Theophrastus redivivus

Liber:Theophrastus redivivus (1659), Paris manuscript.pdf Theophrastus redivivus (meaning "The revived Theophrastus") is an anonymous Latin-language book published on an unknown date sometime between 1600 and 1700. The book has been described as "a compendium of old arguments against religion and belief in God" and "an anthology of free thought." The work comprises materialist and skeptical treatises from classical sources as Pietro Pomponazzi, Lucilio Vanini, Michel de Montaigne, Machiavelli, Pierre Charron, and Gabriel Naudé. According to Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, the Theophrastus redivivus is "a comprehensive statement of atheism and materialism that seems, in effect, timeless. Unlocalized in time or place, Latin confers a kind of scandalous universality or ubiquity on the most heterodox propositions." Theophrastus redivivus is famous for proclaiming that all the great philosophers, including the eponymous Theophrastus (ancient Greek philosopher c. 371 – c. 287 BCE, successor of Aristotle), have been atheists; religions are contrived works of men; there is no valid proof for the existence of gods, and those who claim experience of a god are either disingenuous or ill. However, unlike the Treatise of the Three Impostors, another anti-religious work published around the same time, Theophrastus redivivus was never mentioned by the Age of Enlightenment philosophers and thinkers of the next century, despite being one of the first explicitly anti-religious works ever published in modern Europe. Theophrastus redivivus is divided into a preface ("prooemium") and six treatises ("tractatus"), also called books ("libri"). Every treatise is subdivided into multiple chapters ("capita").