1001Philosophers

Aristotle vs Democritus

Aristotle and Democritus represent the two great competing accounts of nature in classical Greek philosophy. Democritus's atomism — the doctrine that what exists is atoms in void — was the most developed pre-Socratic alternative to the substance-and-form metaphysics Aristotle would later systematize.

At a glance

AristotleDemocritus
Dates384 BC – 322 BCc. 460 BC – c. 370 BC
NationalityGreekGreek
EraAncientAncient
Movements Peripatetic School, Ancient Greek Philosophy Pre-Socratic, Ancient Greek Philosophy
Profile Aristotle → Democritus →

Where they agree

Both held that the natural world is intelligible to disciplined inquiry rather than only through myth, both took the explanation of change and the persistence of natural kinds as central problems, and both worked in close engagement with the pre-Socratic tradition. Aristotle treated Democritus as one of his most important predecessors and discussed his views extensively in Physics and On Generation and Corruption.

Where they disagree

Democritus held that the world is composed of indivisible atoms moving through void, and that the variety of perceptible qualities reduces to the geometrical and kinetic properties of these atoms; sweetness and color exist only by convention, while atoms and void exist by nature. Aristotle rejected the appeal to void as physically incoherent and rejected the reduction of perceptible qualities to atomic geometry: substance is composite, form is genuinely irreducible to matter, and the natures of things are not the geometrical accidents of their constituents. The dispute defines the early modern recovery of atomism, when Galileo, Boyle, and Newton would side with Democritus against the Aristotelian inheritance.

Representative quotes

Aristotle

  • “All men by nature desire to know.”

    Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10

  • “Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

    A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

  • “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Democritus

  • “By convention sweet, by convention bitter; by convention hot, by convention cold; in reality, atoms and void.”

    Fragment 9 (preserved by Galen)

  • “The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.”

    The brave man is not only he who overcomes the enemy, but he who is stronger than pleasures. Some men are masters of cities, but are enslaved to women.

  • “Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.”

    Freeman (1948) [ 1 ] , p. 161 | Variant: The good things of life are produced by learning with hard work; the bad are reaped of their own accord, without hard work. [ citation needed ]

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