The Ethics of Epicurus and its Relation to Contemporary Doctrines

by Jean-Marie Guyau, Federico Testa (Editor), Keith Ansell-Pearson (Editor)

This is the first English translation of a compelling and highly original reading of Epicurus by Jean-Marie Guyau. This book has long been recognized as one of the best and most concerted attempts to explore one of the most important, yet controversial ancient philosophers whose thought, Guyau claims, remains vital to modern and contemporary culture. Throughout the text we are introduced to the origins of the philosophy of pleasure in Ancient Greece, with Guyau clearly demonstrating how this idea persists through the history of philosophy and how it is an essential trait in the Western tradition. With an introduction by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Federico Testa, which contextualizes the work of Guyau within the canon of French thought, and notes on both further reading and on Epicurean scholarship more generally, this translation also acts as a critical introduction to the philosophy of Guyau and Epicurus.

275 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 9, 2021

About the author

Jean-Marie Guyau was a french philosopher and poet. Through his stepfather, the noted French philosopher Alfred Fouillée, he soon knew about Plato and Kant, who strongly influenced him. With this background, he was able to attain his Bachelor of Arts at only 17 years of age, and at this time, translated the Handbook of Epictetus. At 19, he published his 1300-page Mémoire that, a year later in 1874, won a prize from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and helped to earn him a philosophy lectureship at the Lycée Condorcet.

Guyau's works primarily analyze and respond to modern philosophy, especially moral philosophy. Largely seen as an Epicurean, he viewed English utilitarianism as a modern version of Epicureanism. Although an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he did not spare them a careful scrutiny of their approach to morality.

In his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, probably his most important work on moral theory, he begins from Fouillée, maintaining that utilitarian and positivist schools, despite admitting the presence of an unknowable in moral theory, wrongly expel individual hypotheses directed towards this unknowable. He states that any valid theory of ethics must consider the moral sphere as consisting not merely of moral facts (the utilitarian approach) but also, and more importantly, of moral ideas. On the other hand, in contrast to Fouillée, he does not see this unknowable itself as able to contribute a "principle practically limiting and restricting conduct," i.e. of "mere justice" which, he states, comes too close to Kantian notions of duty; for this, in turn, would bring us back to a theory of moral obligation, which, as the title suggests, he wishes to free moral theory from.

(Rephrased from Wikipedia)