Abstract
Most ancient philosophers accept that dreams have prophetic powers enabling humans to relate somehow to a world beyond their own. The only philosophers known to make a clean and explicit break with that tradition are the Epicureans, beginning with Epicurus himself and reaching his last eminent follower, Diogenes of Oinoanda. They openly reject the idea that dreams mediate between the divine and the human realms, or between the world of the living and the world of the dead. They demystify the phenomenon of dreaming by explaining sleeping and dreaming in terms of their materialistic physical theory. Importantly, they examine dreams and their content from different perspectives and explore their relevance to our lives. The general aim of this paper is to offer a synthetic account of the Epicurean view about dreaming and dreams, advance certain new hypotheses that seem worthy of consideration, and show how Epicurus and his followers integrate dream theory into their philosophy as a whole.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Foreword
- Articles
- L’equilibrio dopo il movimento: percezione e conoscenza fra Democrito e i medici ippocratici
- I pathe di Epicuro tra epistemologia ed etica
- Epicurean Dreams
- Passione e immaginazione in Lucrezio: il caso dell’inganno onirico
- La peur, passion radicale
- Keine Furcht mit Diogenes!
- La trattazione vetero-stoica dell’ira: componenti logiche e caratteri fisiologici
- The Stoics on the Mental Mechanism of Emotions: Is There a “Pathetic Syllogism”?
- Seneca e la passione come esperienza fisica
- Note
- Destructible Worlds in an Aristotelian Scholion (Alexander of Aphrodisias’ Lost Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Frag. 539 Rashed)
- Review
- Review
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Foreword
- Articles
- L’equilibrio dopo il movimento: percezione e conoscenza fra Democrito e i medici ippocratici
- I pathe di Epicuro tra epistemologia ed etica
- Epicurean Dreams
- Passione e immaginazione in Lucrezio: il caso dell’inganno onirico
- La peur, passion radicale
- Keine Furcht mit Diogenes!
- La trattazione vetero-stoica dell’ira: componenti logiche e caratteri fisiologici
- The Stoics on the Mental Mechanism of Emotions: Is There a “Pathetic Syllogism”?
- Seneca e la passione come esperienza fisica
- Note
- Destructible Worlds in an Aristotelian Scholion (Alexander of Aphrodisias’ Lost Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Frag. 539 Rashed)
- Review
- Review