Biography of Democritus of Abdera | Greek philosopher.

(Do Abdera?, today disappeared, today Greece, h. 460 BC.-ID?, h. 370 BC) Greek philosopher. Democritus was so famous in his time as other philosophers of the importance of Plato or Aristotle and must have been one of the most prolific ancient authors, although only fragments of some of his works, most of those devoted to ethics, are preserved despite the fact that is attributed to various treaties of physics, mathematics music and technical issues.

Democritus

Disciple of Leucippus, was something younger that his famous compatriot Protagoras, which used to talk, and died according to sources authorized to 100 years of age. He did apparently long trips throughout Egypt and Asia; However, know nothing with certainty, nor regarding its relations with the Pythagoreans, the Athenian environment and the physician Hippocrates, since ancient sources just passed us about Democritus the usual fantasies. Tradition portrays him, as opposed to Heraclitus, as the philosopher who laughs at the crazy human, which perhaps due to the serenity and ease of adaptation expressed by Democritus in his ethics.

Democritus founded doctrine nuclear physicist, who conceived the universe made up of countless corpuscles or substantially identical, indivisible atoms («atom» means, in Greek, inseparable), eternal and indestructible, they are moving in the infinite vacuum and differ from each other only in terms of its size, its shape and its position. The immutability of the atoms is explained by its inner solidity, without vacuum whatsoever, since all separation process is understood to be produced by the possibility of penetrating, as with a knife, in the empty spaces of a body; anything else would be infinitely hard without vacuum, which is the condition of possibility of the movement of existing things.

For Democritus, all that there is in nature is a combination of atoms and vacuum: atoms move in a natural and inherent to them way and, in his motion, collide each other and are combined when forms and other features allow it; the provisions adopted by the atoms and changes undergoing are governed by a causal order necessary. In the universe, the collisions between atoms give rise to the formation of vortex from which arise the various worlds, among whom some are in process of formation, while others are in the process of disappearing. Human beings develop from the primitive silt by the action of heat, about the life as it is also the fire; in fact, the atoms of the fire and the soul are nature similar, smaller and more rounded than the others.

Democritus ethics is based on the internal balance, achieved through control of the passions by knowledge and prudence, without resorting to any idea of Justice or of nature that takes to the interaction of atoms in a vacuum. According to Democritus, the natural aspiration of every individual is not both pleasure and peace of mind (euthymia); Choose the pleasure and pain, avoided, but correct discrimination of pleasures is true happiness.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas