Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, born at Samos, of Athenian origin; settled at Athens in his thirty-sixth year, and founded a philosophical school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the Stoics; philosophy he defined as “an activity which realises a happy life through ideas and arguments,” summing itself up “in ethics, which are to teach us how to attain a life of felicity”; his system comprised “the three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics,” but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded only as the handmaids of ethics; for he “limited logic to the investigation of the criterion of truth,” and physics he valued as disillusioning the mind of “the superstitious fear that went to disturb happiness”; he was a man of a temperate and blameless life, and it is a foul calumny on him to charge him with summing up happiness as mere self-indulgence, though it is true he regarded “virtue as having no value in itself, but only in so far as it offered us something—an agreeable life.”
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Epicureans * Epicycle