Epicurean Justice Nature, Agreement, and Virtue

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and his followers advanced a sophisticated theory of justice that occupied a middle position between Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and some Sophists, on the other. They held that justice is neither fully natural nor fully conventional, that there is a robust virtue of justice, and that it is always better to be just than to be unjust, but it is not always better to obey the laws. In this book, the first English-language monograph on the topic, Jan Maximilian Robitzsch draws on a range of sources including papyrological evidence to give a comprehensive account of Epicurean justice. He shows how it relates to Epicurean philosophy as a whole and discusses to what extent it can be seen to anticipate modern positions such as contractarianism and legal positivism.

About the author

Jan Maximilian Robitzsch is a senior researcher in the Department of Philosophy, University of Greifswald. He is the coeditor of Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus (2018) and the author of a number of articles in journals including Ancient Philosophy, Apeiron, and Classical Quarterly.

Product details

• Authors: Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, Jan Maximilian (Universitat Greifswald) Robitzsch
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Content: Book
• Product form: Paperback / Softback
• Publication date: 31.08.2025
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: antiquity to present day
• EAN: 9781009429443
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0942944-3
• Pages: 209
• Subjects: History of Ideas, LAW / General, PHILOSOPHY / Epistemology, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, HISTORY / Social History, PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical, Greece, Ethics & moral philosophy, Ethics and moral philosophy, Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge, Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500, Philosophy: epistemology and theory of knowledge, Jurisprudence & Philosophy Of Law, Methods, theory and philosophy of law