ATARAXY/ˈætəræksɪ/
Freedom from disturbance of mind or passion; imperturbability.
This word takes us back to the third century BC, to a Greek school of philosophy called Pyrrhonism, which is mainly known because of writings by the equally sceptical Epicureans of roughly the same period.
Pyrrho argued that all claims to knowledge were unjustifiable, since knowledge relied on judgements that were necessarily faulty because there could be no rational basis for choosing one judgement over another. So it was impossible to know anything for certain. The only way to avoid distress and panic was to suspend judgement and live according to custom and appearances, a state both the Pyrrhonists and the Epicureans called ataraxia, “without care”.
The word occasionally turns up in English from the seventeenth century onwards as ataraxy or sometimes ataraxia, but in the middle 1950s it was borrowed to coin ataractic (also written ataraxic), a term for what are more commonly called tranquillisers, whose main aim is to induce calmness without causing confusion of mind.
Last updated 8 Oct 2005
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