The Epicurean challenges are a set of two counter arguments, which state that death cannot affect us, and that death is harmless. The challenges were posed as a response to the harm argument , a theory which suggests that death is to an extent considered bad to those who experience it and therefore it is a harm to them. The term “harm” can be attributed to an abundance of situations, but here it will be solely referring to events that cause an individual suffering and are overall bad for them.
Epicurus challenges the harm argument in his Letter to Menoeceus where he states that “Death … the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.” Which could be reiterated as follows: if death is to harm the person dying, then there must exist a subject that is actively being harmed by death, a clear distinct harm being done, and a time at which the harming is occurring. Operating under the assumption that death occurs directly at the end of life, one can assume that the time at which harm is inflicted can either be while the
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This way Epicurus is able to determine the conditions which determine if a situation is bad for. Epicurus provides the following conditions: an event only harms us if it raises in us something unpleasant. Said unpleasantness or suffering, need not occur at the same instant as its catalyst. An event can occur long before any effect of it is seen, long before we are even born. As for the effects of an event, death specifically, Epicurus never stated any specific criterion for what determines a good or bad effect, but he did note that there is a clear distinction between the two, even though he did not detail said differences, other than to state that harm is something that causes