atomism - Traditional atomism in philosophy, Other issues to do with philosophy and atomism, Greek atomism, Indian atomism

A tradition dating back to the 5th-c BC, associated particularly with Democritus and Leucippus, which maintains that matter is composed ultimately of indivisible particles and that all its properties must be explained in terms of them. Classical atomism anticipated the 17th-c corpuscularian philosophy of Locke, Boyle, and Gassendi; but modern particle physics has a very different origin and approach.

In natural philosophy, atomism is the theory that all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, indestructible elements - atoms.

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. This was the case for the Greek theories of atomism. Indian Buddhists, 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 "atomism" 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.

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.

The atoms that chemists and physicists of the early 1800s thought were indivisible turned out to be composed of even smaller entities: electrons, neutrons, and protons.

How about space and time?

A new twist was given to the ancient conundrum of the divisibility of matter by the discovery of quantum mechanics. Whereas the modern atom is indeed divisible, it is actually not cuttable: there is no partition of space such that its parts correspond to parts of the atom.

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) atoms and 2) void.

The void is infinite and provides the space in which the atoms can pack or scatter differently.

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.

Philosophers often blamed Democritus for the idea that man created gods;

Geometry and atoms

Atom	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 basis of atoms according to Plato

Plato (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.

One part of that creation were the atoms of fire, air, water, and earth.

He postulated the geometric structure of the atoms of the four elements as summarized in the table to the right. 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;

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 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."

Atoms and ethics

Epicurus (341-270) studied atomism with Nausiphanes who had been a student of Democritus.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

Indian atomism

The Indian atomistic position, like many movements in Indian Philosophy and Mathematics, starts with an argument from Linguistics. kShaNDa-pakSha (atomism), a position adopted by the Mimamsa and Nyaya schools (Note: kShanDa = fragmented;

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 possibility that Pythagoras may have visited India. 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.

The atomist position had transcended language into epistemology by the time (around 100 AD) that Nyaya-Vaisesika, Buddhist and Jaina theology were developing mature philosophical positions.

Nyaya-Vaisesika school

The Nyaya-Vaisesika school developed one of the earliest forms of atomism; Like the Buddhist atomists, the Vaisesika had a pseudo-Aristotelian theory of atomism. They posited the four elemental atom types, but in Vaisesika physics atoms had 24 different possible qualities, divided between general (what we would call extensive) properties and specific (intensive) properties. In both Jaina and Vaisesika atomism, atoms first combine in pairs (dyads), and then group into trios of pairs (triads), which are the smallest visible units of matter.

Buddhist school

The Buddhist atomists had very qualitative, Aristotelian-style atomic theory. According to ancient Buddhist atomism, which probably began developing before the 4th century BC, there are four kinds of atoms, corresponding to the standard elements. Like the Hindu Jains, the Buddhists were able to integrate a theory of atomism with their theological presuppositions.

Jaina school

The most elaborate and well-preserved Indian theory of atomism comes from the philosophy of the Jaina school, dating back to at least the first century BC. Their concept of atoms was very similar to classical atomism, differing primarily in the specific properties of atoms. smooth charge) and negative (Rūksa – rough) charges that provide them the binding force.Although atoms are made of the same basic substance, they can combine based on their eternal properties to produce any of six “aggregates,” which seem to correspond with the Greek concept of “elements”: earth, water, shadow, sense objects, karmic matter, and unfit matter.

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.

Islamic atomism

Atomistic philosophies are found very early in Islam, and represent a synthesis of the Greek and Indian ideas. Like both the Greek and Indian versions, Islamic atomism was a charged topic that had the potential for conflict with the prevalent religious orthodoxy.

The most successful form of Islamic atomism was in the Asharite school of philosophy, most notably in the work of the philosopher al-Ghazali (1058-1111). In Asharite atomism, atoms are the only perpetual, material things in existence, and all else in the world is “accidental” meaning something that lasts for only an instant.

