02078    a2200265   4500001001100000005001700011008003900028020001800067037003600085040000700121041000800128072001600136072001400152072002100166072002100187072002100208072001700229100002000246245006300266250000600329260003200335300001000367520142000377999001501797113586046720250317111637.0250312042017GB                   eng    a9781135860462  bTaylor & FranciscGBP 55.99fBB  a01  aeng7 aDSBF2thema7 aDSBF2bic7 aLIT0000002bisac7 aLIT0041202bisac7 aLIT0041802bisac7 a821.72bisac1 aMichael Vicario10aShelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background  a1  aOxfordbRoutledgec20170925  a314 p  bScholars do not agree on how best to describe Shelley’s philosophical stance. His work has been variously taken to be that of a skeptic or a skeptical and subjective idealist. The study presents a new interpretation of Shelley’s thinking – an interpretation that places ‘intellectual system’ squarely within the Epicurean tradition of Lucretius, casting both poets as theistic empiricists. To establish Shelley as working in the Epicurean tradition, this study explores Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura as edited, translated and interpreted by two Epicurean scholars roughly contemporary with Shelley: Gilbert Wakefield and John Mason Good. These scholars rehabilitated Lucretius by drawing on three major seventeenth-century thinkers, Pierre Gassendi, Ralph Cudworth and Nicholas Malebranche. Like Shelley, each of these thinkers rejected the reduction of philosophy to mechanical and atomistic elements, a reduction which Shelley referred to as ‘materialism’ or ‘popular dualism’. What Shelley rejected is a clue to what he embraced: a fusion of Enlightenment Rationalism with British Empiricism. Such a fusion is the distinguishing mark of the work of Sir William Drummond, the only contemporary philosopher that Shelley consistently praised. This is the tradition within which Shelley ultimately stands – one that brings into balance what is given to the mind a priori and what the mind creates.  c7207d7207