Epicurus and the four-part cure

My own view of death is closer to that of Epicurus and what is known as the four-part cure: don’t fear God, don’t worry about death, what is good is easy to get and what is terrible is easy to endure. He writes in the final of the four extant letters attributed to him, Get used to believing that death is nothing to us. For all good and bad consists in sense-experience, and death is the privation of sense-experience. Hence a correct knowledge of the fact of death makes the mortality of life a matter for contentment, not by adding a limitless time to life but by removing the longing for immortality.

Saved 9 April 2015

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