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Leucippus or Leukippos (Greek:
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 , first half of 5th century BC) was the first to develop the theory of atomism
Atomism

In natural philosophy, atomism is the philosophical theses that was theoryzed by Leucippus in the fifth century BC. For it all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, indestructible building blocks ? atoms ....
 — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atom
Atom

|-! bgcolor=gray | Properties|-||}The atom is a basic unit of matter consisting of a dense, central atomic nucleus surrounded by a electron cloud of electric charge electrons....
s — which was elaborated in far greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus
Democritus

Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera in the north of Greece. He was the most prolific, and ultimately the most influential, of the pre-Socratic philosophers; his atomic theory may be regarded as the culmination of early Greek thought....
. He was born at Miletus
Miletus

Miletus was an ancient city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria. Evidence of first settlement at the site has been made inaccessible by the rise of sea level and deposition of sediments from the Maeander....
 or Abdera
Abdera, Thrace

Abdera was a town on the coast of Thrace 17 km east-northeast of the mouth of the Nestos, and almost opposite Thasos. At coordinates , the site now lies in the Xanthi Prefecture of modern Greece....
.
ippus is a shadowy figure, as his dates are not recorded and he is often mentioned in conjunction with his more well-known pupil Democritus.






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Leucippus or Leukippos (Greek:
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 , first half of 5th century BC) was the first to develop the theory of atomism
Atomism

In natural philosophy, atomism is the philosophical theses that was theoryzed by Leucippus in the fifth century BC. For it all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, indestructible building blocks ? atoms ....
 — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atom
Atom

|-! bgcolor=gray | Properties|-||}The atom is a basic unit of matter consisting of a dense, central atomic nucleus surrounded by a electron cloud of electric charge electrons....
s — which was elaborated in far greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus
Democritus

Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera in the north of Greece. He was the most prolific, and ultimately the most influential, of the pre-Socratic philosophers; his atomic theory may be regarded as the culmination of early Greek thought....
. He was born at Miletus
Miletus

Miletus was an ancient city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria. Evidence of first settlement at the site has been made inaccessible by the rise of sea level and deposition of sediments from the Maeander....
 or Abdera
Abdera, Thrace

Abdera was a town on the coast of Thrace 17 km east-northeast of the mouth of the Nestos, and almost opposite Thasos. At coordinates , the site now lies in the Xanthi Prefecture of modern Greece....
.

Overview

Leucippus is a shadowy figure, as his dates are not recorded and he is often mentioned in conjunction with his more well-known pupil Democritus. It is therefore difficult to determine which contributions come from Democritus or from those of Leucippus.

Leucippus was a contemporary of Zeno
Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Velia was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic....
, Empedocles
Empedocles

Empedocles was a Hellenic civilization pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek colony in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the origin of the cosmogenesis theory of the four classical elements....
 and Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic philosophy Greek philosophy famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous , the ordering force....
 of the Ionian school
Ionian School

The Ionian school, a type of Greek philosophy centred in Miletus, Ionia in the 6th and 5th centuries Anno Domini, is something of a misnomer. Although Ionia was a centre of Western philosophy, the scholars it produced, including Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Diogenes Apolloniates, Archelaus , Hippo , and Thales, had such d...
 of philosophy. Leucippus was most influenced by Zeno, who possessed a great interest in the problems and paradoxes
Zeno's paradoxes

Zeno's paradoxes are a set of problems generally thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides's doctrine that "all is one" and that, contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion....
 of space. He studied at the school in Elea, but it is not certain whether this was before or after the death of Parmenides
Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy....
. Around 440 B.C. or 430 B.C. Leucippus founded a school at Abdera, which his pupil, Democritus, was closely associated with. His fame was so completely overshadowed by that of Democritus, who systematized his views on atoms, that Epicurus
Epicurus

Epicurus was an Greek philosophy and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works....
 doubted his very existence, according to Diogenes Laertius
Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes La?rtius , the biographer of the Greece philosophers, is supposed by some to have received his surname from the town of Laerte in Cilicia, Asia Minor, and by others from the Roman Empire family of the La?rtii....
 x. 7.

However, Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
 and Theophrastus
Theophrastus

Theophrastus , a Greek native of Eressos in Lesbos Island, was the successor of Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. His interests were wide-ranging, extending from biology and physics to ethics and metaphysics....
 explicitly credit Leucippus with the invention of Atomism. Leucippus agreed with the Eleatic argument that true being does not admit of vacuum, and there can be no movement in the absence of vacuum. Leucippus contended that since movement exists, there has to be vacuum. However, he concludes that vacuum is identified with non-being, since it cannot really be. Leucippus differed from the Eleatics in not being encumbered by the conceptual intermingling of being and non-being. Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
 made the necessary distinction between grades of being and types of negation.

The most famous among Leucippus' lost works were titled Megas Diakosmos (The Great Order of the Universe or The great world-system) and Peri Nou (On mind).

Quotes

A single fragment of Leucippus survives:

External links