Thanks for accepting my membership.
I am a retired software engineer with a keen interest in philosophy. I have long ago heard of Epicureanism, but always in a negative context. However, after I read Lucretius' remarkable poem I began to evaluate Epicureanism in a new light, not only because of its straightforward and convincing picture of the universe, but also because of the remarkable precocity of its atomic scientific stance, so much ahead of its time. Another reason, though his philosophy was almost universally condemned, since the Renaissance it has infiltrated, so to speak, the outlook of so many scientists of the Scientific Revolution era, reluctant though many of them (in fact most of them) were to openly admit it to (themselves as well as to others).
In my understanding, the paradigm shift that "natural philosophy" went through in its journey to becoming "modern science" is to an (unfortunately not sufficiently) unacknowledged extent the result of the encounter between natural philosophers/early scientists and Lucretius.
I have read (and enjoyed) Diogenes Laertius on Epicurus, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius (in two different translations), Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, Catherine Wilson's Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, as well as Alison Brown's The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence and the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. I look forward to reading the books recommended in your email, and to engaging with the other members of the site.
