This book aims to fill in a lacuna for the English-speaking reader by providing an introduction to the Cyrenaic school. It is intended both for undergraduates of philosophy, ancient philosophy and classics approaching the Cyrenaics for the first time and for more skilled postgraduates and scholars, who lack a general account of Cyrenaic philosophy at the moment. The book can be read at two different levels, corresponding to the two different readerships I have in mind. Informative parts will alternate with more philosophically sophisticated parts. These latter will be useful also to readers with little philosophical expertise but they are specifically targeted for a more skilled readership. Those readers, especially undergraduates, wishing to delve immediately into the philosophy of the Cyrenaics can begin with Part II. Part I intermixes philosophical questions with more historical matters and is more scholarly tuned.

The overall interpretation of the Cyrenaics I recommend in the course of the book is that of a school with a complete philosophical agenda, spanning ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. More unconventionally, I also defend the claim that, together with other ancient philosophers such as Protagoras and Pyrrho, the Cyrenaics can be inscribed into a line of metaphysical enquiry that is centred on indeterminacy; namely, the view that things in the perceptual world do not have any intrinsic ontological essence. This claim is doubly radical, in its own right and in relation to the Cyrenaics.