Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background [Paperback]

Scholars do not agree on how best to describe Shelleys 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 Shelleys thinking  an interpretation that places intellectual system squarely within the Epicurean tradition of Lucretius, casting both poets as theistic empiricists.

To 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.

Introduction.  1. Shelley and the Limits of Skepticism  2. The Atomic Basis of Shelleys Intellectual System  3. Shelleys Lucretius: The Edition of Gilbert Wakefield  4. Shelleys Lucretius: The Translation of John Mason Good  5. 'Splendid Blasphemies': Drummond the Epicurean  Conclusion.  Notes.  Bibliography.  Index