Epicurean Ethics in the Pragmatist Philosophical Counsel

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This publication challenges the predominant rationalist perspective on philosophy as a whole. Specifically it shows that pragmatism is broader and practically much richer than might be suggested by the prevalent scholarly studies of the American Pragmatist sources. The paper explores the susceptibility of fundamentally pragmatist practical attitudes and ideas to ancient hedonism and places this experiment in the context of philosophical counseling and philosophical practice. That context is almost like a laboratory which is capable of isolating specific facets of both pragmatism and ancient hedonism and showing that they are indeed general features of both philosophical approaches. In this I find this paper provocative and that is why it is personally important to me. I generally believe that philosophy is a practical discipline and that its imprisonment in the ivory tower of strictly intellectual excellence and highly rationalized institutional practice is unfortunate. I thus believe that philosophy should free itself of these rationalist shackles as much as possible and I see pragmatism very generally as a potentially good methodological context to mediate this type of philosophical liberation from the modern rationalist tradition.

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