Tranquillism: A Century of Scholars Looking For Epicurus' Supreme Good Anywhere But Pleasure

Status note: This article is a working draft. Every citation below is being verified against a primary source. But the list itself is far from complete: if anything it understates the severity of the problem. More entries and additional details will be added over time as further research is done. This is a very large project, and if anyone sees errors or would suggest updates to classifications of writers or other changes, please contact Cassius at EpicureanFriends.com.

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Introduction

Ask most people who have read a single article about Epicurus what his philosophy is actually about, and a surprising number will say some version of “tranquility.” Not pleasure — tranquility, or its Greek name, ataraxia: freedom from mental disturbance. In the more technical literature the same substitution often appears under a different name: “katastematic” or “static” pleasure, treated not merely as one flavor of pleasure among others but as a separate, ranked-supreme category standing above pleasure in general.

A more extreme, entirely parallel version of the same argument is that katastematic pleasure deserves that supreme rank precisely because it is non-sensory — a cognitive recognition arrived at “upon reflection” rather than something directly felt, in contrast to kinetic pleasure, which is. Whichever label or justification is used — ataraxia, tranquility, katastematic pleasure, static pleasure, or katastematic pleasure elevated specifically for being unfelt — the underlying result is the same: naming something other than pleasure plain and simple as the thing Epicurus actually recommended.

This is not a fringe misunderstanding confined to casual blog posts and careless YouTube videos. It runs through encyclopedia entries, peer-reviewed journal articles, doctoral dissertations, and monographs published by serious scholars who have spent careers on Hellenistic philosophy. Some of them say it in passing. Some of them say it as the explicit thesis of an entire paper. A few say it so plainly that they propose replacing “hedonist” with a new word entirely.

The pattern is not hard to see once it is documented: whenever a commentator has an independent reason to prefer a philosophy of calm withdrawal over a philosophy of active pleasure — whether the motive traces to Stoicism, supernatural religion, Buddhism, Skepticism, Humanism, or simply a modern discomfort with pleasure as a serious philosophical category — naming the goal as ataraxia, tranquility, or katastematic pleasure rather than pleasure plain and simple is the way they get there. What this article does is collect quotations from specific people who have made this substitution under any of its names whether in academic scholarship or generalist publications. Also included for contrast, in the final section, is a listing of the smaller number of scholars who have pushed back directly against it.

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Part One: Academic and Reference Sources

Ordered by editorial priority rather than alphabetically or chronologically: Nussbaum, Warren, and O’Keefe are placed first because their books are the most widely read and cited.

Martha C. Nussbaum

Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994) is among the most widely read and frequently cited books on Hellenistic ethics in print. In Chapter 4, “Epicurean Surgery: Argument and Empty Desire,” p. 109, discussing what Epicurus’s own “cradle argument” (the appeal to the observed behavior of infants and animals) is meant to establish, Nussbaum writes:

“Ataraxia (freedom from disturbance and anxiety) in the soul and freedom from pain in the body: these are the uncorrupted creature’s goals.”

This is not a translation of Epicurus’s own words — it is Nussbaum’s own summary conclusion, naming ataraxia and freedom from pain, not pleasure, as what the argument establishes as the goal. She frames the entire chapter around the same premise, opening it by arguing that for Epicurus philosophy’s “only proper task” is “the relief of human misery” — casting the whole of Epicurean ethics as a therapeutic project aimed at removing disturbance, with the pursuit of pleasure folded into that framework rather than standing as the positive, independent goal in its own right. She is careful and qualifies her claims throughout (she explicitly rejects reading ataraxia as “a zero state, a state of stagnant inactivity”) — but the conclusion she reaches, in her own words, is that ataraxia and freedom from pain, not pleasure, are what the argument is actually shown to establish.

James Warren

Warren’s Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia (Cambridge Classical Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2002) states, in its introduction (p. 5):

“…the Epicureans and the Sextan Pyrrhonists, despite their other differences, promote something which they call ataraxia as the goal of life.”

A page earlier, Warren had written that “the goal of life — if you are an Epicurean — is the pursuit of pleasure, understood to be the absence of physical and mental pain.” Warren moves between both framings without drawing a sharp line between them — which is exactly what Jeffrey Purinton’s own review of the book, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2002.10.01), criticizes him for: Purinton writes that Warren “ends up saying surprisingly little about how Epicurus’ own distinctive view of the telos grew out of Democritean ethics,” faulting the book for imprecision on this exact point.

