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The ancients offered a huge range of therapeutic exercises. Some ward off future emotion, some deal with emotion that has already arisen from a past occurrence. Chrysippus' emphasis on re-evaluating situations is a therapy for emotions, whereas Posidonius' reversion to Plato would have helped with moods as well. Pythagoreans, Democritus, Epicureans, Cynics, Aristo of Ceos (Aristotelian), Plutarch, and Galen all make contributions. The poet Ovid parodies the philosophers' therapies. All this is echoed in Christianity, but the Stoics are outstanding, Epictetus the ex-slave sterner, Seneca the aristocrat more adapted to ordinary discomforts. In recent times, Epictetus enabled Admiral Stockdale to withstand torture and solitary confinement, and his account shows how even the sterner therapies could work in practice.

The ancient atomists, beginning with Democritus, maintained that there existed only atoms, endowed with a power of motion, and void, and that sensory qualities such as colors and scents had no independent reality. This position was heavily criticized by Plato and Aristotle, the former maintaining the reality of forms and denying the full reality of matter; the latter criticizing the hypothesis of indivisible particles and defending the complementarity and necessary co-existence of matter and form. The positive reception of the ‘corpuscularian’ or mechanical philosophy amongst the experimental philosophers of the English Royal Society is discussed, and the question is raised why a metaphysical system making reference to unobservable particles should have been so warmly received by naturalists who placed so much emphasis on communal witnessing.

This chapter looks at the idea that some beasts threaten human well being, while others are conducive towards it. The views of Hermarchus on the need to wage war on the undesirable creatures, and to protect those that are useful are examined, along with his and other ancient attempts to analyse morality as based on rules drawn up on anthropocentric utilitarian lines. This utilitarian account of morality is compared with that of Socrates to indicate why Socrates' claim that it is beneficial to the agent to act morally well is not a utilitarian account, because for Socrates the benefit is explained by the moral goodness, whereas for the Utilitarian the moral goodness is explained by the benefit.

This chapter takes up the question whether Nietzsche's philosophy ought to be characterized as “therapeutic,” as it so often has been, and investigates both his and the Greek skeptics' relationship with “health” as a goal of the philosophic enterprise. It might be objected that the Pyrrhonists' adoption of ataraxia (tranquility) as the ultimate aim of their practice, an aim which has often been linked with indifference, impassivity, and the avoidance of suffering, could not be consistent with any notion of health advanced by Nietzsche. Yet an exploration of the history and etymology of ataraxia—indeed, a genealogy of ataraxia—conducted in light of Nietzsche's longtime interest in the pre-Platonic philosopher Democritus of Abdera illuminates a model of psychological health and well-being that again brings him in line with the Skeptical tradition.

Presents the background to the formation of the friendship in 1876, by discussing Nietzsche’s early academic career and first important publications, The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations. In Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, we can see Nietzsche uncomfortable with the standpoint of these works. A sympathy with natural science was always present in his thinking, but it was a growing dissatisfaction with the Wagnerian movement whose spokesman he had become that made him ready for a sharp change of direction, away from metaphysical romanticism towards a positivistic and scientific viewpoint, as well as the ‘cool’, self-disciplined style of writing that he found in Paul Rée’s work.

Aristotle articulates his natural teleology in the context of a dialectical engagement with his predecessors, identifying each of them with a salient causal factor: Empedocles (luck or chance), Democritus (necessity or spontaneity), Anaxagoras (intelligence or mind), and Plato (art and form). Aristotle tries to co-opt each of these factors into his naturalistic teleology by an a fortiori argument: to the extent that luck, necessity, intelligence, or art is a cause, nature must even more so be considered a cause. For luck is an incidental cause of that which nature is an intrinsic cause, necessity is a conjoint cause of that which nature is a leading cause, and art imitates nature.

Atomism was worked out less than two hundred years after the beginning of science. It was not a lucky guess but a consequence of previous investigations. Democritus realized that the basic stuff need not-indeed, could not–have objectively color, heat, cold, wetness, dryness, taste, and smell, for these are not properties but events that happen when an object and a perceiver interact. The atoms have only the properties conserved through change: shape, size, and weight; and they are in motion from eternity. They can join to make large, visible objects. Their motions are the determinate consequences of the collisions that they have undergone. Epicurus adopted atomism to justify rejection of superstition, modifying the Democritean principles to allow for a “swerve” of atoms, which transformed the science into one which (so he wrongly thought) by allowing some wiggle room for atoms made possible Free Will–a major philosophical problem that here became explicit.

Pyrrho's philosophical affiliations and antecedents are far from clear and a bewildering variety of claims has been made on the topic, in both ancient and modern times. In the ancient period, these frequently take the form of locating Pyrrho in a certain ‘succession’ of philosophers — that is, a chronological sequence of philosophers, each member of which is alleged to have been the teacher of the next member. Such ‘succession’ stories deserve consideration. More clearly worthy of serious attention are the verdicts on other philosophers offered by Timon in his poem Silloi, ‘Lampoons’. This chapter casts doubt on a number of such claims of influence — claims that have received a large measure of acceptance in the literature on Pyrrho. It discusses the indeterminacy thesis, Pyrrho's predecessors such as Plato and Aristotle, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Democritus, Anaxarchus, and the megarians and the Indians.

Epicurus' theoretical and practical aims seem impressively unified. He defends the atomism of Democritus and argues that Democritean hedonism fits this general view of the world. On the one hand, the empiricist epistemology that supports atomism also supports hedonism. On the other hand, the atomist view of the world, with its denial of life after death, secures peace of mind and freedom from anxiety, and so ought to be adopted on hedonist grounds. Closer inspection, however, shows that some of Epicurus' leading aims are not derived from Democritus, and that some questions can be raised about whether they fit his defence of atomism. Epicurus believes that reliance on the senses justifies a non-sceptical conclusion about the external world and acceptance of the atomic theory; we do not need to abandon empiricism for rationalism in order to accept atomism. Not everything worth considering in his ethical outlook depends on his theory of the good. His views about pleasure, freedom, virtue, and friendship include reasonable elements that do not depend on his hedonism.

