![]() Although Democritus’s greatest influence in antiquity was on the atomism of Epicurus, he also had an important impact on the development of ancient skepticism and on the medical and other technical writers of the Hellenistic era. The short texts transmitted therein strike a balance between strictly pragmatic advice and more reflective concern with the eudaemonistic themes characteristic of ancient ethical thought. Although the authenticity of some of this material seems questionable, while the rest has suffered from excerpting in its transmission, these collections remain the most substantive body of evidence for the ethical reflection of any Presocratic thinker. ![]() His ethical views are represented in two collections of sayings, one preserved by the 5th-century AD anthologist John of Stobi, otherwise known as Stobaeus, and the other transmitted as the “Sayings of Demokrates” ( sic). What does seem clear is that Democritus explored some of the more problematic implications of this explanatorily powerful theory in ways Leucippus had not, by addressing such questions as the ontological status of sensible qualities in the atomist system, the mind-body relation, the mechanisms of perception, and the nature of human understanding. This evidence makes it difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to distinguish Leucippus’s and Democritus’s individual contributions to the fundamental physics of atomism. Reconstruction of his views in areas other than ethics therefore must proceed largely from the indirect reports of Aristotle, the Aristotelian commentators, and the doxographical tradition, including an important strain of skeptical doxography. Although the catalog of his writings reproduced in Diogenes Laertius shows that he wrote extensively on a broad range of topics, unfortunately, except for a substantial body of ethical sayings, only a meager group of fragments survives from his more than seventy treatises. He also pursued topics in areas that had little to do with physics, including ethics, political philosophy, language and poetics, and cultural history, making him not only the last great Presocratic natural philosopher but also a thinker with interests paralleling those of 5th-century sophists. ![]() Democritus of Abdera ( c. 460– c. 360 BC) developed the atomist physical theory of Leucippus into a comprehensive philosophical system by pursuing its implications into such areas as epistemology and philosophy of mind. ![]()
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