000			02078 a2200265 4500
001			1135860467
005			20250317111637.0
008			250312042017GB eng
020			_a9781135860462
037			_bTaylor & Francis _cGBP 55.99 _fBB
040			_a01
041			_aeng
072	7		_aDSBF _2thema
072	7		_aDSBF _2bic
072	7		_aLIT000000 _2bisac
072	7		_aLIT004120 _2bisac
072	7		_aLIT004180 _2bisac
072	7		_a821.7 _2bisac
100	1		_aMichael Vicario
245	1	0	_aShelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background
250			_a1
260			_aOxford _bRoutledge _c20170925
300			_a314 p
520			_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.
999			_c7207 _d7207