Strato of Lampsacus

Strato of Lampsacus (c. 340-268 BCE) was a Greek philosopher of the Peripatetic school, born in the city of Lampsacus. He led the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle, after the death of Theophrastus, and he is remembered above all for pushing the naturalistic side of Aristotle's thought further than almost any of his contemporaries. This makes him an important figure in the history of ancient materialism.

According to the sources, he trained at the Lyceum in Athens and later went to Egypt as tutor to Ptolemy, where he also taught Aristarchus of Samos. He returned to Athens after the death of Theophrastus, around 287 BCE, and led the school until his own death, sometime between 270 and 268 BCE. He devoted himself mainly to natural science, so much so that he came to be called the Physicist. None of his writings survive. What we know comes from fragments and from later authors such as Simplicius and Diogenes Laertius, along with Cicero's criticism that he neglected ethics.

In physics he stressed exact observation and experiment. He held that falling bodies accelerate, a conclusion he drew from the way water breaks into droplets as it leaves a spout. He regarded air as a material body, like water or earth, rejected Aristotle's fifth element, and understood place as the space a thing occupies. Against teleology, he sought purely physical explanations based on heat and cold, and he proposed that the universe is governed by the unconscious force of nature rather than by an active god who built it.

His name faded during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century it became famous again because of the perceived resemblances between his system and Spinoza's pantheism. In 1678 Ralph Cudworth listed him among the types of atheism and coined the term hylozoism, and Pierre Bayle adopted him as a key reference point for his own philosophy.