LUCRETIUS: POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
An international conference at the University of Manchester (6-7 July 2009)
The De rerum natura is at once one of the most brilliant and powerful poems in the Latin language, a passionate attempt at dispelling humanity's fear of death and its enslavement by empty religio, and a detailed exposition of Epicurean atomist physics. There is perhaps no other Latin poem which so requires and rewards approaches which combine the critical perspectives of literary analysis, philosophy and the history of science. This conference aims to bring together a group of scholars from a wide range of relevant disciplines to examine such issues as the ways in which its poetic form affects the presentation of the philosophical and scientific content of the poem, the relationship between physics and ethics in the poem, the tensions in the poem between the philosophical position being urged and the affective impact of some striking passages, its generic self-positioning with regard to earlier Greek didactic poetry, its key role in the dissemination and transformation of Epicureanism at Rome, and its place in the history of ancient science.
The recent Cambridge Companion to Lucretius edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie represents a landmark in bringing together cross-disciplinary approaches to the DRN. This conference aims to build on this important combination of different scholarly methodologies, but also to focus attention more directly on the poem itself and its multifaceted nature, particularly with regard to the interaction between its poetic form and its scientific and ethical content, and its focus on physics. This is also an ideal opportunity to re-evaluate whether existing approaches (across a range of disciplines) are sufficient for understanding as difficult and important a text as the DRN, and which new questions it might be most productive to ask about the poem.
Confirmed speakers include:
Monica Gale, 'Lucretius and Hesiod’
James Hankinson
Brooke Holmes, 'Lucretius and the Poetics of Cosmic Indifference’
Monte Johnson,‘Lucretius and the cause of spontaneity’
Duncan Kennedy, 'Lucretius, Virgil and the Instauratio Magna: Knowledge as a Project of Universal Empire'
David Konstan, ‘Lucretius and the Epicurean Attitude toward Grief’
Daryn Lehoux, ‘Soul in a World without Spirit: The Ethics of Sensation in an Inanimate Universe’
Andrew Morrison, ‘Nil igitur mors est ad nos? Iphianassa, the Athenian plague, and Epicurean views of death’
Those interested in the conference should email Andrew Morrison in the first instance (andrew.morrison(at)manchester.ac.uk). The full programme and a booking form will appear shortly at the following webpage:
http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/classicsancienthistory/eventsnews/lucretius/
