Thomas Nail appears to be an example of someone looking to bend the simplicity of atomic nothing-comes-from-nothing physics to allow for the existence and control of supernatural otherworldly forces.
There's no way to stand up to fantasizing except to insist on real evidence given to us by nature as self-evident, and that's what Epicurus' canonics is all about.
Cassius ,
I don't quite see where you make this assumption that Thomas Nail is introducing "supernatural otherworldly forces". Or have I mis-read your post #14.
I read Nail's papers more as simply mis-translating [as Bryan pointed out in post #10] to infer that Lucretius understood and was trying to write about the flow and folds of nature as if Lucretius' prefigured Quantum wavefunctions.
"However, in addition to these insights, my books have tried to argue that Lucretius also prefigured quantum theory’s understanding of entanglement and indeterminacy." [Thomas Nail]
I can see Nail's work as a "strong misreading" of DRN—philosophically productive but historically stretched. Where, Nail could have simply drawn careful analogies between Lucretius's atomic swerve (clinamen) and quantum indeterminacy and wave functions driving motion; Nail went further to present this as historical claim to be seen in passages of DRN.
However, I find no mention of Nail discussing "supernatural otherworldly forces". In fact the forces that occur from "motion" create effects which our human senses can not detect, may be better understood today by modern quantum effects.
I thought the critique given by professor Michael Bennett of Nail's work which I quoted his conclusion in my post #11 clarified that Nail was not proposing "supernatural otherworldly forces" in his theory of motion.
QuoteNothing I have said poses a challenge to the project of developing an ontology of motion adequate to the ethical, political, aesthetic and scientific realities of the present day. Nor have I called into question the consistency or originality Nail claims for the theory of motion presented in the first book of Being and Motion (BM 13). In fact, I have perhaps emphasized its originality—though at the expense of Lucretius’s.
Thanks for your commentary, as it helps me keep reading!
As I have time to read many of the other Nail papers, I'll have a better understanding. Starting with: "THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOVEMENT - An Introduction"