Epicurus' Materialism and Its Roots

Epicurus developed a refined version of ancient atomism, thoroughly revising the Leucippean- Democritean doctrine in the light of the criticisms advanced by thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle (and their schools). We will present the cornerstones of Epicurean atomistic theory, taking into account the dialectical contexts in which its various aspects were outlined. We will propose an interpretation of Epicurean atomism as an embryonal functionalist doctrine of supervenience, based on the principle of the multiple realisability of matter. We will finally show that, like any explanatory model of this kind, Epicurean materialism also suffers from a tension between the vertical and horizontal planes and from causal redundancy: every phenomenon is generally the effect of both an antecedent cause and an underlying cause, which Epicurus does not regard as individually sufficient and therefore mutually exclusive. Only mental states seem to escape this overdetermination at some point in their development thanks to the atomic swerve.