Lucretius

In this chapter of my book Venetian Colour I examine the role of light in Bellini as the novel source of unity and order in a painting, the sign of shared existence and key element in the transition from the icon to the Renaissance picture. I also illustrate what Bellini learnt about the value of tone from engraving and sculpture, and how he modified his colour accordingly.

Quels discours les épidémies produisent-elles ? Comment la littérature peut-elle éclairer notre rapport à la pandémie actuelle ? En explore la bibliothèque des textes consacrés aux épidémies et en analysant les discours littéraires qui fleurissent autour de ce thème prolifique, on peut distinguer quatre types principaux de discours sur les épidémies : documentaire, sémiologique, eschatologique, moral – auxquels se laissent aisément rattacher, de façon pure ou mixte, les discours contemporains sur l’épidémie de Covid-19. Une telle typologie invite à prendre une certaine distance face aux arguments qui nous sont présentés et à les replacer dans une perspective historique et idéologique. C’est une des leçons que peut offrir la littérature.

What Can We Learn from Literature about Epidemics?
What discourses do epidemics produce? How can literature explain our relationship to the current pandemic? By exploring the library of texts devoted to epidemics and by analyzing the literary discourses that flourish around this prolific theme, it is possible to distinguish four main types of discourses on epidemics: documentary, semiological, eschatological, and moral. It is easy to link contemporary discourses on the Covid-19 epidemic to these four types. Such a typology invites us to take a certain distance from the arguments we are currently confronted to, and to place them in a historical and ideological perspective. This is one of the lessons literature can offer.

Dans "Totalité et Infini", Lévinas semble conférer à la peur, qu'il qualifie de "sentiment fondamental", une certaine positivité. Cet article cherche à établir le sens de cette formule ("sentiment fondamental") et à comprendre en quoi la peur pourrait être positive. Pour ce faire, il interroge le contexte qui amène Lévinas à une telle formulation, dirigée tant contre Heidegger et sa valorisation de l'angoisse que contre Descartes pour qui la peur est l'une des seules passions intégralement négatives. Il examine la peur du point de vue de la temporalité, puis de son rapport à l'ignorance et au savoir, s'interroge sur ses modes de transmission, sur sa contagion. Ensuite, il analyse et compare ce que les Anciens disaient de la crainte des dieux et ce que les Proverbes de Salomon disent de la crainte du Nom.

Maratona letteraria in occasione della Giornata mondiale del libro. Dalle 11 alle 18 in diretta streaming.

Evento trasmesso su https://capolavoridellaletteratura.org/
sul sito di Repubblica e sul sito di ACI.

Con l'intervento di: Eraldo Affinati, Bruno Arpaia, Corrado Augias, Serena Autieri, Mauro Balzano, Daria Bignardi, Claudio Bisio, Piero Boitani, Lina Bolzoni, Anna Bonaiuto, Alessio Boni, Achille Bonito Oliva, Paolo Briguglia, Massimo Cacciari, Cristiana Capotondi, Gianrico Carofiglio, Donato Carrisi, Giuseppe Catozzella, Massimo Ceccherini, Monica Centanni, Paolo Cognetti, Carlo Cottarelli, Francesca d’Aloja, Gabriele Dadati, Philippe Daverio, Matilda De Angelis, Maurizio de Giovanni, Cesare De Seta, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Costanza DiQuattro, Davide Ferrario, Ernesto Ferrero, Giulio Ferroni, Giorgio Ficara, Marcello Fois, Giovanni Floris, Chiara Francini, Massimiliano Fuksas, Nadia Fusini, Umberto Galimberti, Fabrizio Gifuni, Lello Gurrado, Alessandro Haber, Filippo La Porta, Nicola Lagioia, Jhumpa Lahiri, Antonella Lattanzi, Gigi Lo Cascio, Elena Loewenthal, Beatrice Lorenzin, Claudio Magris, Raffaele Manica, Gaia Manzini, Luca Marcozzi, Alessandro Mari, Giacomo Marramao, Michela Marzano, Alberto Melloni, Marco Missiroli, Francesco Montanari, Raul Montanari, Laura Morante, Francesco Musolino, Massimo Onofri, Francesco Pannofino, Valeria Parrella, Giorgio Pasotti, Claudia Petrucci, Massimo Popolizio, Alessandro Preziosi, Amedeo Quondam, Elisabetta Rasy, Luca Ricci, Francesco Rocca, Stefania Rocca, Sergio Rubini, Claudio Santamaria, Elisabetta Sgarbi, Matteo Strukul, Emanuele Trevi, Francesco Valagussa, Giorgio Van Straten, Sandro Veronesi, Massimo Zamboni

