'Thomas Nail's inspired reading of Lucretius leaves us moderns with the kind of excitement the Romans must have felt as they first scrolled through that founding text of materialism. Nail makes ancient ideas erupt in a contemporary context, demonstrating their necessity to cutting-edge science and philosophy. Antiquity has never felt so alive.'Ryan Johnson, Elon University'Following in the footsteps of Deleuze and Series, Thomas Nail has rescued Lucretius as a philosopher of flux. In a reading at once daring and patient, the De Rerum Natura emerges as a text still capable of surprising us. Nail shows us that Lucretius truly is our contemporary.'Brooke Holmes, Princeton UniversityThe most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last thirty yearsAfter centuries of abuse by modern atomists and mechanistic materialists, Thomas Nail argues that it is now time to return to De Rerum Natura from the perspective of a new materialism.Nail shows that some of the most important contributions of Lucretius' poem have been completely overlooked or misunderstood.

He reinterprets this classical text as an absolutely contemporary one defined by motion and gives us a genuinely new Lucretius - a Lucretius for today. Thomas Nail is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. Cover image: The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, 1483?85Cover design:[EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.comISBN (cover): 978-1-4744-3467-6ISBN (PPC): 978-1-4744-3466-9 Barcode.