Democritus of Abdera
c. 460-370 BC · Early Greek Thought · Prominent
Democritus of Abdera founded atomism with Leucippus. Cut a thing in half enough times and you reach pieces that cannot be cut: atoms moving through empty void are all there is, and every event follows by necessity from their collisions, with nothing left to chance. Colour and sweetness are conventions of ours, while only the atoms and the void are real. He made the goal of life euthymia, a steady good cheer.
Signature
The position Democritus is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic
- Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic (0 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Brain Only (25 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (17 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (0 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- strongly leans Subjective (0 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Democritus refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Pleasure
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence / Social Invention
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Annihilation
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Indirect Realism / Other
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience / Pure Reason
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Hard Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos
What is the origin of reality? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature?