The Art of Happiness (Penguin Classics)

Used book arrived in very good shape. This translation is pretty good for the layman unfamiliar with philosophical prose. The forward is long, well written, and easy to understand.

A collection of Epicurus' surviving works. Known best for his therapeutic approach to anxiety and death, the Epicurean school developed tools for the hedonistic acquisition of pleasure. A beautiful, sharp metaphysics of atomism, a materialism of contingency and difference, Epicurus demolishes the self and sends you into a charming swirl of pleasures and dispositions.

This is Penguin Classics's re-issue of "The Philosophy of Epicurus: Letters, Doctrines, and Parallel Passages from Lucretius" published in 1963. The Art of Happiness (Penguin Classics) has a new foreword by Daniel Klein, author of the very good related book Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life. The foreword is excellent and the translation by George Strodach is very readable and clear.Professor Strodach also provides an extensive Introduction and learned Notes that make up the bulk of the book. Most of the actual writings of Epicurus and his students have to do with epistemology and metaphysics rather than the art of happiness, the putative subject of the book. This material is interesting - it covers such things as his theory of atoms, sensation, knowledge, and religion (with a wonderful excursion into theories of meteorology). The actual writings on how to live a good life, what we might refer to as his ethics, is a very small portion of the book.However Strodach's Introduction and Notes are scholarly and eccentrically entertaining. He offers a condemnation of religion that is very miuch like the writings of what are characterized as The New Atheism - writers such as Dawkins and Hitchens - and concludes that religion's net effect on humanity is negative. He also offers an unexpected defense of UFO's.If you are interested in the Epicurean approach to the good life, I recommend reading Klein's book instead of this one. If you are interested in reading the original source material on Epicurus for an insight into ancient Greek thought, this is an excellent textbook.

Lots of preface and introduction, it’s like half the book..

I received the book when I was supposed to, and it was exactly what I expected it to be.

I had to read this for an undergraduate course at Georgetown University. I ended up buying additional copies to give as gifts.This is one text for school I have actually re-read on my own time, and I get something new out of it each reading.Highly recommend.

The book's title suggests that this is about Epicurus' writings and his philosophical views on life, so any reader expecting that will get at least partially disappointed with what they'll find.This book would be better described as a compendium of Epicurus' surviving works, heavily leaned towards his view on physical phenomena, with a lot of it focused on atoms. Also, a big section of the book is Mr. Strodach's interpretation of Epicurus' theory and what the epicurean philosophy means, and for this last part he took a lot from Lucretius, another Epicurean who lived centuries later.Although disappointed with the content of the book, it has a lot of information with what little is left of Epicurus' writings. It's difficult to read at times, especially when the pages go on and on about atoms using language that is subjective and pre-scientific. At times, though, it's difficult to distinguish if what you're reading are Epicurus' words, Lucretius', Strodach's or his interpretation of the first two.After reading the book, I felt I was able to grasp a few of the main ideas of Epicureanism, but buried in tons of pages of unrelated topics. If you like ancient philosophy and want to learn about one of the most relevant schools, you will have to endure reading through this.

To think about what the giants of those days were thinking about .... we have slid back instead of forward in THIS millenium... so far. G Kossow