The same pattern recurs in a later book. In Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 147, discussing Philodemus’s comparison of a young and an old man, Warren writes in his own analytical voice: “What matters, therefore, in assessing the goodness of a life is clearly not at all how long that life is but rather whether the person in question has attained the natural goal of life, the absence of pain.” This is a second, independent data point (a different book, two years later) for the same equivocation as to the status of pleasure.

Tim O’Keefe

O’Keefe makes the same claim, in slightly different words, across at least three separate publications spanning fifteen years.

In his book Epicureanism (Acumen / University of California Press, 2010), p. 120:

“And this combination of aponia and ataraxia — with ataraxia being by far the more important of the two — is the pinnacle of happiness. Epicurus is properly called a hedonist, since he avows that pleasure is the sole intrinsic good. But given his idiosyncratic understanding of pleasure, with ataraxia being the primary constituent of the happy life, it may be less misleading to call him a ‘tranquillist’.”

(This same passage is quoted by Wikipedia’s “Epicureanism” article — see the Major Reference Works section below.) Elsewhere in the same book, p. 144, discussing Epicurus’s response to the Ring of Gyges thought experiment:

“And because tranquillity is the main constituent of the happy life for Epicurus, having to live in fear of punishment is reason enough never to break the law…”

In “Achieving Tranquility: Epicurus on Living without Fear,” a chapter written for The Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy (ed. Jacob Klein and Nathan Powers, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp. 184-202):

“Given this pair of distinctions, the Epicureans maintain that the main constituent of the pleasant life, and hence, of the happy life, is the static mental pleasure of ataraxia, or tranquility — the state of being free from mental disturbance. So while it is accurate to call the Epicureans hedonists, it might be less misleading to say that they are ‘tranquillists.’”

And in his entry on “Epicurus” for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read by a far larger general audience than either of the works above:

“He taught that the point of all one’s actions was to attain pleasure (conceived of as tranquility) for oneself, and that this could be done by limiting one’s desires and by banishing the fear of the gods and of death.”

O’Keefe is not a marginal figure making an offhand remark. He is proposing that “tranquillist” is a more accurate label for Epicurus than “hedonist” — which is to say, that tranquility, not pleasure, is the better name for what Epicurus actually recommended.

David Konstan

Konstan (Brown University / New York University) wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Epicurus,” a widely-noted source:

“…a view of the goal of human life (happiness, resulting from absence of physical pain and mental disturbance).”

“…the absence of such fear is ataraxy, lack of perturbation, and ataraxy, together with freedom from physical pain, is one way of specifying the goal of life for Epicurus.”

Jeffrey Purinton

Purinton’s “Epicurus on the Telos,” published in Phronesis 38, no. 3 (1993): 281-320, is one of the more sustained academic arguments against considering pleasure as the goal. On p. 281, near the paper’s opening:

“It follows, then, that, when Epicurus says that pleasure is the telos, what he means is that the telos is specifically what he calls ‘katastematic pleasure’: painlessness (the katastematic pleasure of the body) and undisturbedness (the katastematic pleasure of the soul).”

Purinton goes further than most, and represents a distinct, more extreme view: not just naming katastematic pleasure as the telos, but arguing that it is elevated above kinetic pleasure precisely because it is non-sensory — a cognitive recognition rather than a felt experience. On p. 301:

“…unlike kinetic pleasure, which is directly sensed to be good, painlessness is only recognized to be good upon reflection: one must remember that one was in pain, think about the fact that the absence of what was bad is good, and be grateful for the fact that what was bad is absent.”

And a few lines earlier, on the same page: “the flesh does not report that this painless state is good.” This is worth flagging explicitly because it inverts the ordinary meaning of “pleasure” rather than merely relocating it: kinetic pleasure is “directly sensed,” while katastematic pleasure — the thing Purinton calls the telos — is arrived at only “upon reflection,” through memory and gratitude rather than sensation. Something that is not directly felt at all is nonetheless being named the supreme good, in a philosophy whose own vocabulary ties “good” to “feeling.” Epicurus’s own words, quoted directly in Catherine Wilson’s entry in Part Three below, are “we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.” Mathew Wenham’s entry in Part Three below directly challenges this specific “non-sensory” framing, which Gosling and Taylor had already identified as a “reflection, not direct sensation” reading in 1982.

