Dr. Daniel Kapust to Speak on Lucretius and Rousseau
Dr. Daniel Kapust to Speak on Lucretius and Rousseau
The Departments of Classics and the Department of Government and Politics are happy to present Dr. Daniel Kapust, who will be delivering a paper entitled "Lucretius and Rousseau on Compassion," on Friday, April 17, at 4 pm in MMH 1310.
The close relationship between the Epicurean poet Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men has been long-recognized and well-established. Less clear, however, is the relationship between one of the key elements of Rousseau’s moral psychology – compassion (or pity) – and his source, as conventional readings of Epicurean moral psychology tend to deny the importance of compassion. Building on recent scholarship highlighting the place of compassion in Lucretius’ poem, Dr. Kapust will show that Rousseau draws on Lucretius in constructing his moral psychology. He will also show that Rousseau departs from Lucretius in his understanding of the weakening of compassion within the moral psychology of actually existing humans, and that his departure highlights the differences between Lucretius’ and Rousseau’s respective hypothetical histories of humanity.
Dr. Kapust (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005) is the Judith Hicks Stiehm Chair in Political Theory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a distinguished alumnus of the Classics Department at UMD (B.A. 1999).