{"product_id":"shelleys-intellectual-system-and-its-epicurean-background","title":"Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background","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 Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54234517012824,"sku":"9780415759809","price":71.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780415759809_eb9c2ae0-e0c0-4335-8759-b02675d406df.jpg?v=1769007617","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/shelleys-intellectual-system-and-its-epicurean-background","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}