Stoicism or Epicureanism - In which side are you*
Regardless of the fact that they can be considered dogmatic philosophies and have things in common, like materiality of the soul, the objective here is to check the differences between Stoicism and Epicureanism, the last one considered a non-Socratic school. The main goal in this task is to understand the nature of “the good”: while for Stoicism virtue is the good, for Epicureanism pleasure is the good (and the pain is bad). It is important say that the comparison is done by the stoic point of view, the Epictetus' Criticisms of Epicureanism. Epictetus complains that Epicureans didn’t understand the pleasure of the soul, in other words, they didn’t understand that the mental pleasure is better than the physical one (on the edge, the pleasure of the mind comes from the pleasure of the body…). Even though, for the Epicureanism, reading a book is better than drugs and sex, they consider that the pleasure is the absence of pain. Epictetus believes that Epicurus didn’t understand th...