If one wishes to claim to be heir to Democritus & Epicurus, talking about their specific theories (atoms & swerve etc) is precisely the _wrong_ way to go about it. Their specific theories have no relation whatever to modern notions of space, time, or matter. What one should claim allegiance to is only the _spirit_ of their investigations and claims: their materialist perspective. And swerving atoms are quite another matter. And even more important was/is their perspective (passed on to us by Lucretius) on death: The dead don't know they're dead, and death is a tragedy for the living, not the dead.
Carrol
^^^^ CB: I agree with this , except for the fact that their method seems to be speculative and not empirical , which seems at first blush not to be materialist ( there is idealist empiricism, but is there speculative materialism ?) I assume there must be something materialist to their approach , though, as Marx's thesis is on them because of something materialist in their method. What is materialist about the way they arrived at these theories of the atom or the swerve ?
Yes, "when you're dead, you're done" is a hard one.