Lucretius II

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 *
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
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