Published November 1, 2000
by Duckworth Publishers .
Written in English
|The Physical Object|
|Number of Pages||128|
"Lucretius, writing in the first century before the Common Era, is one of our greatest philosophical contemporaries. He teaches us how to think the atom, the swerve and accident, and freedom: this book, taking stock of the poem's reception across disciplines and periods, persuades us with great force of Lucretius's continuing modernity.". Renaissance () and Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (), Lucretius and the Early Modern is an excellent updated resource for scholars who want to strengthen their academic approach to the subject and investigate promising research venues in Lucretian studies.". The rediscovery in the fifteenth century of Lucretius' De rerum natura was a challenge to received ideas. The poem offered a vision of the creation of the universe, the origins and goals of human life, and the formation of the state, all without reference to divine intervention. It has been hailed in Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling book, The Swerve, as the poem that invented modernity. Lucretius, and How the World Became Modern In his new book, The Swerve, Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt argues that the fifteenth century rediscovery of an ancient Roman poem helped to usher in the modern world. The poem, 7, lines of Latin hexameters, was written in the first century B.C. by Lucretius, about whom little is known.
Lucretius (c. 99 BCE?c. 55 BCE) is the author of De Rerum Natura, a work which tries to explain and expound the doctrines of the earlier Greek philosopher Epicurus. The Epicurean view of the world is that it is composed entirely of atoms moving about in infinite space. The implications of this view are profound: the proper study of the world is the province of natural. Lucretius, and the man who saved his work from oblivion, sparked our modern world The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – Stephen Greenblatt () The intellectual progress of humanity is never smooth, and quite often fraught with violence, pride in ignorance, and just plain old bad luck. The idea that Lucretius subscribed to a world of discrete particles called atoms is therefore both a projection of Epicureanism and a retroaction of modern scientific theories of mechanism onto De Rerum Natura. As such, Lucretitus’ writings have been crushed by the weight of his past and future at the same time. Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius 's De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern .
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. 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. For him, the world become modern is the world discarding God; the means by which it became modern was the discovery and dissemination of Lucretius' De rerum natura in the Renaissance. From it we learned, he says, that the world is made up of atoms colliding at random, forming and reforming objects, including whatever passes for the human soul. Lucretius's long shadow falls across the disciplines of literary history and criticism, philosophy, religious studies, classics, political philosophy, and the history of science. The best recent examp.