Other traditions in Islam rejected the atomism of the Asharites and expounded on many Greek texts, especially those of Aristotle.

Atomic Renaissance

Aristotle held sway in the universities of Europe for most of the Middle Ages, and even through the time of Newton Aristotelian physics was the standard, although other theories were beginning to be introduced to university curriculum by then (Kargon 1966). The experimental philosophy was gaining ground, and with the evidence weighing in against the old physics, atomism soon reappeared in new forms. The main figures in the rebirth of atomism were Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Robert Boyle, but there were many important ancillary figures as well.

One of the first groups of atomists in England was a cadre of amateur scientists known as the Northumberland circle, led by Henry Percy (1585-1632 AD), the 9th Earl of Northumberland. Although they published little of account, they helped to disseminate atomistic ideas among the burgeoning scientific culture of England, and may have been particularly influential to Francis Bacon, who became an atomist around 1605, though he later rejected some of the claims of atomism. Though they revived the classical form of atomism, this group was among the scientific avant-garde: the Northumberland circle contained nearly half of the confirmed Copernicans prior to 1610 (the year of Galileo’s The Starry Messenger). Other influential atomists of late 16th and early 17th centuries include Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes (who also changed his stance on atomism late in his career), and Thomas Hariot.

A more well-known advocate of atomism in the early 16th century was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642 AD). He first published a work based on atomism in 1612, Discourse on Floating Bodies (Redondi 1969). Galileo found some of the basic problems with Aristotelian physics through his experiments, and he utilized a theory of atomism as a partial replacement, but he was never unequivocally committed to it. Atomism could not explain the law of fall, but was consistent with his concept of inertia, since motion was conserved in ancient atomism (but not in Aristotelian physics). Galileo scholar Pietro Redondi has even suggested that the root of the church’s persecution of Galileo was his rejection of Aristotelian philosophy and championing of atomism (Redondi 1969).

Despite the success (and controversy) generated by 16th and 17th century atomists, atomism was not fully revived until Descartes and Gassendi published their new physics systems based on corpuscular (in the case of Descartes) and atomistic (in the case of Gassendi) theories. Descartes’ mechanical philosophy of corpuscularism had much in common with atomism, and may be considered in some sense another version of it. The main difference between atomism and corpuscularism was the existence of the void. Another key distinction between Descartes’ corpuscularism and classical atomism is Descartes’ concept of mind/body duality, which allowed for an independent realm of existence for thought, soul, and most importantly, God. Gassendi’s system was much closer to classical atomism, but without the atheistic undertones.

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655 AD) was a Catholic priest from France who was also an avid natural philosopher. He was particularly intrigued by the Greek atomists, so he set out to “purify” atomism from its heretical and atheistic philosophical conclusions (Dijksterhius 1969).

The final form of atomism that came to be accepted by most English scientists after Robert Boyle (1627-1692 AD) was an amalgam of the two French systems. In The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle shows some of the problems with Aristotelian physics that arise from chemistry experimentation, and offers up atomism as a possible explanation. The unifying principle that led to the acceptance of this hybrid atomism was the mechanical philosophy, which was becoming widely accepted by Western scientists. Despite the problems with atomism, it was clear by the end of the 17th century that it was a better alternative than Aristotelian physics, especially since it was compatible with the mechanical philosophy.

A different atom for each element

By the late 1700s, the useful practices of engineering and technology began to influence philosophical explanations for the composition of matter.

Roger Boscovich provided the first general mathematical theory of atomism, based on the ideas of Newton and Leibniz but transforming them so as to provide a programme for atomic physics. - Lancelot Law Whyte Essay on Atomism, 1961, p 54.

In 1808, John Dalton assimilated the known experimental work of many people to summarize the empirical evidence on the composition of matter.

Furthermore, he concluded that there was a unique atom for each element, using Lavoisier's definition of an element as a substance that could not be analyzed into something simpler.

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

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. a study of atomism and chemistry in the seventeenth century. Indian Atomism: history and sources.