Democritus is the last great cosmologist in the long line of pre-Socratic natural philosophers or physiologists, as Aristotle calls them, and the first universal mind (mens universalis) in the History of Philosophy.

In his work, he condenses all the efforts of his predecessors to define the Being of the world and the meaning of being. At the same time, by combining the views of earlier philosophers and primarily addressing the positions of the Eleatics, he goes much further than the initial outlines of the atomic theory proposed by his teacher, Leucippus.

Furthermore, Democritus is distinctly characterized as a great synthetic mind of the 5th century BC. That is, he was not only concerned with the cosmological problem, which troubled the thought of his great predecessors for almost two centuries, but he is also interested in all the philosophical knowledge acquired up to that point; perhaps it would be better to say the entirety of human knowledge.

However, the cosmological problem finds its definitive expression in his thought, the atomic theory 'closes' the pre-Socratic quest about the essence of the world, that is, the question of what the world is, for the being and the essence.

[Excerpt from the publisher's or edition's presentation text]