Democritus

Democritus of Abdera, a contemporary of Socrates, stands out among early Greek philosophers because he offered both a comprehensive physical account of the universe and a naturalistic account of human history and culture. Although none of his works has survived in its entirety, descriptions of his views and many direct quotations from his writings were preserved by later sources, beginning with the works of Aristotle and extending to the fifth-century AD Florigelium (Anthology) of Joannes Stobaeus. While Plato ignored Democritus’s work, largely because he disagreed with his teachings, Aristotle acknowledged Democritus as the most important physicist of his age, primarily for his exposition of the theory of atomism, which holds that everything in the universe, from objects to human souls, is a result of the interactions and rearrangements of the atoms in the void. Democritus is also known for his ethical theory, based on the thesis that wisdom is the greatest good for humans because it enables a stable and tranquil condition. His position was highly influential during the Hellenistic period, when it was further developed by Epicurus and his followers, who also built on Democritus’s physical theory and theory of knowledge. Although Democritus’s philosophy fell into obscurity during the Middle Ages because of its association with Epicurean hedonism and atheism, it became the focus of renewed interest during a revival of atomism in the Renaissance and early modern period, and today scientists cite the philosopher as an important early contributor to scientific thought.

The standard edition and enumeration of the fragments is Hermann Diels’s Die fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed., 1951-52; The Fragments of the Presocratic Philosophers). The edition and Russian commentary of Salomo Luria (1970) greatly expanded the number and context of fragments beyond Diels’s edition, which was explicitly intended as a provisional collection. Recent translations of much of the extant evidence include the works of C. C. W. Taylor (1999) and, in Italian, Leszl (2009). The most recent edition and translation is the Loeb Classical Library (LCL 530) by André Laks and Glenn W. Most, Early Greek Philosophy: Later Ionian and Athenian Thinkers, Part 2: Atomists (Cambridge, Mass and London, 2016).Laks et al 2016