Lucretius I

Lucretius I PDF Author: Thomas Nail
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474434681
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura. This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Lucretius I

Lucretius I PDF Author: Thomas Nail
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474434681
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura. This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Of the Nature of Things

Of the Nature of Things PDF Author: Titus Lucretius Carus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cosmology
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance

Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance PDF Author: Ada Palmer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God. Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse. Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

A Commentary on Lucretius De Rerum Natura

A Commentary on Lucretius De Rerum Natura PDF Author: Don Fowler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199243587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
'In Lucretius on Atomic Motion Don Fowler produces a commentary of Lucretius like no other. His commentary achieves the status of a meta-commentary... what makes this commentary claim our attention is the range of texts, both poetic and philosophical, ancient and modern, that Fowler brings to bear in revealing the deep background --and the later fortune - of Lucretius' poem.' -Diskin Clay, Times Literary SupplementThis is the first commentary on Lucretius' theory of atomic motion, one of the most difficult and technical parts of De rerum natura. The late Don Fowler sets new standards for Lucretian studies in his awesome command both of the ancient literary, philological, and philosophical background to this Latin Epicurean poem, and of the relevant modern scholarship.

Lucretius on Creation and Evolution

Lucretius on Creation and Evolution PDF Author: Gordon Lindsay Campbell
Publisher: Oxford Classical Monographs
ISBN: 9780199263967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Lucretius' account of the origin of life, the origin of species, and human prehistory is the longest and most detailed account extant from the ancient world. It gives an anti-teleological mechanistic theory of zoogony and the origin of species that does away with the need for any divine aidor design in the process, and accordingly it has been seen as a forerunner of Darwin's theory of evolution. This commentary locates Lucretius in both the ancient and modern contexts, and treats Lucretius' ideas as very much alive rather than as historical concepts. The recent revival of creationismmakes this study particularly relevant to contemporary debate, and indeed, many of the central questions posed by creationists are those Lucretius attempts to answer.

De Rerum Natura IV

De Rerum Natura IV PDF Author: Lucretius
Publisher: Classical Texts
ISBN: 0856683086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
With a commentary giving proper critical emphasis to the techniques and intentions of Lucretius' poetry.

Introduction to Lucretius

Introduction to Lucretius PDF Author: Titus Lucretius Carus
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : la
Pages : 180

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Book Description


De Rerum Natura

De Rerum Natura PDF Author: William Ellery Leonard
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299003647
Category : Didactic poetry, Latin
Languages : la
Pages : 916

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Book Description
Now available in paperback, this annotated scholarly edition of the Latin text of De Rerum Natura has long been hailed as one of the finest editions of this monumental work. It features an introduction to Lucretius's life and work by William Ellery Leonard, an introduction to and commentary on the poem by Stanley Barney Smith, the complete Latin text with detailed annotations, and an index of ancient sources. --University of Wisconsin Press.

The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence

The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence PDF Author: Alison Brown
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674050327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Brown demonstrates how Florentine thinkers used Lucretius—earlier and more widely than has been supposed—to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies. She enhances our understanding of the “revolution” in sixteenth-century political thinking and our definition of the Renaissance within newly discovered worlds and new social networks.

Lucretius on Disease

Lucretius on Disease PDF Author: George Kazantzidis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110722763
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is integral both to the poem’s philosophical agenda but also to its wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and meaning—both inside and outside the text.