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Author: W.R. Johnson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472502272 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 174
Book Description
Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - one of the glories of Latin literature - provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century. It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.
Author: W.R. Johnson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472502272 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 174
Book Description
Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - one of the glories of Latin literature - provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century. It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.
Author: Ada Palmer Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674967089 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 415
Book Description
Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory. 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 transformative ideas.
Author: W.R. Johnson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472502280 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - one of the glories of Latin literature - provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century. It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.
Author: Lucretius Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 019162327X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 816
Book Description
`Therefore this terror and darkness of the mind Not by the sun's rays, nor the bright shafts of day, Must be dispersed, as is most necessary, But by the face of nature and her laws.' Lucretius' poem On the Nature of the Universe combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour Lucretius demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world and everything in it is governed not by the gods, but by the mechanical laws of nature. By believing this, men can live in peace of mind and happiness. Lucretius bases his argument on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His poem explores sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology through acute observation of the beauties of the natural world and with moving sympathy for man's place in it. Sir Ronald Melville's accessible and accurate verse translation is complemented by an introduction and notes situating Lucretius' scientific theories within the thought of 1st century BCE Rome and discussing the Epicurean philosophy that was his inspiration and why the issues Lucretius' poem raisies about the scientific and poetical views of the world continue to be important. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Author: Barnaby Taylor Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198754906 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Lucretius' Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things'), written in the middle of the first century BC, made a fundamental and lasting contribution to the language of Latin philosophy. The style of De Rerum Natura is like nothing else in extant Latin: at once archaic and modern, Romanizing and Hellenizing, intimate and sublime, it draws on multiple literary genres and linguistic registers. This book offers a study of Lucretius' linguistic innovation and creativity. Lucretius is depicted as a linguistic trailblazer, extending and augmenting the technical language of Latin in order to describe the Epicurean universe of atoms and void in all its complexity and sublimity. A detailed understanding of the Epicurean linguistic theory brings with it a greater appreciation of Lucretius' own language. Accordingly, this book features an in-depth reconstruction of certain core features of Epicurean linguistic theory. Elements of Lucretius' style discussed include his attitudes to, and use of, figurative language (especially metaphor); his explorations, both explicit and implicit, of Latin etymology; his uses of Greek; and his creative deployment of compounds and prefixed words. His practice is related throughout not only to the underlying Epicurean theory but also to contemporary Roman attitudes to style and language. The result is a new reading of one of the greatest and most difficult works to survive from the Roman world.
Author: T.H.M. Gellar-Goad Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 047213180X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
"The aim of this study is to track De Rerum Natura along two paths of satire. One is the broad boulevard of satiric literature from the beginnings of Greek poetry to the plays, essays, and broadcast media of the modern world. The other is the narrower lane of Roman verse satire, satura, whose canon begins in the Middle Republic with Ennius and Lucilius and closes with Juvenal, an author of the Flavian era. The first main portion of this book (chapters 2-3) focuses on Lucretius and Roman satura, while the following chapters broaden the scope to satiric elements of Lucretius more generally, but still with plenty of reference to the poets of Roman satura as satirists par excellence. By examining how Lucretius' poem employs the tools, techniques, and tactics of satire-by evaluating how and where in De Rerum Natura the speaker functions as a satirist-we gain, I argue, a fuller, richer understanding of how the poem works and how its poetry interacts with its purported philosophical program. Attention to the role of De Rerum Natura in the more specific tradition of Roman verse satire demonstrates that Lucretius' poem stands as a detour on the genre's highway, a swerve in the trajectory of satura. The numerous satiric passages and frequently satiric narrator of De Rerum Natura draw on earlier Roman satire, and in turn the poem influences the later satiric verse of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. While De Rerum Natura is not in and of itself a member of the Roman genre of satire, it is an important player in the genre's development"--
Author: Thomas Nail Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474434681 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 281
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.
Author: Don Fowler Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780199243587 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 550
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.
Author: W.R. Johnson
Author: W.R. Johnson
Author: Ada Palmer
Author: W.R. Johnson
Author: Lucretius
Author: Walter Ralph Johnson
Author: Barnaby Taylor
Author: Lucretius
Author: T.H.M. Gellar-Goad
Author: Thomas Nail
Author: Don Fowler