Atomism

Atomism (from

.

References to the concept of atomism and its

) that flash in and out of existence.

The particles of

have become a modern analogue of philosophical atoms.

Reductionism

Philosophical atomism is a

By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void.

Atomism stands in contrast to a

classical elements

would be the same in any portion of a homogeneous material).

Antiquity

Greek atomism

Democritus

In the 5th century BC, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus proposed that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles which they called "atoms".^{[7][8][9][10]} Nothing whatsoever is known about Leucippus except that he was the teacher of Democritus.^[10] Democritus, by contrast, wrote prolifically, producing over eighty known treatises, none of which have survived to the present day complete.^[10] However, a massive number of fragments and quotations of his writings have survived.^[10] These are the main source of information on his teachings about atoms.^[10] Democritus's argument for the existence of atoms hinged on the idea that it is impossible to keep dividing matter infinitely - and that matter must therefore be made up of extremely tiny particles.^[10] The atomistic theory aimed to remove the "distinction which the Eleatic school drew between the Absolute, or the only real existence, and the world of change around us."^[11]

Democritus believed that atoms are too small for human senses to detect, that they are infinitely many, that they come in infinitely many varieties, and that they have always existed.

Previously, Parmenides had denied the existence of motion, change and void. He believed all existence to be a single, all-encompassing and unchanging mass (a concept known as monism), and that change and motion were mere illusions. He explicitly rejected sensory experience as the path to an understanding of the universe and instead used purely abstract reasoning. He believed there is no such thing as void, equating it with non-being. This in turn meant that motion is impossible, because there is no void to move into.^[12] Parmenides doesn't mention or explicitly deny the existence of the void, stating instead that what is not does not exist.^[13][14][15] He also wrote all that is must be an indivisible unity, for if it were manifold, then there would have to be a void that could divide it. Finally, he stated that the all encompassing Unity is unchanging, for the Unity already encompasses all that is and can be.^[12]

Democritus rejected Parmenides' belief that change is an illusion. He believed change was real, and if it was not then at least the illusion had to be explained. He thus supported the concept of void, and stated that the universe is made up of many Parmenidean entities that move around in the void.^[12] The void is infinite and provides the space in which the atoms can pack or scatter differently. The different possible packings and scatterings within the void make up the shifting outlines and bulk of the objects that organisms feel, see, eat, hear, smell, and taste. While organisms may feel hot or cold, hot and cold actually have no real existence. They are simply sensations produced in organisms by the different packings and scatterings of the atoms in the void that compose the object that organisms sense as being "hot" or "cold".

The work of Democritus survives only in secondhand reports, some of which are unreliable or conflicting. Much of the best evidence of Democritus' theory of atomism is reported by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) in his discussions of Democritus' and Plato's contrasting views on the types of indivisibles composing the natural world.^[16]

According to some

Unit-point atomism was invoked in order to make sense of a statement ascribed to Zeno of Elea in Plato's Parmenides: "these writings of mine were meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who make fun of him. . . My answer is addressed to the partisans of the many. . ."^[19] The anti-Parmenidean pluralists were supposedly unit-point atomists whose philosophy was essentially a reaction against the Eleatics. This hypothesis, however, to explain Zeno's paradoxes, has been thoroughly discredited.^{[citation needed]}

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Plato (c. 427 – c. 347 BCE) argued that atoms just crashing into other atoms could never produce the beauty and form of the world. In Plato's Timaeus (28b–29a) the character of Timeaus insisted that the cosmos was not eternal but was created, although its creator framed it after an eternal, unchanging model.^[20]

Element	Polyhedron		Number of Faces	Number of Triangles
Fire	Tetrahedron (Animation)		4	24
Air	Octahedron (Animation)		8	48
Water	Icosahedron (Animation)		20	120
Earth	Cube (Animation)		6	24
Geometrical simple bodies according to Plato

One part of that creation were the four simple bodies of fire, air, water, and earth. But Plato did not consider these corpuscles to be the most basic level of reality, for in his view they were made up of an unchanging level of reality, which was mathematical. These simple bodies were geometric solids, the faces of which were, in turn, made up of triangles. The square faces of the cube were each made up of four isosceles right-angled triangles and the triangular faces of the tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron were each made up of six right-angled triangles.

