School of Abdera

The ancient Greek philosophical tradition centered in Abdera, associated chiefly with Leucippus and Democritus and their atomist account of nature.

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Atomism: The view that reality consists fundamentally of indivisible units and, in many versions, the void. The School of Abdera is the best-known early Greek source of this philosophical position.
Democritean Cosmology: Democritus's account of worlds forming from atoms moving and clustering in the void. It applies the School of Abdera's basic principles to the formation and structure of worlds.
Leucippus: A fifth-century BCE Greek philosopher traditionally credited with founding atomism alongside Democritus. Ancient sources name him as the School of Abdera's founder, though little about his life is secure.
Epicureanism: A Hellenistic philosophy founded by Epicurus that joins atomist physics to an ethics of tranquility. It carried atomism forward while revising the School of Abdera's physics and connecting it to a way of life.
Atom: An indivisible, eternal unit of matter in ancient atomist philosophy. Democritus held that atoms differ in shape, arrangement, and position.
Atomic Motion: The movement and collision of atoms that ancient atomists used to explain physical events. Different motions and combinations account for the changing bodies observed in nature.
Democritus: A Greek philosopher from Abdera who developed an influential ancient theory of atoms and void. He is the tradition's most prominent thinker and the source of many surviving doctrines.
Lucretius: A Roman poet whose poem De rerum natura presents Epicurean atomist philosophy in Latin. His poem preserved and popularized a later tradition descended from Abderite atomism.
Void: Empty space, which ancient atomists treated as real and necessary for motion. The School of Abdera argued that atoms move through what other philosophers denied could exist.
Emergence: The appearance of properties in organized wholes that are absent from their individual parts. Abderite explanations derive sensible qualities from arrangements of atoms, not from qualities in atoms themselves.