ABSTRACT
The early parts of book XXV of On Nature give us a picture of how people conceive of themselves according to the pathologikos tropos and aitiologikos tropos. The later fragments of On Nature XXV have received a great amount of scholarly attention since David Sedley's analysis of some of the major fragments in a seminal article. This chapter starts with a general outline of reductionism and anti-reductionism and their attribution to Epicurus. It discusses briefly how Epicurus' reductionist or anti-reductionist position is thought to have been a response to Democritus. For the complete philosophical reconstruction of Epicurus' conception of agency the chapter introduces hypothesis of how the atomic swerve and the conception of the soul as a mixture supports the non-reductive physicalist interpretation of Epicurus' philosophy of mind. Anti-reductionism may be conceived as ontological or epistemological and is often a reaction to reductionism in the philosophy of mind.