Plato postulated the geometric structure of the simple bodies of the four elements as summarized in the adjacent table. The cube, with its flat base and stability, was assigned to earth; the tetrahedron was assigned to fire because its penetrating points and sharp edges made it mobile. The points and edges of the octahedron and icosahedron were blunter and so these less mobile bodies were assigned to air and water. Since the simple bodies could be decomposed into triangles, and the triangles reassembled into atoms of different elements, Plato's model offered a plausible account of changes among the primary substances.^[21][22]

Sometime before 330 BC

]

Aristotle theorized minima naturalia as the smallest parts into which a homogeneous natural substance (e.g., flesh, bone, or wood) could be divided and still retain its essential character. Unlike the atomism of Democritus, these Aristotelian "natural minima" were not conceptualized as physically indivisible. Instead, Aristotle's concept was rooted in his hylomorphic worldview, which held that every physical thing is a compound of matter (Greek hyle) and of an immaterial substantial form (Greek morphe) that imparts its essential nature and structure. To use an analogy we could pose a rubber ball: we could imagine the rubber to be the matter that gives the ball the ability to take on another form, and the spherical shape to be the form that gives it its identity of "ball". Using this analogy, though, we should keep in mind that in fact rubber itself would already be considered a composite of form and matter, as it has identity and determinacy to a certain extent, pure or primary matter is completely unformed, unintelligible and with infinite potential to undergo change.

Aristotle's intuition was that there is some smallest size beyond which matter could no longer be structured as flesh, or bone, or wood, or some other such organic substance that for Aristotle (living before the invention of the microscope) could be considered homogeneous. For instance, if flesh were divided beyond its natural minimum, what would be left might be a large amount of the element water, and smaller amounts of the other elements. But whatever water or other elements were left, they would no longer have the "nature" of flesh: in hylomorphic terms, they would no longer be matter structured by the form of flesh; instead the remaining water, e.g., would be matter structured by the form of water, not by the form of flesh.

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) studied atomism with Nausiphanes who had been a student of Democritus. Although Epicurus was certain of the existence of atoms and the void, he was less sure we could adequately explain specific natural phenomena such as earthquakes, lightning, comets, or the phases of the Moon.^[25] Few of Epicurus' writings survive, and those that do reflect his interest in applying Democritus' theories to assist people in taking responsibility for themselves and for their own happiness—since he held there are no gods around that can help them. (Epicurus regarded the role of gods as exemplifying moral ideals.)

In

Several of these doctrines of atomism are, in some respects, "suggestively similar" to that of Democritus.[36] McEvilley (2002) assumes that such similarities are due to extensive cultural contact and diffusion, probably in both directions.^[37]

The

Late Roman Republic

Lucretius revives Epicurus

Epicurus' ideas re-appear in the works of his

scientific work in poetic form illustrates several segments of Epicurean theory on how the universe came into its current stage; it shows that the phenomena we perceive are actually composite forms. The atoms and the void are eternal and in constant motion. Atomic collisions create objects, which are still composed of the same eternal atoms whose motion for a while is incorporated into the created entity. Lucretius also explains human sensations and meteorological phenomena in terms of atomic motion.

"Atoms" and "vacuum" vs. religion

In his epic poem

The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life.

However, according to science historian Charles Coulston Gillispie:

Encased in the Epicurean philosophy, the atomic doctrine could never be welcome to moral authority. ... Epicurean gods neither created the world nor paid it ... attention. "Nature," says Lucretius, "is free and uncontrolled by proud masters and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods." Only the atomists among ... Greek science ... was the one view of nature quite incompatible with theology. Like a pair of eighteenth-century philosophers, Epicurus and Lucretius introduced atomism as a vehicle of enlightenment. They meant to refute the pretensions of religion ... and release men from superstition and the undignified fear of capricious gods. Consequently, a hint of Epicureanism came to seem the mark of the beast in Christian Europe. No thinker, unless it is Machiavelli, has been more maligned by misrepresentation.[40]

The possibility of a vacuum was accepted—or rejected—together with atoms and atomism, for the vacuum was part of that same theory.

Democritus and Lucretius denied the impossibility of a vacuum, being of the opinion that there must be a vacuum between the discrete particles (atoms) of which, they thought, all matter is composed. In general, however, the belief that a vacuum is impossible was almost universally held until the end of the sixteenth century.^[41] ... The time was certainly ripe for the revival of the belief in the possibility of a vacuum, but to the clerics the very name of the vacuum was anathema, being associated with the atomistic theories of Epicurus and Lucretius, which were felt to be heretical.^[42]

While Aristotelian philosophy eclipsed the importance of the atomists in late Roman and medieval Europe, their work was still preserved and exposited through commentaries on the works of Aristotle. In the 2nd century, Galen (AD 129–216) presented extensive discussions of the Greek atomists, especially Epicurus, in his Aristotle commentaries.

