Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
A conversation with Margaret Graver, Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College

[peggymeredith]

I read a poem titled After Reading Lucretius, I Go To The Pond, by Mary Oliver this morning. Afterwards I looked up Lucretius to have an understanding of the poets reference to Lucretius. Egads! In the rabbit hole I go!

[basibb]

Thank you, it's a great pleasure to listen to the two of you

[tljeffers]

A most helpful--calm and lucid--introduction to Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, the poem George Santayana addresses at the start of his classic Three Philosophical Poets (1910)--the other two such poets being Dante and Goethe. Not that these discussants mention Santayana, but we can go to him on our own.

[mehrdadmohajer]

Thx. to both of you & ICE. I appreciate the efforts & lots of success to you🙂

[abooswalehmosafeer]

Always a Delight to catch a Glimpse of the Past, recent or remote.

[benedictslotte]

I have read only a small, small fraction of De Rerum Natura, but having a scientific background, I cannot be anything but inspired and impressed by it. The very few times so far that I have created music, and needed a text for it, I have used Lucretius's work. There is just something special about using classical Latin from 55 B.C. when describing things that modern science deals with. I'm not sure whether YouTube allows me to post a direct link to my related YouTube video, so I will not do it here.

[thinkmackay]

Thank you for posting this interview. It helps a lot in reading the poems for me.

[jamesy]

This is a fantastic discussion. I do have to take umbrage with science in antiquity being armchair science. This is a common misconception that has come down to us from the Middle Ages. There were indeed experimentation in antiquity. I always recommend Carrier's Scientist in the Early Roman Empire for this subject. It's well researched and supported and very accessible.

[indydude]

At 8:52 she says "anti-teleology". Not "anti totally illogical" according to the closed captions.

[Stonehome]

Ach! Two years ago, I see, I commented on this. Without narrowing my love of these two birds an iota... they just didn't cop onto the "swerve" Lucretius reasons out. They jump miles ahead, to free will and consciousness, like... I guess intellectuals will. In fact, Lucretius, in the middle of deducing that the universe is infinite, reasons then that on a large scale, the distribution of matter in the universe must be uniform. Upon which, he goes on to ask us to stretch our imaginations and realize that if atoms moved about in strictly straight paths, they would eventually "pile up" non-uniformly in one end of the universe or the other. That is- moving in all straight lines, they wouldn't bounce off each other randomly enough to ever become uniformly distributed. So they must "swerve" a little as they move. It would take a smart person to say if this agrees with modern quantum electrodynamics... but to me it sure seems like it does.

[francischow]

I was fascinated by the last part about free will and how it could be independent of determinism, since uncertain causation is simply another kind of causation and does not address volition. You should have her back to talk about free will because it seemed she had worked out some ideas which she did not put forth in this interview.

[amapolapoppy]

Anybody knows her translation on Seneca's letters to Lucilio?

[Zeno_]

no idea has harmed mankind's intellectual progress more than monotheism, known variously as judaism, christianity and islam.

[Stonehome]

Oh Jesus. I just managed to visualize it. Not only must atoms swerve, but they must swerve out of phase. If they swerve in a common phase, it reduces to nothing more than a bunch of littler straight line motions, in which case (as Lucretius saw) their momenta after collision could not be randomly distributed.

[TheMusicalStylingsofBrentBunn]

It's a beautiful work. While his explanations of things were largely incorrect, I believe the point was to show that all things could be explained nationalistically without invoking the supernatural.

[lauricetork]

thanks quite interesting and the explanation is very good

[marcelopedroni]

Wow. M.G. falando de Lucrécio. 👍👍👍🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷💚💛💚💛💚💛💚💛
Gleiser, para mim estoicismo é o 'deus das lacunas' dos filosofos celebridades do Brasil.
Prefiro o epicurismo, mas vivo o estoicismo. Quando passares por Arcata let's drink a coffee com este xará que te admita.

[lucas]

Great!!!! What course is Marcelo talking about???

[hm]

The question of free will still seems to be a problem. I think it is largely a problem of definition, as Prof. Graver suggests. Either the choice is driven by things in the universe, and the question of whether you have a choice or not is sort of tautological, or it is formed from nothing, which many philosophers don't much like. We may not have control over things in our lives, but we like the illusion of control. Similarly, we may not have free will, but the illusion of free will is almost as good.

[PortalEMCioranBrasil]

"Creation ex nihilo is an impossibility."