Unit 9 worksheet
Democritus was a philosopher born at Abdera in Thrace around 460 BC; he lived to be very old but died at an unknown date. He was a student of Leucippus, and co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable indivisible elements which he called atoms. It is virtually impossible to tell which of these ideas were unique to Democritus, and which are attributable to Leucippus. Democritus is also the first philosopher we know to realize that what we perceive as the Milky Way is the light of distant stars. Other Philosophers, including later Aristotle, argued against this. Democritus was among the first to propose that the universe contains many worlds, some of them inhabited. He was also a pioneer of math and geometry in particular, we only know this because of citations in other writing since most of his work did not survive the Middle Ages. His theory of matter, commonly called atomism was a reaction to Parmenides, who denied the existence of motion. Parmenides quarreled that the existence of a thing suggests that it could not have come to be because nothing comes from nothing. He also argued that movement was impossible, because one must move into what he called “the void” and (he identified “the void” with nothing or empty space) the void does not exist and cannot be moved into. Democritus agreed that everything which is must be internal, but denied that “the void” can be equated with nothing. This makes him the first thinker on record to bicker for the existence of something that people thought didn’t exist. To explain the change around us from basic, unchangeable substance he argued that there are different elements which have existed since the beginning of time but it can be rearranged into different forms. He bickered yet again, this time about how atoms only had several properties particularly size, shape, and mass. All other properties that we attribute to matter, such as color and taste, are but the results of complex contact