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In Natural Philosophy , atomism is the theory that all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, indestructible building blocks - Atom s. Or, stated in other words, that all of reality is made of indivisible basic building blocks. The word atomism unquestionably derives from the ancient Greek word ''atomos'' which can be parsed in to ''a''-''tomos'' (''not cutable'') - ''tomos'' being a form of the Greek verb ''temnein'' (''to cut'') - meaning ''that which cannot be cut into smaller pieces''. Atomists are sometimes called Later Ionian s. Martin Bernal , however, supported the argument that that the reputed founders of atomism, Leucippus and his student Democritus coined ''atomos'' from the name of the Egyptian solar deity Atum after returning from Egypt . Of importance to the philosophical concept of atomism is the historical accident that the particles that ?" Since absence of evidence does not amount to evidence of absence, experiment cannot answer this question. Thus, as regards quarks, electrons, and other fundamental Leptons are concerned, the possibility that they too are composed of smaller particles cannot be ruled out. In the mean-time, however, it is these particles (not chemical atoms) which remain the best candidates for the traditional indivisible objects, with which historical atomism has concerned itself. TRADITIONAL ATOMISM IN PHILOSOPHY Derives from the word ''atom'' is used in two distinct divisions: the atoms of physical science, and that of philosophy. Atomism is traditionally associated with the latter, where philosophers have argued that the basic building blocks of reality, and which make up absolutely anything that exists, are incredibly tiny objects that do not have physical parts, cannot be split, divided or cut, and which are either point-sized (sizeless) or they have a tiny size. Those that have a tiny size are called Democritean atoms. This was the case for the Greek theories of atomism. India n Buddhist s, such as Dharmakirti and others, also contributed to well-developed theories of atomism, and which involve momentary (instantaneous) atoms, that flash in and out of existence. The tradition of atomism leads to the position that only atoms exist, and there are no composite objects (objects with parts), which would mean that human bodies, clouds, planets, and whatnot all do not exist. This consequence of atomism was openly discussed by atomists such as Democritus, Hobbes , and perhaps even Kant (there is a debate over whether or not Kant was an atomist) among others, and it is also called Mereological Nihilism or Metaphysical Nihilism . In contemporary philosophy, atomism is not as popular as it has been in past times, because many contemporary philosophers are not willing to argue that ''only'' atoms exist, wherein there are not any things like trees, etc. Simples theory is a similar theory to atomism, but where unlike mereological nihilism, philosophers ''do'' hold that more than just atoms exist (such as cars and trees made up of the atoms). OTHER ISSUES TO DO WITH PHILOSOPHY AND ATOMISM If ''atomism'' is the idea that anything might ultimately consist of an aggregation of small units that cannot be sub-divided further, then it might be applied to even the aggregations of society or logic. Accordingly, the term ''social Atomism'' is used to denote the point of view that individuals rather than social institutions and values are the proper subject of analysis since all properties of institutions and values merely accumulate from the striving of the individual. {Link without Title} Similarly, Bertrand Russell developed ''logical Atomism'' in an attempt to identify the atoms of thought, the pieces of thought that cannot be divided into smaller pieces of thought. Besides Matter , questions have arisen about the infinite divisibility of Space and Time . In their modern, Set-theoretic description, both space and time are infinitely divisible Continua , in the sense that between any two points of space, there will always be another point of space. But some current theorists suggest that even space and time, or Spacetime , may be discrete in the Mathematical Sense . See Planck Time and Planck Length for more about these ideas. A new twist was given to the ancient of space such that its parts correspond to parts of the atom. In other words, the quantum-mechanical description of matter no longer conforms to the Cookie Cutter Paradigm . GREEK ATOMISM Is there an ultimate, indivisible unit of matter? In the late fifth century BC, Democritus and Leucippus taught that the hidden substance in all physical objects consists of different arrangements of 1) Atom s and 2) Void . Both atoms and the void were never created, and they will be never ending. Democritus became famous for this