Mar29 Alt ?s Nature’s God by Stewart (3).

1.   Who was always Benjamin Franklin’s mistress? (93).

2.   When Epicurus turned from atoms to the stars, projecting his intuition about the intelligibility of all things up into the night sky, he produced what? (106).

3.   The first of Epicurus’s cosmological conclusions is that the universe must be what? (106).

4.   The best evidence for Epicureanism in the absence of Epicurus in America comes once again from? (112).

5.   On the one hand, it seems as obvious now as it did in the early modern period that the great champion of the guiding principle and its infinite universe was an ? (113).

6.   Johannes Kepler urged Galileo to give credit to whom for his inspiration? (This was the same person that Locke, Toland, and Leibniz suggested that Descartes had also failed to give proper credit for his influence). (118-120).

7.   The greater challenge of esoteric writing, then was, was not to escape the censors but to? (122).

8.   The most remarkable eruption of radical philosophy in prerevolutionary America, however, was arguably the first: ? (124-5).

9   Who does Matthew Stewart believe was the “Natural Man”? (127).

 Alternative discussion questions.

1.       “Alongside his official theology, Epicurus offers an intriguing, arguably deeper theory concerning the gods. The intuition expressed in the deeper theory involves a kind of reversal of the traditional relationship between gods and humans: the gods do not cause us to exist, but rather,we cause them to exist.” (114). How can we reconcile this theory with Epicurus view of an infinite universe where everything that exists has always existed? This would cause god to exist after humans existed.

2.       “The point of the strange theology of intermundial gods, in fact, may be just to give earthlings fitting objects toward which to direct their non-instrumental yet therapeutic prayers.” (114). Would this suggest that it is okay to tell someone that you will keep them in your prayers?