Search results for " Agostino Doni"

The Body of the Soul. Lucretian Echoes in the Renaissance Theories on the Psychic Substance and its Organic Repartition

2015

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 …