Medieval Buddhism

Medieval Buddhist atomism, flourishing around the 7th century, was very different from the atomist doctrines taught in early Buddhism. Medieval Buddhist philosophers Dharmakirti and Dignāga considered atoms to be point-sized, durationless, and made of energy. In discussing the two systems, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy (1930) stresses their commonality, the postulate of "absolute qualities" (guna-dharma) underlying all empirical phenomena.^[49]

Still later, the

Medieval Islam

See also:

Alchemy and chemistry in medieval Islam

Atomistic philosophies are found very early in Islamic philosophy and were influenced originally by earlier Greek and, to some extent, Indian philosophy.^[52][53][54] Islamic speculative theology in general approached issues in physics from an atomistic framework.^[55]

The most successful form of Islamic atomism was in the

Averroes rejects atomism

Other traditions in Islam rejected the atomism of the Asharites and expounded on many Greek texts, especially those of Aristotle. An active school of philosophers in Al-Andalus, including the noted commentator Averroes (1126–1198 CE) explicitly rejected the thought of al-Ghazali and turned to an extensive evaluation of the thought of Aristotle. Averroes commented in detail on most of the works of Aristotle and his commentaries became very influential in Jewish and Christian scholastic thought.

According to historian of atomism Joshua Gregory, no serious work was done with atomism from the time of Galen until

resurrected it in the 17th century; "the gap between these two 'modern naturalists' and the ancient Atomists marked "the exile of the atom" and "it is universally admitted that the Middle Ages had abandoned Atomism, and virtually lost it."

Although the ancient atomists' works were unavailable, scholastic thinkers gradually became aware of Aristotle's critiques of atomism as Averroes's commentaries were translated into Latin. Although the atomism of Epicurus had fallen out of favor in the centuries of Scholasticism, the minima naturalia of Aristotelianism received extensive consideration. Speculation on minima naturalia provided philosophical background for the mechanistic philosophy of early modern thinkers such as Descartes, and for the alchemical works of Geber and Daniel Sennert, who in turn influenced the corpuscularian alchemist Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry.^[57][58]

A chief theme in late Roman and Scholastic commentary on this concept was reconciling minima naturalia with the general Aristotelian principle of infinite divisibility. Commentators like John Philoponus and Thomas Aquinas reconciled these aspects of Aristotle's thought by distinguishing between mathematical and "natural" divisibility. With few exceptions, much of the curriculum in the universities of Europe was based on such Aristotelianism for most of the Middle Ages.^[59]

In

Atomist renaissance

17th century

In the 17th century, a renewed interest arose in

, as well as other notable figures.

Northumberland circle

One of the first groups of atomists in England was a cadre of amateur scientists known as the Northumberland circle, led by

. A number of different atomistic theories were blossoming in France at this time, as well (Clericuzio 2000).

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was an advocate of atomism in his 1612 Discourse on Floating Bodies (Redondi 1969). In The Assayer, Galileo offered a more complete physical system based on a corpuscular theory of matter, in which all phenomena—with the exception of sound—are produced by "matter in motion".

Atomism was associated by its leading proponents with the idea that some of the apparent properties of objects are artifacts of the perceiving mind, that is, "secondary" qualities as distinguished from "primary" qualities.

either, it was a more promising framework in which to develop an explanation because motion was conserved in ancient atomism (unlike Aristotelian physics).

of Descartes, which allowed for an independent realm of existence for thought, soul, and most importantly, God.

partly in response to Descartes; he particularly opposed Descartes' reductionist view that only purely mechanical explanations of physics are valid, as well as the application of geometry to the whole of physics (Clericuzio 2000).

Johann Chrysostom Magnenus (c. 1590 – c. 1679) published his Democritus reviviscens in 1646. Magnenus was the first to arrive at a scientific estimate of the size of an "atom" (i.e. of what would today be called a molecule). Measuring how much incense had to be burned before it could be smelled everywhere in a large church, he calculated the number of molecules in a grain of incense to be of the order 10¹⁸, only about one order of magnitude below the actual figure.^[63]

Corpuscularianism is similar to atomism, except that where atoms were supposed to be indivisible, corpuscles could in principle be divided. In this manner, for example, it was theorized that mercury could penetrate into metals and modify their inner structure, a step on the way towards transmutative production of gold. Corpuscularianism was associated by its leading proponents with the idea that some of the properties that objects appear to have are artifacts of the perceiving mind: 'secondary' qualities as distinguished from 'primary' qualities.^[64] Not all corpuscularianism made use of the primary-secondary quality distinction, however. An influential tradition in medieval and early modern alchemy argued that chemical analysis revealed the existence of robust corpuscles that retained their identity in chemical compounds (to use the modern term). William R. Newman has dubbed this approach to matter theory "chymical atomism," and has argued for its significance to both the mechanical philosophy and to the chemical atomism that emerged in the early 19th century.^[65][66]

Corpuscularianism stayed a dominant theory over the next several hundred years and retained its links with

Mikhail Lomonosov

In his 1744 paper Meditations on the Cause of Heat and Cold, Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov specifically defined corpuscles as composite particles: "An element is part of a body which is not composed of any other smaller body ... A corpuscle is a collection of elements which constitute one small mass.."^[70] In a later study (1748), he uses the term "atom" instead of "element", and "particula" (particle) or "molecule" instead of "corpuscle."

