On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) is a didactic poem that presents the philosophy of Epicureanism. It posits that everything in the world, including the human soul, is composed of atoms moving through the void, emphasizing the importance of understanding the natural world to free oneself from the fear of gods and death. Lucretius argues that the universe operates without divine intervention, governed instead by natural laws.
The poem's emphasis on the material and mechanistic nature of reality, along with its rejection of abstract forms or essences, laid early groundwork for nominalism. Nominalism, a later medieval philosophical position, holds that universals (like "beauty" or "goodness") do not have a real existence outside of the particular objects that exhibit them. While Lucretius himself was not a nominalist, his emphasis on the tangible and the particular over the abstract influenced the development of nominalist thought, which similarly denied the independent existence of universals and stressed the importance of individual, concrete entities.
