Talk:Leucippus

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The year of Leucippus death.

The article contains contradicting information:

"Leukippos (Greek: Λεύκιππος, born in 500 BC – died in 450 BC)" "Around 440 B.C. or 430 B.C. Leucippus found a school at Abdera, which his pupil, Democritus, was closely associated with.[2]"

I believe 450B.C to be incorrect, I do not know what is correct though. Olemann89 19:03, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

The caption under the portrait/painting of Leucippus might benefit from denoting who the artist is - does someone know who painted this picture? 69.209.101.46 (talk) 20:19, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Era notation:BCE

BCE was introduced 2004 January 27. That makes it the default ERA notation for this article--JimWae (talk) 08:10, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Was Democritus 460 Pre-Socratic???

Anyone to compile some of them here (ne mi, kompreneble)? Milesian Thales (Phoenician-Ioanian) et al; Samian Pythagoras (also inspired by the Prienian Bias and Pherecydes of the Phoenician-Greek Syros) et al (including Hippasus and Alcmaeon); Colophonian Xenophanes et al (including Zeno); Hecataeus of Miletus et al; Ephesian Heraclitus et al; Clazomenian Anaxagoras et al; Protagoras (Abderan like the one of this article) et al (including Hippias); Oenopides of Chios et al; Metrodorus of Lampsacus et al; Diogenes of Apollonia (425!!!) et al. Such learning approach was turned lesson approached when Alexander was advised by Aristotle, certain empires may happen to lack a Byzantine cosmopolitan location (which means very ancient references requiring JavaScript)...

Introduction structure and style

The third sentence/paragraph would be better right after the first, i.e., "Leucippus was one of the earliest Greeks to develop the theory of atomism — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms — which was elaborated in greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus. He was most likely born in Miletus, although Abdera and Elea are also mentioned as possible birth-places."

And the third sentence/paragraph works better at the end of the first paragraph of the overview and in paretheses, i.e., "...It is therefore difficult to determine which contributions come from Democritus and which come from Leucippus. (A possible earlier candidate for atomism is Mochus of Sidon, from the Trojan War era [13th or 12th century BCE])."

I didn't want to unilaterally impose these changes. I'm sure someone has been tending this entry, so I defer to that person's judgment. 98.148.115.161 (talk) 16:12, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. Please check if I have done it right. (Actually the net effect of the 2 changes is only moving one sentence.) I could always be wrong on this but I think this article is not closely attended by anyone at the moment and such an edit is unlikely to cause controversy. I have been watching it for a while and it gives me the impression of being an article where people (including me) have basically only pasted in notes which someone will one day need to tidy up.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:38, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

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Murdered by Democritus?

"He is famous for being murdered by Democritus. Democritus realizing he had surpassed his mentor, wished to return Leucippus to the earth. This historic story, inspired many modern stories, such as that of Star Wars."—I can't find sources for this anywhere? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.53.118.93 (talk) 06:51, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

That was vandalism. It is, thankfully, no longer in the article because the vandalism has now been reverted by another editor. --Katolophyromai (talk) 13:55, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Leucippus/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: HistoryofIran (talk · contribs) 16:03, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Happy to review this. --HistoryofIran (talk) 16:03, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Assessment

Lede

• Looks good. Not the biggest lede, but there is obviously no need when the article isn't that big either. --HistoryofIran (talk) 14:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Life and philosophy

• Looks good. I don't expect there to be much more to added, considering his very existence is obscure and disputed. --HistoryofIran (talk) 14:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Historicity

• Looks good. --HistoryofIran (talk) 14:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

References and Sources

• Looks good. High quality sources. --HistoryofIran (talk) 14:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Passed. Congratulations on a great article! --HistoryofIran (talk) 14:54, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Precursor to modern atomic theory?

The current lead says that his philosophy was a precursor to modern atomic theory. This is a bit of an overstatement, and in some ways also misleading. Observe what Sylvia Berryman writes in her 2005–2022 SEP article "Ancient Atomism":

Renaissance alchemy, as much as the reworking of ancient Greek atomist theories by adherents of the ‘New Science’ of the seventeenth century, proved important sources of inspiration for corpuscularian theories in the early modern world (Newman 2006). The Aristotelian notion of minima naturalia, and the appeal to microstructures of matter in explanation of chemical changes in Aristotle’s Meteorology IV, meant that consideration of corpuscularian explanations need not automatically be framed as a rejection of Aristotle. A useful corrective here to the tendency to regard early modern atomism as merely reviving ancient Greek theories is Newman’s argument that an ‘operational’ notion of minima—the smallest unit that seems to be manifest in the best explanation of the observed phenomena—emerged from the alchemical tradition and provided an alternative to the metaphysical arguments of the ancient Greek atomists (Newman 2006, 2009).

Consider also the abstract of William R. Newman's 2009 paper cited by Berryman 2005–2022:

The historical treatment of atomism and the mechanical philosophy largely neglects what I call "chymical atomism," namely a type of pre-Daltonian corpuscular matter theory that postulated particles of matter which were operationally indivisible. From the Middle Ages onwards, alchemists influenced by Aristotle's Meteorology, De caelo, and De generatione et corruptions argued for the existence of robust corpuscles of matter that resisted analysis by laboratory means. As I argue in the present paper, this alchemical tradition entered the works of Daniel Sennert and Robert Boyle, and became the common property of seventeenth-century chymists. Through Boyle, G.E. Stahl, and other chymists, the operational atomism of the alchemists was even transmitted to Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, where it became the basis of his claim that elements are simply "the final limit that analysis reaches."

