Quotes About Atomists

Parmenides and Zeno became famous for arguments which apparently cannot be refuted but which reach conclusions impossible to accept. These arguments provoke a crisis in philosophical accounts of the world; responses to it can be found in the cosmologies of Anaxagoras, Empedocles and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.

Unlike many later atomists, and unlike his Stoic rivals, Epicurus rejected determinism not only in the physical realm but also in the realm of human agency.

The atomists knew that causation must start from something, and that no cause can be assigned to this original something. Motion was simply a given. The atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers. When they asked "Why?" they meant: what was the cause of an event? When their successors—Plato, Aristotle, and so on—asked "Why?" they were searching for the purpose of an event.

These ancient Atomists (who shared an awe for nature very similar to Carl Sagan's in our own time) developed a full cosmology based on the theory that all things are made of elementary particles and void.4 They rejected all supernatural opinions, posited an early theory of relativity, developed a "doctrine of innumerable worlds," and 2,300 years ago were speculating about extraterrestrial life based on their initial observations about the nature of things.