6533b7d3fe1ef96bd1260ac4
RESEARCH PRODUCT
The Body of the Soul. Lucretian Echoes in the Renaissance Theories on the Psychic Substance and its Organic Repartition
Fabio Tutronesubject
Natural philosophymedia_common.quotation_subjectPoetry as TopicArt historySettore L-FIL-LET/04 - Lingua E Letteratura LatinaHistory 17th CenturyPsychicHumansAristotelianismHistory of scienceHistory Ancientmedia_commonHuman BodyLiteraturebusiness.industryLucretius Aristotle dissections ancient psychology early modern medicine Bernardino Telesio Agostino Doni Francis Bacon.Historical ArticleGeneral MedicineArtReligionPhilosophyHistory 16th CenturyTeleologyMaterialismSoulbusinessdescription
In the 16th and 17th centuries, when Aristotelianism still was the leading current of natural philosophy and atomistic theories began to arise, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura stood out as an attractive and dangerous model. The present paper reassesses several relevant aspects of Lucretius’ materialistic psychology by focusing on the problem of the soul’s repartition through the limbs discussed in Book 3. A very successful Lucretian image serves as fil rouge throughout this survey: the description of a snake chopped up, with its pieces moving on the ground (Lucretius DRN 1969, 3.657–669). The paper’s first section sets the poet’s theory against the background of ancient psychology, pointing out its often neglected assimilation of Aristotelian elements. The second section highlights the influence of De Rerum Natura and its physiology of the soul on Bernardino Telesio, Agostino Doni and Francis Bacon, since all of these authors engage in an original recombination of mechanical and teleological explanations.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-02-25 | Gesnerus |