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WillowOne's Positions

De Rerum Natura

Overview

A six-book Latin poem setting out the philosophy of Epicurus. The universe consists of atoms moving in a void; everything, including the mind and soul, is made of them; the gods, if they exist, take no interest in us; and death is nothing to us, since when it arrives we are not there to meet it. Lucretius explains sensation, weather, disease, the origin of life and of human society, all without appeal to divine action, and argues that the fear of the gods and of death is the chief source of human misery. The poem was lost for most of the Middle Ages and rediscovered in 1417.

Notes

Two thousand years old and closer to my world view than most of what has been written since. Lucretius' argument that the soul is material, that it dies with the body, and that this is nothing to be afraid of is the position I hold on Life After Death, reached with no evidence from neuroscience and by reasoning alone. He was wrong about a great deal of the physics and right about the shape of the answer, which is a useful thing to notice about reasoning.

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