Kevin Killeen, "The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable" (Stanford UP, 2023)
New Books in Literary Studies
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The Importance of Touch in Early Modern Thought
This chapter deals with the importance of this ancient Roman atomist in early modern thought. In many ways Lucretius as natural philosopher is quite preposterous his ideas of atomism or according to the scientific lights of early modernity entirely preposterous. The 17th century returns to him continually because I think he provides a particular language for thinking about the tactile nature of things. There is a sense in which the response to microscopic demands a poetics as much as a scientific theory it demands a way of coping with a reality that is doing something entirely different now. This would tend not figure in accounts of the scientific revolution but it should and a figure like Robert Boyle for example who writes the right
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