The forefather of the Epicurean school of thought, Epicurus, was perhaps the first philosopher to systematically deny the widespread belief that humans are immortal. He established his arguments based on his theory of atomism and suggested that not only does all matter exist as atoms, but it’s also the only form of existence and nothing else. Although bound to fail, his assertions remained a minority opinion.
Before the era of Enlightenment, most thinkers assumed that the human senses (physical) were separate from reason (spiritual). Plato defined the soul’s (reason) immortality with his theory of Forms – where he claimed that our innate knowledge of the world passes down from our previous lives. Aristotle – although he disregarded the idea of Forms – argued that we gain knowledge through our senses (body) but while our bodies die, the soul can continue to exist because it is immaterial. The belief in immortality is primarily a component of religion and the basis of Eastern philosophy, and it remained a widely accepted one until many centuries after Epicurus. Today, even as science disproves the notion, eternity and immortality still remain an essential part of religious beliefs.