This chapter examines in detail Plutarch's arguments in response to Colotes' criticism of the well-known Democritean thesis that everything other than atoms and the void is what it is ‘by convention’. Colotes took Democritus' thesis to imply eliminitativism and claimed that such a philosophical view makes life impossible to live. Whilst acknowledging that Democritus' thesis leads to absurd consequences, Plutarch still turns the tables on Colotes: he convincingly argues that, despite its attempt to diverge from Democritus' materialist ontology by highlighting the objective reality of sensible qualities, Epicurean atomism ultimately fails to give the explanations necessary to escape the eliminativist corollaries of the atomic theory. Plutarch provides an insightful critique of atomism and highlights the atomists' general difficulty to conjure up a wholly new being out of material, unaffected, and qualityless primary entities.

Physical atomism, as proposed by Democritus, was a speculative theory, without much empirical support or explanatory success, which much later received serious confirmation. Comparisons are drawn between some ancient Greek responses to puzzling phenomena and modern reductionist responses to the mind-body problem. It is conjectured that atomism with regard to the mental is true in advance of there being any particular evidence for it. According to this theory, conscious states consist of unobserved underlying states, which combine to produce the states that we do observe. If such a theory could be produced, it is argued that it might contribute to a solution to the mind-body problem.

Descartes's physics is set against the mainly Aristotelian ideas that preceded it, emphasizing six differences, three of which are the following. Aristotle's physics has many basic kinds of things, while Descartes's has only one—matter—with all variety coming from differences of movement and structure of that one. They also differ in how they view many basic laws they entertain. Teleology is central to Aristotelian physics and banished from Descartes's. Descartes's physics is compared with Democritean atomism.

In this chapter, Hankinson discusses the theory of Atomism, from Leucippus and Democritus to Epicurus and his followers. The early Atomists were concerned with the circumvention of the Eleatic denial of motion; they did so by positing unchanging atoms and the existence of the void in which the atoms move. Democritean Atomism is thoroughly mechanistic and reductionist; Epicurean Atomism is ontologically more generous, accepting, for instance, the reality of properties and guaranteeing, by virtue of the controversial notion of the ‘swerve’, the exercise of free will. Thus, although strictly speaking it denies uncaused events, Epicureanism nevertheless holds that human action is not subject to determinism. The later Epicureans also reject the Stoic view that fundamental physical principles are logically necessary truths.

The first atomic theory is credited to Democritus of Abdera, who lived in the 5th century BC. The actual development of the kinetic theory of gases accordingly took place much later, in the 19th century. With his transfer equations, James Clerk Maxwell had come very close to an evolution equation for the distribution function, but this last step must beyond any doubt be credited to Ludwig Boltzmann. The equation under consideration is usually called the Boltzmann equation, but sometimes the Maxwell-Boltzmann equation. Rudolf Clausius took kinetic theory to a mature stage with the explicit recognition that thermal energy is but the kinetic energy of the random motion of the molecules and the explanation of the first law of thermodynamics in kinetic terms. In any case there remained the important unsolved problem of deducing the second law of thermodynamics, the basis of the modern idea of irreversibility in physical processes.

A large collection of chemical recipe texts dating from the end of the first century BC to the Byzantine period appear to describe actual chemical experiments and reactions carried out in ancient Greece with the object of transforming the outward appearance of copper first to silver, then to gold. However, the gold was not a realistic imitation designed to deceive the unwary, like the adulterated or imitation gold and silver of the recipes in the Egyptian goldsmiths' notebooks of the third century AD. To determine the experimenters' real aims, this chapter examines the experiments' theoretical background as well as the role of distillation (evaporation of liquids and collection of the recondensed vapour) and sublimation (the heating of minerals within a sealed vessel to release gases which can react with other substances placed in the vessel). It argues that metalworkers already skilled in those technologies were among the founders of the chemical art, and discusses the significance of Democritus to them.

It’s an imaginative encounter between the modern physicist and the ancient natural philosophers, during a beautiful hot summer day, where the physicist takes a first glance at their rational views of nature. Old sage Thales, playing by a river, is in search of something. Atomist Democritus is staring curiously in the void. Legendary Pythagoras solves all mathematical irrationalities. Anaximander is concerned with cosmic justice. For Heraclitus everything is constantly changing; for Parmenides nothing ever is. Anaximenes cools down when his condensed sweat rarefies and evaporates. Anaxagoras finds everything, in everything, to be a puzzle. Zeno can’t even get the door. Melancholy Empedocles leaps through the Air over a Fire but lands safely on Earth, in fact in the Water. Brilliant Aristotle is meticulously studying them all. Everyone’s senses are keen. But so is everyone’s intellect contemplating it all. What a beautiful day! What a beautiful nature! What is her nature?

This chapter looks at the various negations involved in the “other” of meaning, beyond the philosophically comfortable couple sense/nonsense(Freud’s analysis of jokes as the Unsinn in Sinn), and toward a theorization ofsomething closer to Lacan’s real, as “ab-sense.”This underscores the importance of lack as a foundation of desire—Lacan’s famous dictum “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”—and as a founding principle of “otherness” within language and between languages. A reading of a passage in Democritus points to the way in which this radical otherness of language undermines the very foundation of materialist physics, just as Lacan undermines rationalist models of contemporary science.This in turn becomes a meditation on the nature of feminine sexuality and jouissance, particularly in Lacan’s most important seminar devoted to this question, Encore.