Atoms, Minima and Points: Democritean Corpuscularism in the Thirteenth Century

What is known as ‘medieval atomism’ is most often a form of mathematical theory inspired by Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean ideas, in which atoms are considered as geometric points. Although these atomists asserted that the continuum is composed of indivisible entities, they did not renounce the continuity of the material world, unlike Democritus, Epicurus or Lucretius, who accepted the existence of the vacuum and, consequently, described the world as discrete. On the contrary, apart from Nicholas of Autrecourt in the fourteenth century, the atomists of the Middle Ages conceived the world as continuous and they did not accept the existence of void spaces between the bodies or an infinite extra-cosmic space. Moreover, they did not question the main principles of Aristotelian physics, but only modified them at the margins. The aim of this paper is to show that, in addition to these famous atomists, some very interesting discussions on the nature of atoms can be found in more unexpected texts, particularly in the thirteenth century. This is particularly the case of four anonymous commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, whose authors took very seriously Democritus’ atomism. Some of them even seem to accept some form of corpuscularism. In order to understand these texts, we will look closer at the relationship between atoms, minima and points in the context of thirteenth-century philosophical debates.