Overview

Human suffering, the fear of death, war, poverty, ecological destruction and social inequality: almost 2,000 ago Lucretius proposed an ethics of motion as simple and stunning solution to these ethical problems. Thomas Nail argues that Lucretius was the first to locate the core of all these ethical ills in our obsession with stasis, our fear of movement and our hatred of matter. Instead of trying to transcend nature with our minds, escape it with our immortal souls and dominate it with our technologies, Lucretius was perhaps the first in the Western tradition to forcefully argue for a completely materialist, immanent and naturalistic ethics based on moving well with and as nature. If we want to survive and live well on this planet, Lucretius taught us, our best chance is not to struggle against nature but to embrace it and facilitate its movement.

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9781474466639

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Reviews

"More than just a study of Lucretius, Nail provides a stunning reading of an already fascinating philosopher. By attending carefully to Lucretius's poetics Nail opens an alternative history of philosophy that makes sense of the turbulent present. Rather than a world and beings that undergo motion, motion provides a way of accounting for the genesis of the world. Nail's originally and beautifully composed account of motion generates an ethics worthy of the twenty-first century, allowing us to think of instability as an opportunity for thinking our world anew.--Claire Colebrook, Penn State University Nail's approach to Lucretius' philosophy is quite successful in defining ethics of motion and correlating ethics with life, death, knowledge, aesthetics, and ecology. The methodology, the honorifics, and the structure of Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion help readers follow the narration and rediscover Lucretius as an ancient philosopher in a combination of the contemporary perspective. I offer people to read Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion without a doubt if they have concerns about humanity's applications of nature and life itself from an ethical questioning. After reading this book, readers will have new ways of criticizing motion through a philosophical posthumanist philosophy.--Didem Yilmaz ""Journal of Posthumanism"" With Lucretius II, Thomas Nail continues his project of re-reading Lucretius' De rerum natura in a startlingly new fashion--as a foundational text in the philosophy of movement. Here Nail, in his own words, 'unfolds another dimension' of Lucretius' text, offering through close-reading and translation of the Latin original a compelling, contemporary ethics and aesthetics of movement. The results of Nail's labor are breathtaking: traditional pieties of scholarship (such as Lucretius' slavish devotion to Epicurus or Epicurean ethics) fall by the wayside, replaced by a Lucretius truly of and for the twenty-first century.--Wilson H. Shearin, University of Miami"

Author Information

Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Being and Motion (Oxford University Press, 2018), Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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