Democritus: Atomistic materialism

Not only does Democritus's name not appear anywhere in Plato's work, Plato makes no mention of the atomic theory. This is especially odd since Plato's star pupil and philosophical successor, Aristotle, wrote knowingly about him. What we do know with some confidence is that Democritus was as prolific a writer as Plato. He had more than fifty books to his credit.

Democritus devoted his entire, century-long life to the formidable task of understanding ourselves and the world. His solution was a synthesis of all that had come before him,inspired on the one hand by the atomic physical theory of Leucippus and, on the other, by Protagoras's representational theory of the mind and the indirect nature of perception. Leucippus had already begun the project of philosophical synthesis by, in effect, giving the Parmenidean properties of being not the whole of existence but only its ultimate, indivisible, eternal units, which he called atoms. The concept of nothing, or nonbeing, became at his school the concept of space. Whereas Parmenides had claimed that reality consists of a single, undifferentiated and indivisible One, which was completely full, Democritus claimed that there were an infinite number of separate, individual,thing-atoms-each one completely full, containing no void (no empty space), and indivisible. So reality consists not of one thing but of two very different things-one which is a thing proper, the atom, and the other which is a nonthing, space. Space, a vacuum, has only the property of extension, so the atoms can freely move about. Their motions give rise to the various constellations of physical objects as well as to the visual objects of our perceptions.

德谟克利特的名字不仅没有出现在柏拉图的作品中，柏拉图也没有提到原子理论。这尤其奇怪，因为柏拉图的明星学生和哲学继承者亚里士多德，在写作中有意地提到了他。我们确信德谟克利特和柏拉图一样多产。他有五十多本书值得称赞。

德谟克利特把他长达一个世纪的一生奉献给了理解我们自己和世界的艰巨任务。他的解决方案是综合了他之前的所有理论，一方面受到了Leucippus的原子物理理论的启发，另一方面又受到普罗泰戈拉斯的心灵表征理论和感知的间接本质的启发。明西普斯已经开始了哲学综合的计划，实际上，他给了帕尔曼人这样一种属性:不是整个存在，而是它的终极的、不可分割的、永恒的单位，他称之为原子。在他的学校里，“无”或“无”的概念变成了“空间”的概念。帕尔门尼德曾宣称，现实是由一个单一的、未分化的、不可分割的、完全充实的实体构成的，而德谟克利特则宣称，有无数个独立的、独立的——原子——每一个原子都是完全充实的，不包含空洞(不包含空的空间)，是不可分割的。所以现实不是由一件东西组成，而是由两件截然不同的东西组成——一件是固有的东西，原子，另一件是虚无的东西，空间。空间，一个真空，只有延展的特性，所以原子可以自由移动。它们的运动产生了各种各样的物理对象，也产生了我们感知的视觉对象。