You really have to say that Epicureanism is a materialistic system. There are intrusions into it of glimmers of a notion of form, as when Lucretius writes about loss of an eye as an evil. You need a notion of form in order to define a privation. Still, on the whole it's materialistic, since Epicurus posited that reality at bottom is atoms moving at random in the void.
Some ancient opponents of Epicureanism mocked the Swerve as something just brought in to save free will but that does not arise from the primary premises of the system. Atoms falling downward through space should have no reason to swerve sideways and collide with each other to form things. But then, if they are falling down, why not move in other directions, too? So an Epicurean would say that atoms' mass is not weight such that they fall down by nature. They are always in motion, period. Lucretius uses the image of motes of dust moving and bouncing at random in a room and visible in the light.
I once started to read about Father Gassendi, an Epicurean Catholic of the 17th century, but I never got far into it.
The thing about the swerve is that Epicurus refuses to attribute it to some ulterior cause. The atoms' swerve is, I guess we'd say, brute fact. Atoms have shape, the atoms are eternal, they swerve. He doesn't get into issues of potentiality and actuality. It's a much simpler system. The swerve can only be deduced from what we observe of things.
The soul is composed of very fine atoms. Those atoms are in the body, in contact with other things, and that's how the body is made to move. There is no immaterial substance. The gods are also made of the finest atoms and appear occasionally to humans but take no notice of humans. Humans just see films of atoms that spill off from the fine bodies of the gods and go shooting through void and hit humans' field of vision every so often.
Epicurus is not a determinist for the above reasons. There are many worlds, with empty space between them (intermundia). Matter in motion is eternal. Events are not strictly determined, only conditionally caused as one complex of atoms holds together in the way that fits its atoms, and thus it has corresponding powers. Aristotle lived before Epicurus, but Aristotelians and Platonists and Stoics subsequently said that there are contradictions in Epicureanism, or that it fails to explain things because it lacks notions of essential form. Epicureans did hold to a version of the ToE.
I've read a lot of the primary sources of Epicureanism, though not for 20 years or so at any depth. You may have seen Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. I never did get around to reading it, but friends said they thought it was good.
Last edited by ficino (11/09/2017 9:57 am)
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