This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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Death is nothing to us seeing that when we are, death is not come and when death is come we are not.

Who said this?

A philosopher born two and a half millennia ago, Epicurus.

He was in many ways a remarkably modern philosopher.

Catherine Wilson is an Epicurean scholar at York University.

Catherine Wilson, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you, Nigel. Nice to be here.

The topic we're going to discuss is Epicureanism.

Now that obviously comes from the philosopher Epicurese,

but could you say a little bit about who Epicurus was.

Epicurus was the leader of an Athenian school working in the third century B.C.

and you can think of that as coming along a bit after Aristotle and the school was a competitor

with the school of Stoics. They both valued tranquility but they had very different

ontologies and attitudes towards ethics and

attitudes towards explanation and were very different in many respects.

Do we know what Epicurus was actually like what he looked like, was he married, was he tall?

I don't know if his physical appearance was described, but he was thought of as someone who had simple

tastes, he always said just a bit of bread and cheese is enough for

the philosopher.

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