Home > Catalogue > Lexis > Num. 41 (n.s.) – Dicembre 2023 – Fasc. 2 > Le lexique de la nature : sur la notion de sponte sua chez Lucrèce

Lexis | Num. 41 (n.s.) – Dicembre 2023 – Fasc. 2

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Research Article

Le lexique de la nature : sur la notion de sponte sua chez Lucrèce

Alexandra Peralta    Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France    

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abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the term sponte sua, which appears about twenty times in Lucretius’s poem. I begin with a commentary on Johnson’s article “Nature, Spontaneity and Voluntary Action in Lucretius”, in order to clarify my own purpose, namely, to delimit the use of sponte sua to the notion of generation in Epicurean natural philosophy and to establish its difference with respect to the voluntas. By examining a selection of passages from De rerum natura mentioning spontaneity, I conclude that this notion refers to internal causality that is opposed to both necessity and chance.

Published
Dec. 18, 2023
Accepted
Oct. 2, 2023
Submitted
March 16, 2023
Language
FR

Keywords: Automatos • Nature • Spontaneity • Lucretius • Causality

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Lexis/2724-1564/2023/02/005

Copyright: © 2023 Alexandra Peralta. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.