Nietzsche and Epicurus: Nature, Health and Ethics

About the Author Vinod Acharya is Instructor of Philosophy at Seattle University, USA, and author of Nietzsche's Meta-Existentialism (Walter de Gruyter. 2013).Ryan Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy Elon University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Ryan is author of two monographs — Deleuze, A Stoic (Edinburgh UP, 2020) and The Deleuze Lucretius Encounter (Edinburgh UP, 2016) and several edited volumes, including Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh UP, 2017) and Nietzsche & Epicurus (Bloomsbury 2020). He recently finished a co-written (with Biko Mandela Gray) monograph, Phenomenology of Black Spirit (forthcoming with Edinburgh UP), which stages a dialectical parallelism between Hegel's magnum opus and Black thinkers from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. In between, Ryan is writing a fourth book, Three American Hegels, which explores the reception of Hegelianism by three seminal yet neglected American philosophers: Henry C. Brokmeyer, the forgotten first English translator of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik; Horace Williams, the first philosophy professor at the first U.S. public university, UNC-Chapel Hill; and John William Miller, the influential teacher of the metaphysics of democratic acts. Ryan is also completing a co-editing another volume entitled Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice (Edinburgh University Press). Finally, Ryan is bringing to completion several articles on themes such as Hegel and lynching, Nietzsche and James Baldwin, and historical exclusion in philosophy and musicology, as well as translating a book of French philosophy by Émile Bréhier and serving as the co-editor of a journal issue of Studies in Pedagogy on the theme of "Teaching Philosophy as a Way of Life." Product Description This volume explores Nietzsche's decisive encounter with the ancient philosopher, Epicurus. The collected essays examine many previously unexplored and underappreciated convergences, and investigate how essential Epicurus was to Nietzsche's philosophical project through two interrelated overarching themes: nature and ethics. Uncovering the nature of Nietzsche's reception of, relation to, and movement beyond Epicurus, contributors provide insights into the relationship between suffering, health and philosophy in both thinkers; Nietzsche's stylistic analysis of Epicurus; the ethics of self-cultivation in Nietzsche's Epicureanism; practices of eating and thinking in Nietzsche and Epicurus; the temporality of Epicurean pleasure; the practice of the gay science, and Epicureanism and politics. The essays also provide creative comparisons with the Stoics, Hobbes, Mill, Guyau, Buddhism, and more. Nietzsche and Epicurus offers original and illuminating perspectives on Nietzsche's relation to the Hellenistic thinker, in whom Nietzsche saw the embodiment of the practice of philosophy as an art of existing. Review "This wide-ranging and impressive volume brings together essays on the Nietzsche-Epicurus relationship by established and emerging scholars. By examining in detail the diverse ways in whch Epicurus was an influence upon and a spur to Nietzsche's philosophy, and why Nietzsche developed criticisms of Epicurus, the collectino fills a gap in the available scholarship."- Rebecca Bamford, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Quinnipiac University, USA, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of Fort Hare, South Africa "The editors have put together an astonishingly rich volume of essays that demands the attention of all readers of Nietzsche, as well as anyone interested in the possibilities of philosophy, and philosophy as a way of life, today. Each essay in the volume contrains fresh insights, as well as thoughtful proposals for novel ways of thinking and living. In staging such an instructive series of encounters between NIetzsche and Epicurus the volume provides new directions for philosophical thinking, and nothing could b