Ancient Philosophy · Part 9 · The first philosophers · B1–B2
Leucippus and Democritus: Atoms and the Void
Part 9 of Ancient Philosophy: two Greek thinkers said that everything is made of tiny, uncuttable particles moving through empty space, and that colour, taste and warmth exist only in us. They were laughed at, ignored by Plato, and proved surprisingly close to the truth two thousand years later. The zero conditional (if atoms collide, they bounce apart), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the most modern idea of the ancient world: atoms.
In Greek, “uncuttable”: a piece of matter so small it cannot be divided. Everything you see, they said, is made of them.
Even you, and your thoughts too. That is where Philo will start to argue.
Leucippus is said to have invented atomism in the 5th century BCE; he is so obscure that Epicurus, a century later, claimed that he never existed. His pupil Democritus of Abdera, in northern Greece, developed the theory in about seventy books on physics, mathematics, music, ethics and much else.
Every one of those books is lost. About three hundred fragments survive, most of them short ethical sayings whose authenticity is debated; for his physics, we depend mainly on Aristotle, who argued against it, and on later writers. Plato never mentions Democritus at all.
The atomists taught that everything is made of atoms, tiny, solid, indivisible bodies of countless shapes, moving through the void, empty space. When atoms collide and hook together, things come into being; when they separate, things pass away. Nothing is created from nothing, and nothing is destroyed into nothing.
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