Purinton is not inventing this reading from nothing. Cicero’s De Finibus is where Wenham and others locate its origin — Cicero states flatly that “Epicurus holds the highest pleasure to be to feel no pain” (quoted via Splawn, who cites De Finibus directly). And the same equivalence — painlessness simply is the greatest pleasure, with no further felt quality required — reappears in one of the most widely used reference works: A.A. Long and David Sedley’s The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 122-123:

“If complete absence of bodily and mental pain constitutes the greatest pleasure, then it is only reasonable to avoid any pleasures which will imperil this objective… As long as pain is absent we have static pleasure, but kinetic pleasure will last only as long as the activity giving rise to it.”

Long and Sedley are not making the “non-sensory” argument as explicitly as Purinton does, but the formulation itself performs the same equivalence: static pleasure simply is the state of pain being absent, full stop, with nothing said about whether that state is itself felt or experienced in the way kinetic pleasure is.

Yosef Z. Liebersohn

Liebersohn, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Elenchos 36, no. 2 (2015): 271-297, in “Epicurus’ ‘Kinetic’ and ‘Katastematic’ Pleasures: A Reappraisal,” states in the paper’s own abstract, p. 271:

“…the removal of pain is a necessary condition for the Epicurean goal of ataraxia and aponia…”

Voula Tsouna

Tsouna (University of California, Santa Barbara) has written in The Ethics of Philodemus (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 18:

“Another controversy within the Epicurean school concerns the ways in which it is possible to secure the most important aspect of the supreme good: i.e., tranquillity.”

In a separate piece, however, her review of David Konstan’s A Life Worthy of the Gods for the American Journal of Philology, Tsouna criticizes Konstan for “the overemphasis on the static pleasure of the sage at the expense of the kinetic pleasures which he also surely experiences.” The two positions can be reconciled, but only if we are clear that the absence of pain IS pleasure, and not leave that conclusion unstated and unexplained.

Stephen E. Rosenbaum

In Rosenbaum’s “Epicurus on Pleasure and the Complete Life,” The Monist 73, no. 1 (January 1990): 21-41, he wrote:

“The highest good, for Epicurus, is static pleasure, and it is further the absence of pain — aponia/ataraxia.”

He continues immediately: “This makes it clear that Epicurus was not basically advocating a life of sensual delights, and one may hypothesize that many of the misunderstandings of his hedonism developed without a clear view of this crucial distinction.” This is the exact statement Alex Gillham’s 2018 Purdue dissertation (below) had paraphrased from the same page as “the goal is pleasure, but a specific version of it: tranquility.”

Rosenbaum’s earlier paper, “How to Be Dead and Not Care: A Defense of Epicurus,” American Philosophical Quarterly 23, no. 2 (April 1986): 217-225, shows him making the same identification four years earlier: “His general philosophical aim seems to have been much the same as that of Lucretius, his disciple, to know the truth and thereby achieve ataraxia,” and “Epicurus did have a serious purpose, to establish the truth and thereby gain mental tranquillity and show the way to mental tranquillity” (pp. 220-221).

Ken Binmore

Binmore is a distinguished game theorist and philosopher (Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus at University College London), not an ancient-philosophy specialist by trade — which makes it notable that he wrote an entire book applying and defending an Epicurean framework: Crooked Thinking or Straight Talk? Modernizing Epicurean Scientific Philosophy (Springer, 2020). Pp. 8-9:

“In his old age at least, Epicurus thought that avoiding pain — including painful thoughts and regrets — was much more important than seeking pleasure: that the tranquility to be so derived is a prize beyond measure.”

And p. 69, under the subheading “Ignoring pleasure?”:

“We know that he thought avoiding pain more important than seeking pleasure, and so we can model him as preferring lives with better worst outcomes… hence this ideal life will be one of perfect tranquility — the ataraxic life.”

Binmore also includes the subheading, “Ignoring pleasure?”, which shows he is aware his reading downplays pleasure and is asking the question openly. Binmore also makes a related, more specific claim elsewhere (his earlier paper “Life and Death,” Economics and Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2016): 75-97) that Epicurus valued a life by its worst experience rather than by the balance of pleasure over pain across the whole life.