What Newman 2009 sketches here is much closer to how historians of chemistry today view the origin of modern atomic theory: it derived from alchemical corpuscularianism, which itself derived from Aristotelian physics, not from the purely metaphysical atomism of Leucippus and Democritus.

The source cited in the article for the claim that ancient atomism was influential in the development of early atomic theories in the 18th and 19th centuries is Richard McKirahan. But McKirahan is a historian of ancient philosophy. Let's hear a philosopher of science specialized in modern atomic theories (and an opponent of many of Newman's theories, for good measure), Alan Chalmers 2005–2014, also in SEP ("Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century"):

The problem besetting those seeking experimental support for atomic theories is most evident in chemistry. Although many eighteenth-century chemists espoused versions of Newtonian chemistry their chemical practice owed nothing to it (Thackray, 1970). As philosophers they payed lip-service to atomism but as experimental chemists they worked independently of it. [...] Klein (1995) has highlighted [...] how a large section of the experimental chemistry of the time could be construed as a practical tradition divorced from a speculative metaphysics, atomistic or otherwise. [...] whatever sympathy Lavoisier may have had for Newtonian atomism of the kind championed by Laplace, he was at pains to distance his new chemistry from it. Substances provisionally classified as elements were those that could not be broken down into something simpler in the laboratory. Progress in eighteenth-century chemistry led away from rather than towards atomism. It was not until Dalton that the situation changed early in the nineteenth century.

So with John Dalton in the 19th century (pinging Ajrocke, who wrote stuff like [1][2]), the term 'atomism' finally for some time became more than lip-service when used by actual chemists. Of course, with the discovery of the electron in 1897, the word 'atom' again devolved into a mere technical term, used within the thoroughly non-atomistic frameworks of 20th-century and 21st-century physics (the article's reference to Heisenberg's view that "that modern atoms are more like the intangible Platonic forms than the discrete material units of Leucippus" is very much on point here). Leucippus surely is not a precursor to 20th/21st-century atomic theory, but obviously also Dalton's atomic theory was based on the work of his direct predecessors, which went back on medieval alchemy and ultimately on Aristotle (and in a way on Empedocles, from whom Aristotle borrowed), not on Leucippus and Democritus.

Given all this, the article's claims about Leucippus' influence in the 18th and 19th centuries need serious revision. Beyond that, the article's claim that Leucippus's theory of change regarding the movement of atoms was generally accepted in physics until the early 20th century is wildly inaccurate, as should be obvious from the above, but see also Berryman 2004–2023, "Democritus", SEP: "Although the ancient atomists are often compared to modern ‘mechanistic’ theories, Balme warned of the danger of assuming that the atomists share modern ideas about the nature of atomic motion, particularly the idea that motion is inertial (Balme 1941)." This needs to be removed.

I think the comparison in the article between –or I should say the contrasting of– Leucippus' atomism and modern atomic theory is helpful, but it doesn't need the misleading claim that Leucippus was a precedent for modern atomic theory. In the section on the modern era (where all of this occurs), it would be better to leave behind Leucippus a bit and speak of "ancient atomism", which indeed was revived in the 16th and 17th centuries, though crucially not by chemists but by philosophers such as Gassendi. It would be good to explicitly point this out, as well as the fact that the 18th-century chemists who cited these philosophers were often merely paying lip-service to atomism. The fact that recent historians of chemistry do not regard ancient atomism but medieval alchemical corpuscularianism to lie at the basis of (early) modern chemical atomic theories should also be briefly mentioned in the article.

Thanks for you attention, ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:05, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

I went ahead and removed the inaccurate statement about movement of atoms, and took a stab at implementing the information and some of the sources suggested above. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:17, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Interesting. I had not before heard that recent historians of chemistry do not regard ancient atomism but medieval alchemical corpuscularianism to lie at the basis of (early) modern chemical atomic theories, but it is not surprising. On a related note, there was an RM in February for Atomic theory → History of atomic theory where the issue of its relationship to Atomism was raised. Srnec (talk) 19:04, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Looks like editors at that RM did not quite understand that 'atomic theory' is not the current name of the scientific field inquiring into the nature of atoms (which would be 'atomic physics'), but has instead become a term mainly used in the history of science. Then again, if this is not immediately transparent to editors, it's probably also not to readers, so adding 'history of' may be a welcome clarification.

In any case, 'atomic theory' is broader than 'atomism', which tends to be used only for broadly philosophical (metaphysical) theories that postulate indivisible particles, while 'atomic theory' also includes various corpuscularian theories as well as 19th-/20th-century scientific (experimental) theories involving atoms. A separate article is therefore warranted, and since it is indeed a historical topic it may have been a good idea to make this clear to lay readers from the get-go (although I'm not quite sure; I probably would not have !voted).

If you're interested to know more about late medieval and early modern '(al)chemical atomism', and how it interacted with the Aristotelianism of the scholastics, Newman, William R. 2006, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution is a brilliant work and a highly recommended read. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:52, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

fantasy portrait

What purpose is served by having an anachronistic fantasy portrait of the subject so prominent at the top of the article? Please remove. Spicemix (talk) 21:03, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Fantasy portrait? It's a 17th-century oil painting in the Baroque style by Luca Giordano. Per MOS:IMAGES, it is significant and relevant in the topic's context, not merely decorative, because it illustrates the topic's historical notability. It is the type of image used for similar purposes in high-quality reference works. What would you have expected for a lead image? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 21:21, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

What about changing the caption to "Leucippus, as imagined by the 17th-century painter Luca Giordano", as I did here? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 21:30, 11 May 2024 (UTC)