Cyrenaics

The Cyrenaics taught that the only intrinsic good is pleasure, which meant not just the absence of pain (as it did for Epicurus), but positively enjoyable sensations.

[1] Diogenes Laërtius, based on the authority of Sotion and Panaetius, provided a long list of books said to have been written by Aristippus.

After the time of the younger Aristippus, the school broke up into different factions, represented by Anniceris, Hegesias, and Theodorus, who all developed rival interpretations of Cyrenaic doctrines, many of which were responses to the new system of hedonistic philosophy laid down by Epicurus.

Socrates had held that virtue was the only human good, but he had also accepted a limited role for its utilitarian side, allowing pleasure to be a secondary goal of moral action.

[5][9] Aristippus and his followers seized upon this, and made pleasure the sole final goal of life, denying that virtue had any intrinsic value.

[16] Regard should be paid to law and custom because even though these things have no intrinsic value on their own, violating them will lead to unpleasant penalties being imposed by others.

Like many of the leading modern utilitarians, they combined with their psychological distrust of popular judgments of right and wrong, and their firm conviction that all such distinctions are based solely on law and convention.

The equally unwavering principle that the wise person who would pursue pleasure logically must abstain from that which is usually thought wrong or unjust.

This idea, which occupies a prominent position in systems like those of Jeremy Bentham,[12] Volney, and even William Paley, was clearly of prime importance to the Cyrenaics.

[7] The philosophy of the Cyrenaics around the time of Hegesias of Cyrene evolved in a way that has similarities with Pyrrhonism, Epicurianism and also Buddhism.

[23][24][25] It is therefore sometimes thought that Hegesias may have been directly influenced by Buddhist teachings through contacts with the alleged missionaries sent to his rulers in the 3rd century BC.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, there are quatrains in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and pessimistic verses in the book of Ecclesiastes which might have been uttered by Aristippus.