{"product_id":"shelleys-intellectual-system-and-its-epicurean-background-paperback-softback","title":"Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background - Paperback \/ softback","description":"\u003cp\u003eScholars 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Taylor \u0026 Francis","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45564676604142,"sku":"9780415759809","price":91.2,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/9612\/7726\/files\/9780415759809.jpg?v=1720670613","url":"https:\/\/bookland.com.au\/products\/shelleys-intellectual-system-and-its-epicurean-background-paperback-softback","provider":"Book Land AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}