Facts, Fiction and Philosophy at Atrium Gallery at London School of Economics and Political Science

Facts, Fiction and Philosophy' is an exhibition that argues that literature and philosophy have been inextricably intertwined from the ancient world through to the present day. The intimate link between philosophy and the arts is nowhere better demonstrated than in the LSE's own Latin motto, drawn from a line by the great Roman epic poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.). The line in full reads 'felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas' - 'happy is he who has been able to discover the causes of things', a tribute to the philosopher of the same period Lucretius, who wrote, not as we would expect of a philosopher today, in prose, but, like Virgil, in verse. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura 'On the Nature of Things' was a major text of the Epicurean school of philosophy, which flourished in the first century BC. While there might be no philosophical texts conceived in verse in the 21st century, as recently as the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche was as well known for his poetry as for his philosophical works in prose, and in the 20th century two of the seminal figures of existentialism, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, produced both purely philosophical treatises as well as plays and novels.