Lucretius I An Ontology of Motion

by Nail, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9781474434669
• ISBN10: 1474434665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-03-01
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years

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 Biography

Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Table of Contents

A Note on the Translation and Text

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Book I

1. The Birth of Venus

2. Love and War

3. Religion

4. The Flows of Matter

5. The Pores of Matter

6. The Event

7. The Folds of Matter

8. The Emancipation of the Senses

9. The Infinity of Matter

Book II

10. The Motion of Matter

11. The Swerve

12. The Form of Matter

13. Morphogenesis

14. The Sensation of Matter

15. The Multiverse

Lucretius: Our Contemporary

Index