Alex Voorhoeve

Voorhoeve (London School of Economics) in “The Pleasures of Tranquillity,” Homo Oeconomicus 39, no. 2-4 (2022): 185-197 (open access, CC BY 4.0, via LSE’s institutional repository), sets out to resolve what he calls “this purported tension between a life of the greatest pleasures and tranquillity” — and concludes, on the paper’s final page, p. 197:

“I have offered an Epicurean account of the pleasures of tranquillity and their supreme value.”

Phillip Mitsis

Mitsis’s Epicurus’ Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 48 (Cornell University Press, 1988) is frequently cited. Chapter 1, “Pleasure, Happiness, and Desire,” is explicit that pleasure is what Epicurus names as the end — p. 44: “we, as adults, come to recognize pleasure as the end” — but the section titled “Pleasure, Ataraxia, and Aponia” (pp. 51-58) consistently states the goal in other terms. P. 51:

“He further claims that someone who satisfies these desires will be in a state of aponia and ataraxia. In identifying these states with eudaimonia, Epicurus relies on the assertion that a necessary condition for happiness is the satisfaction of our natural and necessary desires.”

This is the same “redefinition” register as Warren, Tsouna, and Rosenbaum above — pleasure named as the telos, its actual content supplied by aponia and ataraxia. But Mitsis goes further and states his own conclusion, p. 58, that Epicurus’s attempt to identify happiness with aponia and ataraxia “is caught in a dilemma” — pressed on one side by Cicero’s charge, on behalf of the Cyrenaics, “that ataraxia is the summum bonum of a corpse” (p. 51), and on the other by a sustained contrast with Hobbes’s view that happiness cannot consist in the “repose of a mind satisfied.” That conclusion is itself a rejection of pleasure as a workable, self-sufficient goal.

Carlo Diano

Diano is an early source for this argument. In “Épicure: la philosophie du plaisir et la société des amis” [“Epicurus: The Philosophy of Pleasure and the Society of Friends”], Les Études philosophiques, n.s., 22, no. 2 (April-June 1967): 173-186, p. 182, Diano writes:

“Quand on peut le dire! Mais pour pouvoir le dire, pour entrer dans cette espèce de nirvana vécu les yeux grands ouverts, et se mettre hors du temps et vaincre la mort, il faut que l’âme soit libre de toute agitation et de tout désir, de toute jalousie, de tout ressentiment, sereine, en paix avec elle-même et avec le monde. Ainsi, même pour Epicure, on ne peut atteindre le souverain bien qu’à travers la pureté de sa vie et l’ascèse.”

“But to be able to say [I have lived], to enter into this kind of nirvana lived with wide-open eyes, and to place oneself outside time and conquer death, the soul must be free of all agitation and all desire, of all jealousy, of all resentment — serene, at peace with itself and with the world. Thus, even for Epicurus, one can attain the sovereign good only through purity of life and asceticism.”

This does not merely name ataraxia or katastematic pleasure in place of pleasure, but reaches for “nirvana” as the closest available analogy, and pairs the Epicurean summum bonum with “asceticism,” a word standing about as far from ordinary “pleasure” as it is possible to do.

Diano also published Epicuri Ethica (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1946) — reviewed by Phillip De Lacy in Classical Philology 44, no. 2 (1949): 141. Peter Preuss’s account of it, p. 149, describes the same thesis in different technical terms: “Right after the second world war C. Diano in his influential work on Epicurus proposed an interpretation, based on Lucr. 4.627-9, of katastematic pleasure as the condition of the organism free from natural and necessary wants, and of kinetic pleasure as presupposing katastematic pleasure and consisting merely in the variation of it.”

Philip Merlan

Merlan’s Studies in Epicurus and Aristotle, Klassisch-Philologische Studien 22 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1960), contains the study “Hedone in Epicurus and Aristotle” (pp. 1-37), which opens by stating its whole purpose, p. 1:

“‘Pleasure’ (Lust, plaisir, piacere) seems to be an entirely adequate translation [of hedone]. But is it? In what follows it will be shown that this question should be answered in the negative — at least when the term occurs in Epicurean and in Aristotelian texts… In the form ‘hedonism’ … the word hedone occurs and any philosophic dictionary is therefore likely to explain hedonism as a doctrine which teaches that pleasure is the summum bonum. But should the translation of hedone by ‘pleasure’ turn out to be inadequate, the usual definition of hedonism will need some rectification.”

