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The Other Greek Philosophers

Democritus: Empirical Rationalist

Chris Christensen argues that two basic philosophical opposites were harmoniously united in the thought of Democritus (460-370 BC).

I’m fascinated by the faultline of dualism that runs through the entire history of philosophy – the dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete. It manifests itself in many ways: metaphysics-physics, mind-matter, idealism-realism, subjective-objective, and so on. The split sharpened in the Seventeenth Century when an intellectual war broke out between the (European) Continental Rationalists, who believed that true knowledge could only be gained through reason, and the British Empiricists, who felt that sense perceptions were necessary to validate knowledge. Judging from what I’ve read, a truce is still not at hand.

To get a grip on this war, I decided to explore dualism in its infancy, in the pre-Socratic period.

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