idea, but he followed closely what his teacher Leucippus taught (Lloyd 1970, 45-48). No word written by Leucippus has survived, and of the writings of Democritus we have only a few unhelpful fragments. {Link without Title} 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 we feel, see, eat, hear, smell, and taste. While we may feel hot or cold, hot and cold actually have no real existence. They are simply sensations produced in us by the different packings and scatterings of the atoms in the void that compose the object that we sense as being "hot" or "cold." The work of Democritus has survived only in secondhand reports, sometimes unreliable or conflicting. Much of the best evidence is that reported by Aristotle in his criticisms of atomism, who regarded him as an important rival in natural philosophy. {Link without Title} His ideas are also represented in the derivative works of Democritus's followers, such as Lucretius's '' On The Nature Of Things ''. These derivative works allow us to work out several segments of his theory on how the universe began its current stage. The atoms and the void are eternal. And after collisions that shatter large objects into smaller objects, the resulting dust, still composed of the same eternal atoms as the prior configurations of the universe, falls into a whirling motion that draws the dust into larger objects again to begin another cycle. Philosophers often blamed Democritus for the idea that man created gods; the gods did not create man. For example, Sextus noted, ''Some people think that we arrived at the idea of gods from the remarkable things that happen in the world. Democritus ... says that the people of ancient times were frightened by happenings in the heavens such as thunder, lightning, ..., and thought that they were caused by gods'' (Taylor 1999, p. 140). According to Democritus, the workings of the universe are entirely mechanical, driven by what he called the ''vibrations'', the velocities and impacts of the constituent atoms. He explained that things happen because of what he called '' Necessity '', the mechanistic collisions and aggregations of the atoms according to their own ''nature''. Geometry and atoms Plato (c. 427—c. 347 BC) objected to the Mechanistic purposelessness of the atomism of Democritus. He argued that atoms just crashing into other atoms could never produce the beauty and form of the world. In the ''Timaeus'', (28B - 29A) Plato insisted that the Cosmos was not eternal but was created, although its creator framed it after an eternal, unchanging model. One part of that creation were the atoms of fire, air, water, and earth. But Plato did not consider the atoms 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. The atoms 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. He postulated the geometric structure of the atoms of the four elements as summarized in the table to the right. 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 atoms 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 (Cornford 1957, 210-239; Lloyd 1970, 74-7). The rejection of atoms Sometime before 330 BC Aristotle asserted that the elements of fire, air, earth, and water were not made of atoms, but were continuous. Aristotle considered the existence of a void, which was required by atomic theories, to violate physical principles. Change took place not by the rearrangement of atoms to make new structures, but by transformation of matter from what it was in potential to a new actuality. (This theory is called Hylomorphism .) A piece of wet clay, when acted upon by a potter, takes on its potential to be an actual drinking mug. Aristotle has often been criticized for rejecting atomism, but in ancient Greece the atomic theories of Democritus and Plato remained "pure speculations, incapable of being put to any experimental test. Granted that atomism was, in the long run, to prove far more fruitful than any qualitative theory of matter, in the short run the theory that Aristotle proposed must have seemed in some respects more promising." (Lloyd 1968, 165; see also Lloyd 1970, 108-9). Atoms and ethics Epicurus (341-270) 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 (Lloyd 1973, 25-6). Few of Epicurus's writings survive and those that do reflect his interest in applying Democritus's 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. Three hundred years later, Lucretius in his epic poem '' On The Nature Of Things '' would depict Epicurus as the hero who crushed the monster Religion through educating the people in what was possible in the atoms and what was ''not'' possible in the atoms. However, Epicurus expressed a non-aggressive attitude characterized by his statement: "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." {Link without Title} The exile of atomism While Aristotelian philosophy eclipsed