School of Epicurus

In fact, fourth-century Greece passed much the same judgment on the school of Epicurus, whose students avoided public service and chose to live in obscurity. One of the school’s harshest critics was Epictetus. Like other Stoics, he prized civic duty, and he thought the Epicureans needed to get real: “In the name of Zeus, I ask you, can you imagine an Epicurean state?…The doctrines are bad, subversive of the State, destructive to the family…Drop these doctrines, man. You live in an imp...

 Nietzsche is the Opposite of Humanism

If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).109 Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course, but that doesn’t matter: the liv...

 Nietzsche's Ubermensch as a Precursor to Transhumanism

...over a century ago, Nietzsche wrote, in Also Sprach Zarathustra, that the ultimate purpose of humankind was to create a being transcending human abilities, an ubermensch. While ubermensch is often translated into English as “super man”, it is actually much closer to the concept of H . The ubermensch was a person above all weaker beings, an empiricist who gained knowledge from his senses just as H will gain knowledge from trillions of sensors. The ubermensch would not be constrained by rel...