A more esoteric alternative to Stoicism was Epicureanism, a philosophy grounded in a materialist conception of the universe. Epicureans believed that we are all made of atoms, and come into creation and pass away as part of a universal cycle of agglomeration and dispersal. Epicureanism aimed to free people from fear, especially fear of death, by showing that all religion was superstition. Knowledge of the world and the self could facilitate a freedom from desire, anxiety, and pain and thus true tranquillity (hedone, from which we derive our word hedonism, although with a debased
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