From the beginning of philosophy, two questions have been at the forefront. The first asks what is the true nature of reality, and this discipline is that of metaphysics. The second asks how we can know anything, and this discipline is that of epistemology.
ATOMIST: Apparently Democritus and Leucippus founded a group around the ideas they offered about the world. We were not the first to ask questions about reality, but I think we were the first to do so in a way that attempted to look at the nature of reality directly rather than through some mystical force such as had been suggested by Anaxagoras. Whenever he could not explain something in concrete terms, he turned to the gods as the source of reality. This was not a useful system. When we did look at reality, though, we determined that it was not as solid as it appeared and was made up of smaller units we called atoms, the ultimate property, indivisible, ubiquitous.
Different ones of us took different views of how to explain this underlying reality. Leucippus, along with Democritus, was the leader of the group of philosophers who became known as "the atomists." They saw the world as composed of material bodies themselves composed of groups of "atoms," meaning something indivisible, something that cannot be divided into a smaller component. Leucippus explained how the indivisible atoms could come together to form the world we see around us--the atoms move in the void, collide, and interlock to form larger aggregates which we can then see with our senses (Luce 74).
The theory developed by Leucippus and Democritus was not itself formed from nothing but built on what had gone before, notably the works of Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Where these earlier philosophers had determined that there was some force which created and infused reality, Leucippus saw only a mechanistic universe. The atoms came together not by divine force but by collision. There is no detaile...