Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

Undergraduate / Graduate

On the Nature of Things is the most celebrated philosophical epic of Greco-Roman antiquity. Its poeticization of the atheistic materialism of the philosopher Epicurus influenced the thought of Rousseau, Marx, and Deleuze, and played the role of midwife in the emergence of early modern science. But there is more to the poem than its atoms: it offers an evolutionary perspective on organismic adaptation, a speculative reconstruction of human prehistory, and a robust account of sexual attraction, to point to a few of the items in Lucretius's inventory of how things are, and how they got to be that way. We will read On the Nature of Things in its entirety, and consider what is at stake in taking this ancient poet as a precursor of our own intellectual commitments.