lucretius

Be aware, this volume includes Lucretius who is not a stoic, rather, a typical reductionist Epicurian.

I think it's important to note that Lucretius was a poet not a philosopher or scientist.

On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) by Lucretius is a fascinating glimpse at the foundation of scientific thought from the 1st century BC.

I don't know, Lucretius would probably say yes.

But many Assyriologists I imagine would sacrifice a great deal of barley records for a single chapter from Mesopotamia that's more like either Lucretius or Herodotus, for example, with some insight into how they understood things like metaphysics or politics.

For example, it seems like it would be more appropriate to say that the quantized nature of light was discovered in the early 20th century when confirmed by experiment and not that it was discovered in antiquity when Epicurus or Lucretius were talking about how light was made up of the smallest possible parts moving very quickly.

The same concept has been argued in details some 2100 years ago by Lucretius in "On the nature of things."

But hey, learning Latin would give you the ability to read Lucretius in the original, and his "De Rerum Natura" is quite an interesting contrast to the Stoicism of "Meditations".

I'm reading "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous book on the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things"), a Roman-era scroll on Epicurus' philosophy, by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417.

If you're interested in the history of science and lost knowledge, you may enjoy the book entitled "The Swerve" by Greenblatt which is about similar discoveries of ancient codices in Europe--in particular "de Rerum Natura" by Lucretius.

It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.

Lucretius had the idea that the world was comprised of atomos (by way of Epicurus).

It tells the story of the rediscovery of Lucretius's poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), which was assumed lost.