By p. 7, working through two kinds of katastematic pleasure (mental and bodily), Merlan ties the mental kind directly to freedom from fear of death and the gods, and generalizes from there:

“What gives us mental pain is the fear of gods and of death. Once we have learned that there is no reason to be afraid of either, our mind is experiencing the hedone of freedom from fear in precisely the same way in which our body is experiencing the hedone of health… Mental hedone is, if we may say so, the natural condition of the mind, i.e. mind if only left to itself, not attacked by false fears, would experience hedone.”

On pp. 11-13, Merlan calls Diano’s opinion a theory with “much to recommend” it before ultimately finding it “not entirely convincing”:

“As far as kinetic hedone of the body is concerned, the translation by ‘pleasure’ is adequate; it is much less adequate, when hedone designates kinetic hedone of the mind; it is entirely inadequate, when we speak of katastematic hedone either of the mind or of the body. And it is misleading, when the term hedone is used in the generic sense of the word, designating both katastematic and kinetic hedone either of the mind or of the body.”

The study then builds its argument further through a series of passages where Epicurus uses chara (“joy”) interchangeably with, or as a species of, hedone, and closes, p. 15, with Merlan’s own explicit conclusion:

“The philosophy of Epicurus is not a philosophy of pleasure; it is a philosophy of joy.”

Merlan does not present this as a settled fact so much as a deliberate rhetorical corrective. On the same page he weighs the case carefully — “‘Joy’ seems inappropriate when we speak of hedone of eating, drinking, sexual intercourse, etc. ‘Pleasure’ seems inappropriate when we speak of hedone of an unperturbed spirit” — and says: “considering the specific historic situation in which we find ourselves and in which the general inclination is to interpret Epicurus’ philosophy as one of pleasure, it will be good to counterbalance this inclination by stress on the translation by ‘joy.’ … And in the present investigation preference will be given to the translation by ‘joy’” (p. 15). He also grounds the katastematic/chara link directly in the text, p. 14, n. 14: “The words katastema and chara are so closely linked that it is very difficult to imagine that the same Epicurus should elsewhere have said of chara that it is limited to kinetic hedonai.”

The argument extends to the life of the gods. On p. 18 he states: “We therefore find the unambiguous assertion that gods find the source of all their joys within themselves, so that all their joys would be katastematic.” And, closing that section: “However, no matter what kind of hedonai the Epicurean gods enjoy… again it seems much more appropriate to speak of the life of the gods as being filled with joy rather than pleasure.” Merlan goes on, in a following section, to defend “joy” against the objection that it sounds “too spiritual” to cover the full range of hedone.

J.M. Rist

Rist’s Epicurus: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1972) explicitly defends Diano’s line of interpretation (above) against Merlan’s objections (above). At p. 109 he states in a section titled “The subsidiary role of kinetic pleasure”:

“It is certain that for Epicurus the greatest pleasure is a complete absence of pain, both from the body and from the mind… He will be like a calm sea with no disturbing breezes. But what is the position of all actual human beings, none of whom regularly enjoys such absolute tranquillity?”

Here he states the substitution as settled fact (“It is certain that…”) rather than as one interpretation among others.

Clay Splawn

Splawn, “Updating Epicurus’s Concept of Katastematic Pleasure,” Journal of Value Inquiry 36, no. 4 (2002): 473-482, uses “katastematic pleasure,” rather than “ataraxia” or “tranquility,” as the name of the elevated, supreme good. In his conclusion, p. 481:

“The limit of someone’s katastematic pleasure, the greatest pleasure possible for a person, would occur when the person takes pleasure in the fact that he is completely free from pain.”

Peter Preuss

Preuss’s Epicurean Ethics: Katastematic Hedonism, Studies in the History of Philosophy, vol. 35 (Lewiston / Queenston / Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1994) devotes a full chapter (“Kinetic and Katastematic Pleasure,” pp. 121-179) to defending the substitution of katastematic pleasure for pleasure because it should be viewed as continuous, where kinetic pleasure is inherently intermittent. On p. 166 he writes:

“Some philosophers, having seen the inadequacy of pursuing kinetic pleasure as the good, abandoned pleasure altogether and recommended something else instead, virtue for example. But Epicurus rather makes katastematic pleasure the good of his ethics because it is continuous in its nature.”

