Journal of the History of Philosophy

According to a testimony of Sextus Empiricus's Against the Physicists( MX 18–19), Epicurus began to study philosophy because his grammar teacher, dealing with the birth of Chaos in Hesiod's Theogony(116–17), was not able to explain what the cause and origin of Chaos were. If this evidence is reliable, the question of disorder was extremely significant for Epicurean philosophy. Usually, ancient pagan and Christian critics of materialistic philosophies accused Democritus and Epicurus of denying the power of providence. To Dante, Democritus is the philosopher who 'l mondo a caso pone( Inf. IV 136) in the sense that, according to the Atomist, the world derives from chance.

Eva Marie Noller's book—specifically devoted to Lucretius's science of nature—is particularly welcome in the more general context of studies on the Epicurean tradition and Hellenistic philosophies. It seeks to demolish the idea that Epicureanism is a philosophy of chance and disorder because there is no providential, divine, or teleological force directing the movement of atoms and their combinations. As David Sedley already rightly emphasized ( Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, especially chapter V), all ancient philosophers must explain the order of the universe, but of course they do not do so in the same way. Ancient Atomists rely on matter and its intrinsic physical properties of organizing autonomously without the need for a providential force to guide the birth of animated and inanimate beings. Democritus gave the example of pebbles on a beach, which are organized on the basis of their size without the need to postulate a force ordering them teleologically (Sext. Emp. MVII 117–18/Diels-Kranz 68 B 164/Laks-Most VII 27 D55).

Even in the Epicurean tradition, without resorting to the power of necessity—identified by Democritus with the cosmic vortex (cf. Diog. Laert. IX 45) and categorically rejected by Epicurus—it is possible to trace the theory that the universe is an ordered physical [End Page 610]structure. Its order does not depend on the benevolent action of the gods or on a teleological conception of nature. In short, contrary to Aristotle, the end/ telosis not always a cause, as Ancient Atomism perfectly shows: the organization of matter (i.e. atoms) does not pursue an aim but simply conforms to its own physical laws whose result is the world physical order (see, e.g. Lucretius, DRNV 677–79). Noller's volume—the first comprehensive work explicitly dedicated to the theme of order in Epicurean physics—examines all those Lucretian passages (especially from the first and second books of the De rerum natura) in which the topic of order is central. Order, as Noller demonstrates by dealing, for example, with the analogy (already Democritean) between alphabetical letters and the shapes of atoms, is a genuinely physical notion. The order of the aggregated bodies depends on the shapes of their atoms, which are obviously responsible for the different modes of combination. These shapes, in their turn, depend on the atomic minima ( ta elachista). The latter are physical "parts" (even if Epicurus, in his Letter to Herodotus§ 59, speaks of perata, "limits") of the smallest possible size, which, in function of their (limited) number and their arrangement within atoms, determine the shapes, magnitudes, and weights of the atomic bodies. Noller dedicates a section to a plausible study of minimal parts (151–61), but it surprises me a little that she does not take into account what, to my knowledge, is the only monograph on this difficult doctrine (Francesco Verde, Elachista: La dottrina dei minimi nell'Epicureismo, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013).

The probability that atoms always combine in the same way, producing aggregates that harmonize with each other in an ordered universe, is very high (see, e.g. Lucretius, DRNIII 854...