanism appears as an object of fear and a term of abuse in general accounts of atheism and heresy, especially Reformation and Counter-Reformation literature, and in specific attacks on radical figures, from Luther and Erasmus to Spinoza. Epicureanism’s recovery has received particular attention from modern scholars because of the powerful similarities between its core doctrines and characteristically modern secularized science, ethics, and political theory.
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Palmer, A. (2016). Epicureanism. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_192-1
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