the importance of the atomists, their work was still preserved and exposited through commentaries on the works of Aristotle. In the 2nd century, Galen (A.D. 129-216) presented extensive discussions of the Greek atomists, especially Epicurus, in his Aristotle commentaries. According to historian of atomism Joshua Gregory , there was no serious work done with atomism from the time of Galen until Gassendi and Descartes resurrected it in the 16th 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.” However, scholars still had Aristotle’s critiques of atomism, and it seems unlikely that all ideas of atomism could have been lost in the West. In the Medieval Universities there were rare expressions of atomistic philosophy. For example, in the fourteenth century Nicholas Of Autrecourt considered that matter, space, and time were all made up of indivisible atoms, points, and instants and that all generation and corruption took place by the rearrangement of material atoms. The similarities of his ideas with those of Al-Ghazali suggest that Nicholas may have been familiar with Ghazali's work, perhaps through Averroes ' refutation of it (Marmara, 1973-74). Still, “the exile of the atom” is an appropriate description of the interim between the ancient Greeks and the revival of Western atomism in the 16th century, in view of atomism’s success elsewhere during that time. If the atom was in exile from the west, it was in India and Islam that atomistic traditions continued. INDIAN ATOMISM The Indian atomistic position, like many movements in Indian Philosophy and Mathematics, starts with an argument from Linguistics. The Vedic Etymologist and Grammarian Yaska (ca. 7th c. BC) in his Nirukta, in dealing with models for how linguistic structures get to have their meanings, takes the atomistic position that words are the "primary" carrier of meaning - i.e. words have a preferred ontological status in defining meaning. This position was to be the subject of a fierce debate in the Indian tradition from the early Christian era till the 18th century, involving different philosophers from the Nyaya , Mimamsa and Buddhist schools. In the Pratishakhya text (ca. 2nd c. BCE), the gist of the controversy was stated cryptically in the sutra form as "saMhitA pada-prakr^tiH".1 According to the atomist view, the words ('' Pada '') would be the primary elements (''prakrti'') out of which the sentence is constructed, while the holistic view considers the sentence as the primary entity, originally "given" in its context of utterance, and the words are arrived at only through analysis and abstraction. These two positions came to be called ''a-kShaNDa-pakSha'' (indivisibility or sentence-holism), a position developed later by Bhartrihari (c. 500 AD), vs. ''kShaNDa-pakSha'' (atomism), a position adopted by the Mimamsa and Nyaya schools (Note: ''kShanDa'' = fragmented; "a-kShanDa" = whole). Between the 5th – 3rd Century BC , the Atom (anu or aṇor) is mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 8, Verse 9):
The ancient “shAshvata-vAda” doctrine of eternalism, which held that elements are eternal, is also suggestive of a possible starting point for atomism (Gangopadhyaya 1981). There has been some debate among scholars as to the origin of Indian atomism; the general consensus is that the Indian and Greek versions of atomism developed independently. However, there is some doubt on this, given the similarities between Indian atomism and Greek atomism and the proximity of India to scholastic Europe, as well as the account, related by Diogenes Laertius , of Democritus "making acquaintance with the Gymnosophists in India ".Diogenes Laertius, ''Lives of the Philosophers'', ix, 35. In any event, the earliest schools of Indian atomism (in the linguistic tradition), as well as certain epistemological positions such as the materialist Uddalaka, were developed before Greek positions associated with philosophers such as Leucippus and Democritus. The atomist position had transcended language into epistemology by the time that Nyaya - Vaisesika , Buddhist and Jaina theology were developing mature philosophical positions. Will Durant wrote in ''Our Oriental Heritage'': Indian atomism in the Middle Ages was still mostly philosophical and/or religious in intent, though it was also scientific. Because the “infallible Vedas ”, the oldest Hindu texts, do not mention atoms (though they do mention elements), atomism was not orthodox in many schools of Hindu philosophy, although accommodationist interpretations or assumptions of lost text justified the use of atomism for non-orthodox schools of Hindu thought. The Buddhist and Jaina schools of atomism however, were more willing to accept the ideas of atomism. Nyaya-Vaisesika school See Also: Nyaya Vaisesika |
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