He names ataraxia and aponia directly as “prominent example[s] of a katastematic pleasure” (pp. 166-167), and a few pages later, p. 169, quotes Cicero’s report of the Epicurean position as “we for our part deem the good life to consist in tranquility of mind.”

Ali Haydar Kutan

Kutan’s thesis, “Epicurus and Kant: A Comparison of Their Ethical Systems” (Middle East Technical University, September 2010), p. 124, states:

“…a tranquil life, (i.e., ataraxia), a state which is free from all kind of bodily and mental disturbances is itself the ultimate goal of life.”

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Part Two: Major Publications and Popular Press

Neel Burton

Burton, a psychiatrist and author, writes in “The Philosophy of Epicurus,” Psychology Today (October 2013, updated June 22, 2024):

“Given the prime importance that he attaches to the avoidance of pain, the elimination of desire, and peace of mind, Epicurus is far more of a ‘tranquillist’ than a hedonist.”

“Static pleasures, says Epicurus, are better than moving pleasures because they free us from the pain of need or want.”

Maria Karvouni

Karvouni’s “The Ultimate Tranquilizer,” Philosophy Now, Issue 127 (August/September 2018), states the claim as plainly as any entry in this catalog:

“…ataraxia is the goal of life.”

“Epicurus characterized the state of ataraxia as the absence of pain and freedom from all worry. He said that the condition in which nothing can discomfort you — whatever that thing is and however distressful it is — can be attained through philosophical contemplation.”

Neel Burton

Burton returns to the subject directly in “What Is Ataraxia?” Psychology Today (UK edition, originally published June 2020, updated October 23, 2024):

“Epicurus… rather than pleasure, emphasized the avoidance of pain, the elimination of desire, and ataraxia.”

Major Reference Works

Wikipedia, “Epicureanism” (English-language article, collaboratively edited, consulted 2026-07-19), in the Ethics/Pleasure section, states:

“The ultimate goal then of Epicurean ethics was to reach a state of aponia and ataraxia.”

This sentence is footnoted directly to Tim O’Keefe’s 2010 book Epicureanism, p. 120 — meaning Wikipedia’s own editorial voice, on one of the internet’s single most-read general-reference sources for this topic, has adopted O’Keefe’s “tranquillist” framing (see his entry in Part One) as settled fact for its general readership, with no hedge or alternative view presented alongside it.

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Part Three: Those Who Have Pushed Back Against Replacement of Pleasure as the Supreme Good

A smaller, more recent line of scholarship has argued directly against treating ataraxia or “katastematic pleasure” as a separate, superior good standing above ordinary pleasure.

J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor

Gosling and Taylor, in The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford, 1982), ch. 19, were among the first to argue systematically that the traditional two-kinds reading generates problems with no good answer. They argue that such reading makes Epicurus’s own emphasis on sensory pleasure inexplicable, and that it requires imagining a “pleasure” with no sensory content at all, which Epicurus’s own physics rules out. Their own alternative, stated at 19.2.2 (p. 372):

“The value of ataraxia is parasitic upon that of aponia, since the only ataraxia worth having on Epicurus’ view is that which comes from pleasant memories and confident expectations of sensory pleasures of a painless kind.”

That is: aponia is a condition of actual sensory pleasure, and ataraxia’s value is derivative of it, not a separate, competing kind of good standing above it.

Gosling and Taylor identify, by name, the exact “non-sensory, arrived at by reflection” reading that Purinton (Part One, above) argued eleven years later, tracing it to Cicero. Considering the possibility that Epicurus held katastematic pleasure to be recognized only “when we realize that we are without pain,” rather than perceived directly, they write, p. 370:

“This would… involve reflection on our state, a state quite possibly lacking sensory pleasure… The end of De Finibus I.xi does, indeed, provide some evidence that some Epicureans did consider that it was reflection that convinced us that katastematic pleasure is the good, but the same chapter is also evidence that that was not the view of Epicurus himself.”

