Conclusion

Lucretius and the Language of Nature ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198754909.003.0008 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 193-194

Author(s):

Barnaby Taylor

Keyword(s):

First Century ◽

Linguistic Development ◽

Philosophical Writing

‘Also, men with understanding (συνειδότες‎), introducing certain things that were previously not understood (οὐ συνορώμενα‎), recommended certain utterances.’ So Epicurus describes one aspect of the second, rational stage of linguistic development at Ep. Hdt. 76. From the perspective of Lucretius, writing in the middle of the first century BC, the process of linguistic improvement and augmentation outlined here had not yet come to an end. This is demonstrated not only by his own creative eloquence and linguistic exuberance—which went on to leave a permanent mark on the style of Latin philosophical writing—but also by his three explicit invocations of the alleged problem of ...

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Marquis de Sade

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0021 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Christian Grünnagel

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Second World War ◽

First Century ◽

Marquis De Sade ◽

World War ◽

Homo Sacer ◽

Philosophical Writing ◽

Man Ray ◽

History Of ◽

Second World

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), appears in European literature and culture like a ghostly figure whose prolific and monstrous works haunt not only nineteenth-century French novels and the surrealist artists (Magritte, Man Ray), but also thinkers, essayists and philosophers of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century.1 After the Second World War and the devastation that it caused worldwide, some influential thinkers – such as Klossowski, de Beauvoir, Horkheimer and Adorno2 – reread the oeuvre of the divine marquis, long decried as the product of a troubled, ill and wicked mind. Lacan and Adorno and Horkheimer even proposed structural parallels between Sade’s libertinage and Kant’s philosophy.3 Keeping this history of reception in mind, it is not completely surprising that Agamben includes commentaries on Sade’s political and philosophical writing in one of his own central projects, Homo Sacer, and comes back occasionally to Sade in other works.

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