Christian thinkers considered him an atheist and amoralist. In Jewish tradition, “apikoiros” meant a heretic. Dante put Epicureans in hell for denying the soul’s immortality. In popular lore, Epicurus was patron to gluttons, publicans and brothelkeepers. The “sensualist” slur stuck. Later “epicure” came to mean an aesthete or foodie. Epicurus’s scientific speculations － on atomism and natural selection － sound uncannily modern but rested on brilliant inference, not experiment. Read today, the detail sounds barmy.
The uses of philosophy － Debts to pleasure The Economist September 28th 2019 (Book review) 哲学的生活(書評)
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