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Lucretius in the Modern World (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,177
Discovery Miles 11 770
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Lucretius in the Modern World (Paperback)
Series: Classical Inter/faces
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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 ninetheenth 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.
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