[...]... upon the classical framework of the ancient materialists 8 epicureanism at the origins of modernity alone They laid the groundwork for modern science in the experimental academies and by means of the friendships established and maintained through them The rehabilitation of Epicurean atomism and many-worlds theory was not a smooth process In the early seventeenth century the name of Epicurus was associated... Fate Norton, The Myth of British Empiricism’, History of European Ideas, 1 (1981), 331–44 For some disputed aspects of Norton’s thesis see below p 151 4 epicureanism at the origins of modernity their authors reasoned out and invented alternatives to and barriers against the philosophy they thought of as atheistic corporealism To problematize and contest the image of the world offered by natural science... Tacitus, and Plato were edited, translated into the vernacular, and widely studied However much philosophers might proclaim themselves mistrustful of ancient sects and schools, weary of the books of men, and attentive exclusively to the book of nature, they found their current predicaments illuminated and their horizons enlarged by the old texts 2 epicureanism at the origins of modernity Until the early... Appetite which Nature has wisely given to lead us to the Propagation of the Species’ The feeling of vitality and health is the greatest of all Pleasures, and almost all the Utopians reckon it the Foundation and Basis of all the other Joys of Life; since this alone makes the State of Life easy and desirable’.⁴⁸ The Utopians ‘freely confess’ that if the soul were not immortal and susceptible of reward and... with the particles that it hardly attends to the structure, while the others are so lost in admiration of the structure that they do not penetrate to the simplicity of nature.’⁶² He nevertheless favoured the atomists, for he praised Leucippus and Democritus, whose doctrines, by contrast with Aristotle’s, he said, ‘have some taste of the natural philosopher (some savor of the nature of things, and experience,... honors He saw that innocence was not safe, that crimes were committed with impunity; he saw that death raged without concern for mortals.’⁹ Epicureanism s promise to take away the fear of death and the dread of hell was appealing in the face of the ferocity of the clerics and the horrifying Calvinist doctrine of arbitrary election that had infiltrated the Protestant churches The moral message that pleasure... for the Support of that Opinion, so indulgent to Pleasure’.⁴⁷ Carefully observing the Epicurean maxim that pleasures that draw pains after them should be avoided, the Utopians devote themselves to pleasures of the mind and also of the body The latter arise, according to More, when we ‘feed the internal Heat of Life by eating and drinking’, or when we are relieved of surcharge or pain in ‘satisfying the. .. implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind’.⁵ The reference to Venus at the start of On the Nature of Things is, to be sure, paratheology, not theology Epicurus’ own theory of religion was not straightforward, but it was often read as offering a kind of conventionalist account of religious truth Cicero explained that Epicurus ‘alone perceived that the gods exist, because nature herself... abrasions of living; and an interest in the prehistoric state of nature and the evolution of law and civilization The Epicurean system that it expounded with the help of vivid imagery knitted together a theory of the physical and living world with a system of ethics Its reappearance, in a period of civil unrest and religious controversy, coincided with the emergence of ambitions to transform the material... world, the special status of men vis-`-vis other animals, a and the doctrine of original sin It implied that prayer and sacrifice were useless and made the notion of a providential plan in history unthinkable The Epicureans maintained that there was an infinite number of cosmoi Worlds, they declared, come into being from the chance combination of atoms, and animals and men are generated from the same atomic . h1" alt="" Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity This page intentionally left blank Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity Catherine Wilson CLARENDON PRESS · OXF ORD 1 Great Clarendon. alternatives to and barriers against the philosophy they thought of as atheistic corporealism. To problematize and contest the image of the world offered by natural science is still a feature of the. practice of the Alexandrian school. They absorbed and improved upon the classical optics, astronomy, mathematics, and physiology that had circulated, first in manuscripts, and then, from the end of the