In other words: Gosling and Taylor already knew, in 1982, that a reflection-based, non-sensory reading of katastematic pleasure could be extracted from Cicero’s text. They rejected this, treating it as at most a later Epicurean argument that Cicero chose to preserve. After an extended, chapter-length examination comparing Cicero’s testimony against Lucretius’s and Plutarch’s, they reach their verdict on p. 393:

“The outcome of all this is that there is no conclusive evidence for the view that all sensory pleasures are kinetic. The only firm evidence is Cicero, and while his testimony is unequivocal we have tried to undermine its claim to reliability.”

This means that Gosling and Taylor conclude that katastematic pleasures are sensory as well, and thus are more appropriately classified as part of pleasure rather than some condition or experience superior to or outside of pleasure.

Mathew Wenham

Wenham, “On Cicero’s Interpretation of ‘Katastematic’ Pleasure in Epicurus,” in Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University, June 2007, eds. E. Close, G. Couvalis, G. Frazis, M. Palaktsoglou, and M. Tsianikas (Adelaide: Flinders University Department of Languages — Modern Greek, 2009), 109-118, argues against the view that not just that katastematic pleasure is the true goal, but that it is ranked above kinetic pleasure precisely because it is non-sensory, as being an unfelt cognitive state rather than an experience. He traces this “standard interpretation” to Cicero and names Jeffrey Purinton (Part One, above) as a direct modern inheritor of it, quoting Purinton’s own words that katastematic pleasures “don’t feel like anything” (Purinton 1993: 302). Wenham’s own position is a rejection of that framing:

“This framework refuses any conception of pleasure that locates it extrinsically to its experiential object — yet this is just how the standard interpretation casts katastematic pleasures.”

Wenham’s argument is that Epicurean epistemology itself requires pleasure — of any kind, kinetic or katastematic — to be something felt and experienced, not a cognitive judgment arrived at “extrinsically” to actual sensation. If katastematic pleasure must be an experience like any other, the specific argument for ranking it above pleasure generally — that it is superior precisely because it escapes the messiness of felt, sensory experience — collapses.

Boris Nikolsky

Nikolsky, “Epicurus on Pleasure,” Phronesis 46, no. 4 (2001): 440-465, goes further than Gosling and Taylor, arguing that the entire “kinetic versus katastematic” framework is a scholastic artifact of the Hellenistic Academy’s divisio Carneadea — a classification scheme for cataloging rival schools’ positions on the highest good. Nikolsky argues that this division was transmitted into both Cicero and Diogenes Laertius from a single common source, rather than constituting an independent corroboration of a real Epicurean doctrine.

David Sedley

In “Epicurean versus Cyrenaic Happiness,” ch. 5 of Selfhood and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill, ed. Matthew Wright, Richard Seaford, and John M. Wilkins (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 89-106, and “The Inferential Foundations of Epicurean Ethics,” in Epicureismo greco e romano, ed. Gabriele Giannantoni and Marcello Gigante (Bibliopolis, 1996), Sedley consistently treats kinetic and katastematic pleasure as jointly necessary aspects of a complete life, not as a hierarchy. On the specific question of whether katastematic pleasure alone constitutes the goal, he writes in “Epicurean versus Cyrenaic Happiness,” p. 103:

“Only a tranquil life additionally textured by a variety of kinetic pleasures can be enjoyed as a whole from any chosen temporal viewpoint… Here we are very close to the heart of the Epicurean eudaimonistic enterprise.”

And, in “Inferential Foundations,” p. 323, addressing Cicero’s own attempt to use the kinetic/katastematic distinction as a trap against Epicurus’s followers, Sedley argues that Epicurus’s own silence on which kind of pleasure infants pursue was “methodologically correct,” precisely because specifying a hierarchy of kinds would have undermined the “absolute generality” of his account. In other words, Sedley reads Epicurus as having deliberately avoided committing to any kind-based hierarchy at all, not as covertly holding one.

Kelly Arenson

Arenson, in Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Introduction p. 4 and p. 140, aligns explicitly with Gosling, Taylor, and Nikolsky, and names directly the danger their reading closes off:

“I share their position that what counts as properly kinetic according to Epicureans is the pleasure linked to the perceived process of restoring painless organic functioning, whereas what counts as katastematic is the awareness of the organism’s painless functioning.”

