By W. R. Johnson
Lucretius' at the Nature of items - one of many glories of Latin literature - presents a vibrant poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem performed a very important function within the reinvention of technology within the 17th century, its effect at the French Enlightenment used to be robust and pervasive, and it turned an immense battlefield within the wars of faith with technological know-how in nineteenth-century England. yet within the 20th century, regardless of its important contributions to fashionable notion and civilisation, it's been mostly ignored by means of universal readers and scientists alike. This booklet deals an intensive description of the poem, with exact emphasis on its pleased model of materialism and on its try and devise a moral approach that fits this kind of universe. It surveys significant suitable texts shape the eighteenth and 19th centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the traditional medical culture he championed has turn into marginalised within the 20th century. It closes with a dialogue of what worth the poem has for college kids of technological know-how and know-how within the new century: what suggestion it has to provide us approximately how you can pass approximately reinventing our machines and our morality
Read or Download Lucretius in the Modern World (Classical Inter/Faces) PDF
Best modern books
Modern Fourier: Transform Infrared Spectroscopy
This ebook is the newest addition to the great Analytical Chemistry sequence. The chapters are designed to offer the reader not just the certainty of the fundamentals of infrared spectroscopy but additionally to offer rules on find out how to follow the strategy in those diverse fields. considering the fact that spectroscopy is the learn of the interplay of electromagnetic radiation with subject, the 1st chapters take care of the features, houses and absorption of electromagnetic radiation.
- Modern X86 Assembly Language Programming: 32-bit, 64-bit, SSE, and AVX
- Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy (Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements Series)
- Carnap's Early Conventionalism: An Inquiry into the Historical Background of the Vienna Circle (Studien Zur Oesterreichischen Philosophie)
- Modern Acetylene Chemistry
Additional resources for Lucretius in the Modern World (Classical Inter/Faces)
Sample text
Much of the symbolic (and even some of the material) paraphernalia of the Roman paterfamilias will persist as long as Rome is ruled by Romans (and some of it persists in Western tradition still, not least in the Vatican), but in the late Republic various people who wanted new erotic patterns, and came upon them while other social patterns were breaking up, needed and found poets who would tell them that it's a very good thing to go crazy for a love that may destroy you but that will, in the process, transform your humdrum, vapid existence into a Life, into something so delicious and so profound and so expansive that any and every pain and humiliation it costs will seem a bargain once the fatal transaction is completed.
The citizens of the Roman Republic were no longer able to ignore the widening fissures at its base. Their matchless armies, once composed of the citizen-farmer-soldiers who had won the empire and built the roads which traversed it, were becoming increasingly professional even as they became increasingly more loyal to the generals who led them than they were to the Roman people and the magistrates who (theoretically) represented them. The magistrates themselves, and the rich, venerable families they came from, had gradually forgotten how to share the profits of empire effectively with each other, with 30 1.
Cicero is not talking about that ideal entity, he's talking about the psyche's erotic gyrations and disequilibriums. So he wants us to use some other word when we're trying to talk about the good kind of love. ) What is the cure for lechery, for what the world calls love (that's his formal question, but he is specially concerned with same-sexual obsessions)? You have to reveal to the patient how worthless what he craves really is. ), or that the desire for it can be utterly shut out from the brain.