Leucippe (in Greek old Λεύκιππος / Leúkippos ), presocratic philosopher Greek (v. 460   -   370 av. J. - C.).

Biography

We know few things of its life. According to the tradition, Leucippe was born with Milet, according to other sources (Diogène Laërce, IX, 30), with Élée; finally, it is done sometimes citizen of Abdère. He would have been the contemporary of Empédocle and Anaxagore, and raises it Zénon d' Élée or even of Parménide. For some, Leucippe was pythagorician.

Doctrines

Leucippe is the founder of the Atomisme, but we do not have any of its works strictly speaking: they are included/understood in those of Démocrite, and it is practically impossible to distinguish their respective ideas. The existence even of Leucippe is prone to guarantee: Lucrèce denies it, but Aristote and Théophraste explicitly quotes it as being at the origin of the theory nuclear physicist. One allots however a treaty to him On intellect although according to certain historians this treaty is only one extract of a vaster work said great cosmology .

According to this Theory, the principles first of reality are the full one and the vacuum:

“It estimated that all the things are unlimited and mutually change the ones in the others, and that the universe at the same time empty and is filled with body. ” (Diogène Laërce, IX, 30)

The differences between the things are in the final analysis analyzable by a combination of qualities of the atoms which form them. Their weight, their form, their speed, their direction, their positions respective gives to each thing its characteristic configuration. The atomism of Leucippe was taken again and popularize by its pupil Démocrite. To the physical and cosmological theories original, this one will add into clean the ethical consequences that it is advisable to draw from the physics of Leucippe.

In its work Of Dei will go, ( Of the anger of God ), written towards 320 after Jesus-Christ, Lactance which fights the ideas of written Leucippe: " The former philosophers explained that all is consisted four elements. He, (Leucippe) did not want this explanation by fear of appearing to go on the traces of others; but it has claimed that these elements themselves originated in of other elements which one could neither see, neither to touch, nor to perceive by any part of the body; they are so thin says it, that there is no enough fine iron blade to be able to cut them and divide them; thereafter, it gave them the name of atom . (Lactance 10,1,5)

Sources

• ;

• presocratic Schools , p.  383-400.

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