Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background

<p>Scholars do not agree on how best to describe Shelley’s 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 Shelley’s thinking – an interpretation that places ‘intellectual system’ squarely within the Epicurean tradition of Lucretius casting both poets as theistic empiricists.</p><p>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.</p>