Пред-етичка рефлексија перифронетичког Абдерићанина
Pre-ethical Reflection of the Periphronetic Abderite

Summary/Abstract: Eight or nine catalogued writings of Democritus, preserved under the collective title Ethics (᾿Ηθικὰ), have survived, arranged into two tetralogies. Subsequently, several eminent thinkers endeavoured to integrate these somewhat fewer than 220 fragments into a logical, coherent, and original system, conferring upon them a place of prominence within the philosophy of "Wisdom" from Abdera, with the intent of concluding that, in his case, one may speak almost incontrovertibly of an ethics, indeed to the extent of regarding him as the progenitor of Greek ethical thought. However, an examination of those passages and of Leukippus' "associate" positions concerning virtue, justice, laws, regulations, norms, responsibility, democracy, liberty, contentment, happiness, measure, paideia, and man has led the author of this article to a markedly different conclusion. From the extant Fragmenta moralia, it is manifest that there is no separate methodological reflection on morals, nor any thinking on active thinking, alias, ethics, as a discipline, nor any conceptual articulation of the aforementioned practical expressions and terms. In the Thracian's notes, one most frequently finds morality-based maxims and so-called loci communes of Hellenic culture and civilisation. A significant number of sententiae, in other words, do not transcend the realm of explicating what is known as folk wisdom, that is, gnōmai, or didactic maxims, of the ancient world. Ultimately, the author has determined that within the 'ethical' works of the "very thoughtful" (περίφρονα) Abderite one encounters predominantly advisory elements characteristic of the pre-ethical and pre-moral experience of the Hellenes, and no more than that.

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