Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Osborne

Author:Catherine Osborne [Osborne, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, History & Surveys, Ancient & Classical
ISBN: 9780192840943
Google: F-oRDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2004-04-22T19:01:50.516279+00:00

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18. Democritus became known to later tradition as the ‘laughing philosopher’, largely as a result of the circulation of apocryphal stories about his cheerful attitude to life and fortune, and his perception of the follies of other men.

same problems with explaining the reactions between smaller and yet smaller bodies. There will be another appearance and reality divide at the next level down, and it will be necessary to appeal yet again to deeper phenomena to explain the apparent behaviour of the first set of hypothetical particles, and so on ad infinitum. Twenty-first century science meets the same difficulty. It continues 76

Democritus thinks that the nature of eternal things consists in small substances, infinite in quantity, and for them he posits a place, distinct from them and infinite in extent. He calls place by the names ‘void’, ‘nothing’ and ‘infinite’; and each of the substances he calls ‘thing’, ‘solid’ and ‘being’. He thinks that the substances are so small that they escape our senses, and that they possess all sorts of forms and all sorts of shapes and differences in magnitude. . . . He explains how the substances remain together in terms of the way in which R

the bodies entangle with and get hold of one another; for ealit

some of them are uneven, some hooked, some concave, some y an

convex, and others have innumerable other differences. d a

p

Aristotle, On Democritus, from a quotation in pear

Simplicius’s commentary on the De Caelo, 294, an

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tr. J. Barnes

: more a

Box 17: Democritus and the properties of atoms. What features dventures in m

does an individual atom have, as opposed to a collection of atoms?

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to pursue quantum physics in the search for explanations of taph

phenomena at the atomic level, which were themselves intended ysics

to explain phenomena at the level of experience. But so long as the explanations remain of the same order as the phenomena to be explained (physics explained by physics, mathematics explained by mathematics), the same demand for explanation will simply emerge again at the next level. Democritus’s atoms provided inspiration to Robert Boyle and others when they rediscovered his ideas in the 17th century; but the atomic theory was destined never to escape from the dilemma of unending gaps in explanation.

Philosophy, meanwhile, had continued to probe the appearance and reality distinction for other riches.

77

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