Introduction. Back to the Shores of Light
When in his Inferno (10.15), Dante portrayed the eternal punishment of Epicurus’ followers – who “make the soul die with the body” – Epicurean science was almost entirely unknown to European scholars. Aquinas and the Scholastics did not know much more than Dante, as the scattered references in non-Epicurean Latin sources did not provide a comprehensive view on Epicurus’ philosophical garden. Things changed only in the first half of the fifteenth century, when the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) rediscovered Lucretius’ didactic poem De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) – by far the most brilliant exposition of Epicurean physics and its underlying ethics. After his discovery in 1417, Poggio sent a copy of his medieval manuscript to Florence, but it was only in the 1430s that Poggio’s erudite friend, the Florentine Niccolò Niccoli (1365–1437), made a new copy of De Rerum Natura (hereafter DRN), starting a process of...
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Tutrone, F. (2019). Epicureanism. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_9-1
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