Arenson also poses, in her own words, the objection this whole line of scholarship is answering: “How would Epicureans dodge the charge that their best life resembles the state of a corpse?” (p. 140) — the “corpse problem” that follows directly from treating katastematic pleasure as an inert absence rather than a positively enjoyed condition.

Emily Austin

Austin, in Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, 2022), ch. 4, n. 8, declines to relitigate the dispute in her main text for a general audience, but states in a footnote that she is “adopting a view roughly in line with Gosling and Taylor (1982) and Arenson (2019).”

Catherine Wilson

Wilson (Presidential Professor of Philosophy, University of York) has written two popular-audience books directly on Epicurus: How to Be an Epicurean (Basic Books, 2019; published in the UK as The Pleasure Principle: Epicureanism and the Good Life), and, more historically focused, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2008, revised paperback 2015). The historical volume does not engage the pleasure/ataraxia question directly — its subject is Epicureanism’s reception in early modern philosophy. But How to Be an Epicurean is unambiguous, p. 10:

“In fact, Epicurus did consider pleasure, including pleasure in food and drink, to be not only the main motive of our actions but also the supreme good.”

She quotes Epicurus’s own words immediately after (“Pleasure is our first and kindred good… we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing”) and, elsewhere in the same book, explicitly frames her project as “defending the authentic Epicurus” against those who misuse or misread him.

R.W. Sharples

Sharples’s Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy (Routledge, 1996), p. 84, a standard academic survey covering all three schools, states plainly:

“For Epicurus the goal of life is pleasure, and the happy life is that with most pleasure and least pain.”

He goes on to give a survey of the kinetic / katastematic puzzle, but never asserts that ataraxia replaces or outranks pleasure as the named goal.

Gisela Striker

Striker, “Ataraxia: Happiness as Tranquillity,” originally The Monist 73, no. 1 (1990): 97-110, reprinted as ch. 9 of Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 183 of the reprint, argues directly against treating tranquility as a rival end in its own right:

“I will argue that tranquillity was in fact not a serious contender for the position of ultimate good in ancient times. Greek theories of happiness from Plato to Epicurus were attempts to spell out what sort of a life one would have to lead in order to have good reasons for feeling tranquil or contented; they were not recipes for reaching a certain state of mind.”

And, on Epicurus specifically, p. 185 of the reprint:

“Thus tranquillity, for Epicurus, is the state of mind of the happy person, a part of happiness, but not happiness itself.”

A second Striker paper reinforces the same conclusion. “Epicurean Hedonism,” ch. 10 of the same collection (originally in J. Brunschwig and M. Nussbaum, eds., Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 3-17), is a reading of Cicero’s De Finibus Book I which defends Epicurus’s kinetic / katastematic pleasure distinction against the charge of inconsistency. Striker’s point is that aponia and ataraxia are what the greatest pleasure consists in, not a separate goal displacing pleasure. Her own summary, p. 207, states this directly:

“It was this terminological move that allowed Epicurus to identify the greatest pleasure with the good life… I would suggest that he introduced the notion of katastematic pleasure in order to show that happiness can be the same as pleasure after all.”

That is: Epicurus calls the painless state “pleasure” precisely so that pleasure, not something else, can remain the highest good.

Pascal Massie

Massie, “Ataraxia: Tranquility at the End,” in Sean D. Kirkland and Eric Sanday, eds., A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2018), p. 389, states plainly:

“…ataraxia is not a degree zero since… it is already pleasure and Epicurus’ insistence on the idea that ataraxia is a form of pleasure rules out a common objection according to which one who follows such an ethics would live a life of indifference.”

He also explicitly rejects treating kinetic and katastematic pleasure as opposed categories:

“The kind of pleasure that constitutes the end is not identified with something mental by opposition to something physical, nor is it katastematic by opposition to kinetic.”

Julia Annas

Annas, “Epicurus on Pleasure and Happiness,” Philosophical Topics 15, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 5-21, p. 8, goes further than most by objecting to the English word itself:

“…ataraxia is not an alternative end but a specification of the kind of pleasure that can be our final end…”

“Ataraxia is the state in which you are not hindered by pain or anything upsetting. You are functioning normally and nothing unpleasant is interfering. This is not ‘tranquility’; normal activity can be energetic and varied.”

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