By the late 18th century, the useful practices of engineering and technology began to influence philosophical explanations of the composition of matter. Those who speculated on the ultimate nature of matter began to verify their "thought experiments" with some repeatable demonstrations, when they could.

19th century

John Dalton

In 1808, English physicist John Dalton (1766–1844) assimilated the known experimental work of many people to summarize the empirical evidence on the composition of matter.^[72] He noticed that distilled water everywhere analyzed to the same elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly, other purified substances decomposed to the same elements in the same proportions by weight.

Therefore we may conclude that the ultimate particles of all homogeneous bodies are perfectly alike in weight, figure, etc. In other words, every particle of water is like every other particle of water; every particle of hydrogen is like every other particle of hydrogen, etc.

Furthermore, he concluded that there was a unique atom for each element, using

into something simpler. Thus, Dalton concluded the following.

Chemical

analysis and synthesis

go no farther than to the separation of particles one from another, and to their reunion. No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of chemical agency. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen. All the changes we can produce, consist in separating particles that are in a state of cohesion or combination, and joining those that were previously at a distance.

And then he proceeded to give a list of relative weights in the compositions of several common compounds, summarizing:^[73]

1st. That water is a binary compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and the relative weights of the two elementary atoms are as 1:7, nearly;

2nd. That ammonia is a binary compound of hydrogen and azote nitrogen, and the relative weights of the two atoms are as 1:5, nearly...

Dalton concluded that the fixed proportions of elements by weight suggested that the atoms of one element combined with only a limited number of atoms of the other elements to form the substances that he listed.

Dalton's

.

20th century

Experimental verification

in 1926 "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter". The direction of the force of atomic bombardment is constantly changing, and at different times the particle is hit more on one side than another, leading to the seemingly random nature of the motion.

See also

• Eliminative materialism
• First principle
• History of chemistry
• Mereological nihilism
• Montonen–Olive duality#Philosophical implications
• Ontological pluralism
• Physicalism
• Prima materia
• Process philosophy

References

• Brock, W.H., ed. (1967). The Atomic Debates. Leicester University Press.
• Clericuzio, Antonio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles; a study of atomism and chemistry in the seventeenth century. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.
• Cornford, Francis MacDonald. Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.
• ISBN 0-691-02396-4
• Firth, Raymond. Religion: A Humanist Interpretation. Routledge, 1996.
  ISBN 0-415-12897-8
  .
• Galilei, G. (1957) [1623]. "The Assayer". In Drake, S. (ed.). Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (PDF). Doubleday.
• Gangopadhyaya, Mrinalkanti. Indian Atomism: history and sources. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981.
  ISBN 0-391-02177-X
• Gardet, L. "djuz'" in Encyclopaedia of Islam CD-ROM Edition, v. 1.1. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
• Gillispie, C. C. (1960). The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas. Princeton University Press.
• Gregory, Joshua C. A Short History of Atomism. London: A. and C. Black, Ltd, 1981.
• Kargon, Robert Hugh. Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
• ISBN 978-0-521-09456-6
  .
• Lloyd, Geoffrey (1970). Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. London; New York:
  ISBN 978-0-393-00583-7
  .
• Lloyd, Geoffrey (1973). Greek Science After Aristotle. New York: W. W. Norton, .
  ISBN 0-393-00780-4
• Marmura, Michael E. "Causation in Islamic Thought." Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973–74
• McEvilley, Thomas (2002).
  ISBN 1-58115-203-5
  .
• Melsen, Andrew G. van (2004) [First published 1952]. From Atomos to Atom: The History of the Concept Atom. Translated by Henry J. Koren. Dover Publications.
  ISBN 0-486-49584-1
  .
• Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli; Moore, Charles (1957). A Source Book in Indian Philosophy. Princeton University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-691-01958-1
  .
• Redondi, Pietro. Galileo Heretic. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
  ISBN 0-691-02426-X
• Riepe, Dale (1964). The Naturalistic Tradition of Indian Thought (2nd ed.). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

External links

Look up atomism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Atomism: Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Atomism in the Seventeenth Century
• Jonathan Schaffer, "Is There a Fundamental Level?" Nous 37 (2003): 498–517. By a philosopher who opposes atomism
• Article on traditional Greek atomism
• Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy