SOURCE: “Democritus and the Impossibility of Collision,” in Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 252, April, 1990, pp. 212-17.

In the following essay, Godfrey explains a modern argument concerning the mathematical indivisibility of atoms and compares it to Greek thought on the subject.

The Abderite philosophers Leucippus and Democritus sought to solve many of the problems facing Greek thought in the fifth century b.c. by taking all things to be made up of atoms of matter moving in a void. One of the major controversies surrounding their work is whether their atomism was logical or merely physical. Did they consider their atoms to be mathematically indivisible?

An important cause of difficulty here is that Democritus seems to have been fully involved in the mathematics of his day¹ and to have been aware of the discussion of infinite divisibility and points with no magnitude, found, for example, in the paradoxes of Zeno.² It...