ABSTRACT
Whose pleasures? Which assessment of risk? Sixteen years after Aristotle’s death, a native of the island of Samos in his midthirties named Epicurus bought a house and garden in Athens and with a circle of friends embarked on a quiet, private life free from involvement in civic affairs. He offered a carefully articulated philosophical position in support of this way of life. This included a comprehensive theory of nature and of the gods, a theory which he believed removed much of the basis for the fears and superstitions that haunted the lives of ordinary people. But he offered this theory not as the object of the sort of contemplation that made for a fulfilled human life but as the instrument for removing psychological states that might detract from the true aim
of life, which was the very ordinary pleasures that could be experienced in a tranquil life.2