Usually referred to as ‘On generation’ or ‘On procreation’, this unique text without a title or an author's name, transmitted in PHerc. 1390/908, stands by itself because of its subject matter and because in the Herculaneum collection, as is well known, no medical or paramedical works have survived. Along with the final section of Book 4 of Lucretius’ On Nature, it is the only Epicurean treatment of this topic of a certain length. Here, we offer its first comprehensive critical edition, with an introduction and a commentary. This text, traditionally attributed to Epicurus, is now tentatively ascribed by us, with various arguments, to the Epicurean philosopher and writer Demetrius of Laconia (2nd century BC).

In the seventh book of his "De immenso", Bruno puts forward sixteenth arguments in order to disprove the Aristotelian theory according to which the world is unique and finite. These same arguments had been deployed by Bruno seven years earlier in the fifth dialogue of "De l’infinito" (1584). Many interesting features of Bruno’s rebuttal of Aristotle’s theory arise from the comparison between "De l’infinito" and "De immenso". While in the former, for instance, the theory of the infinity of the universe and the innumerable worlds is presented as the outcome of an investigation, in the latter the new cosmology is announced as a sort of revelation by the poet-philosopher.

The author is trying to retrace the structural pattern responsible for the coherence of Jan Kochanowski's "Elegiarum libri quattuor", a collection of 46 Latin elegies by Polish most prominent Renaissance poet. In order to achieve this he takes into account the characters hailing from the Trojan myth (Paris, Hector, Ifigenia, Ulysse...) as they apparently play a serious role in the poetic expression of different stages of the collection' s protagonist's emotional journey he takes as Lydia's infortunate lover but, more importantly, an adolescent becoming a grown man

The global spread of the coronavirus has forced us to confront our own mortality, and fears about illness and death weigh heavily on the minds of many.

But there’s a risk that fear for our own life will outweigh fear for the collective to the extent that, however unwittingly, we start to act in a way that causes harm to the collective – the global phenomenon of panic-buying is an obvious example.

As early as the first century BC, Roman philosopher Lucretius predicted that humanity’s fear of death could drive us to irrational beliefs and actions that would harm society. And as COVID-19 sweeps across the globe, three of his key predictions are coming true.

Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia embraces the orthodox Stoic view that, when unduly protracted, grief reflects a logical misunderstanding of the natural world, human life, and the limits of the self. Seneca is aware that persuading Marcia to leave her false beliefs is the only way to reawaken her interest in communal life, family reciprocity, and constructive memory. He conceives his consolatory writing as an intellectually engaging didactic work tailored to the needs and disposition of his addressee. The main purpose of the present paper is to show that in this and several other respects the Consolation to Marcia makes a conscious move towards the different but evidently related genre of didactic poetry. I shall focus on the literarily and philosophically dense section on general ‘praecepta’ which follows the opening gallery of ‘exempla’. At the very start of this section (7), Seneca embarks on a skilful (yet almost unrecognized) ‘imitatio/aemulatio’ of Lucretius' famous argument on the mother cow (2.352-366). A closer analysis of Seneca's intertextual allusion to Lucretius' piece of bravura and its Ovidian afterlife (Fast. 4.455-466) will reveal that the strategies of literary amplification and rewriting deployed in the Consolation support the construction of a distinctively Stoic paradigm of natural philosophy. While giving new shape to his poetic models, Seneca substantially revises the intellectual meanings of Lucretius' exposition, in an attempt to replace the Epicurean emphasis on physical diversity and animal cognition with the Stoic doctrine of a uniform, teleologically ordered cosmos.

N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of my article. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes