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Democritus: Aristotle
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Democritus was a man with an all-embracing mind, as is evident from the scope of his writings, of which unfortunately only fragments remain. His philosophy incorporates virtually the entire body of knowledge of his age, while in their impressively comprehensive range his works can only be compared with those of Aristotle.
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Democritus of Abdera lived from about 460 to 370 B.C. Along with Leucippus, an older philosopher whose dates are uncertain, he is the founder of the atomic philosophy of nature. Atomism is the most influential of the philosophies of nature to be developed prior to the time of Socrates (d. 399 B.C.). With Socrates the interest of philosophy shifts for awhile away from nature. After Aristotle's death the atomist philosophy is revived, with some modifications, by Epicurus. In the Roman period it was popularized in its Epicurean form in Lucretius' lengthy poem On the Nature of the Universe.
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Aristotle opposed the atomic ideas of Leucippus and Democritus a hundred or so years after they were originated. Those who thought called Aristotle their master opposed atoms, and since Epicurus was an atomist, he was opposed by the Stoics. Cicero, Seneca and Galen ... opposed anything to do with atoms.
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Ultimately, though, Aristotle and Plato, two of the best-known philosophers of Ancient Greece, rejected the theories of Democritus. Aristotle accepted the theory of Empedocles, adding his own (incorrect) idea that the four core elements could be transformed into one another. Because of Aristotle’s great influence, Democritus’s theory would have to wait almost 2,000 years before being rediscovered.
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The Presocratic period ended with Democritus. Athens had become the political, cultural and spiritual center of Greece, preparing the ground for the philosophical giants, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle whose works outshone the atomists for many centuries. Yet, the atom theory remains one of the most amazing intellectual accomplishments of the antiquity.
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Little is known about the life of Democritus, who hailed from the city of Abdera in Thrace. We do know that his ideas did not catch on. Rather, Aristotle’s view that matter is continuous and infinitely divisible held sway for more than 2,000 years, until the early 1800s, when John Dalton demonstrated that atoms did a very good job of explaining what was observed in chemical transformations. Even so, not all scientists were convinced that matter was made of atoms until the early 1900s, when The Svedberg’s studies of Brownian motion gave unequivocal proof of their existence.
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