![]() The last twenty years or so have seen a resurgence in Democritus studies (as part of a more general revival of interest in Presocratic philosophy), and more attention is being paid to the Democritean corpus as a whole. The editors' introduction provides a brief history of Democritus studies from the nineteenth century, noting how even from the beginning, scholars tended to focus on either the physical fragments or the ethical ones. This is perhaps disappointing, but not a flaw, for these essays are contributions that will form the foundation for the sort of second-order, unifying theorizing that will, one hopes, come next. The question of the unity of Democritean thought remains open, for there is not much here that addresses that issue directly. The collection certainly succeeds in showing how much of the breadth of Democritus' interests can be reconstructed from the sources, and provides an excellent overview of recent scholarship. The book contains eleven essays in addition to the Introduction five of the essays are in French, the remainder in English. One of the first major collections to focus on Democritus since the publications of the proceedings of the Catania conference of 1979 and the Xanthi symposium of 1983, Democritus: Science, the Arts, and the Care of the Soul brings together scholars from disparate backgrounds in order to, in the editors' words, "concentrate … attention on relatively neglected areas of research on Democritus and on themes on which it is legitimate to expect new contributions, and finally new interpretive suggestions" (p. This volume aims to redress some of these problems. His links with other fifth-century thinkers have been under-appreciated. Democritus is known best among philosophers for his atomism, yet there are few direct sources for that theory, and little to help us see how his atomism connects with other aspects of his thought. He was probably an important influence on Plato's moral psychology, yet the largest collection of ethical fragments, most of the so-called "Democrates" fragments, are banal, and their authorship is disputed. The ancient lists of his works are long, yet little survives. The study of Democritus can be frustrating, even for a scholar familiar with the vicissitudes of Presocratic studies.
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