Xenophanes, Leucippus and Democritus

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews the lives and achievements of three Pre-Socratics philosophers. The paper first describes Xenophanes, an Ionian from Colophon, (560- 478 BC), who was a Greek poet and rhapsode, religious thinker and precursor of Eleaticism, which stressed unity rather than diversity and held that the particularity of material things is more apparent than real. The paper explains that the most ambitious response to the Eleatic challenge was the atomic theory, invented by Leucippus. The author continues that Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 B.C.) expanded Leucippus' original atomic theory examining its applications and supporting it with a subtle epistemology.

From the Paper:

"Along with the principles of atomism, the Democritean epistemology was materialist in nature. In Fragment 11 of Democritus' extant writings, he distinguishes between two modes of cognition; the "bastard" knowledge derived from the senses, and the "legitimate" knowledge based on reasoning which, in turn, has as its foundation the reals of Atoms and the Void. In Fragment 9, Democritus speaks of the objects of sensation as existing merely "by convention." According to him, we cannot trust the knowledge obtained via our senses, although he acknowledges that the mind begins the reasoning process from the data received from sense perception (Fr. 125). Democritus believed that critical reflection of sensory evidence is our best means of approaching the truth; yet since thought itself, like sensation, involves physical interactions between atoms, it also is subject to distortion; hence, even "legitimate" knowledge rests on opinion (Fr. 7)."

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