PHIL 203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Atomism, Eleatics, Cultural Relativism
3 May 2018
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History of Ancient Philosophy
9.14.17 Lecture Notes – the Atomists, Pythagoras
The Atomists
- Side note: Eleatic philosophers: Parmenides, Zeno
- Leucippus (starts the theory)
- Democritus (fully develops the theory)
o Did’t like Aaagoras’s ies
o P5: Causal explanation
▪ Event #1 leads to Event #2
▪ Thinking in terms of the obejcts involved in the event and the causal
powers (or disposition)
▪ Have we seen causal explanations prior to Democritus?
o P10-11: elements are the full and the empty (what-is and what-is-not, language
seen in Parmenides)
▪ Differs from what Parmenides says – the bit in the parentheses of P10
▪ Parmenides said that what-is-not cannot be conceived of because it
does’t eist
▪ Democritus says that what-is-not is still conceivable and that it enjoys the
same kind of existence as the what-is
▪ Three main properties of what-is: contour, contact, rotation
• Contour – figure, shape (A differs from N)
• Contact – order (AN differs from NA)
• Rotation – orientation (I differs from H)
▪ Qualitative properties – intrinsic nature of something; quantitative
properties – the measurable magnitudes of properties
▪ The three main properties are quantitative – used to explain the
qualitative properties (such as later when he talks about taste and sound)
o P12: atoms retain their independent existence, but they interact with one
another in different ways
▪ Explains the way we perceive things through this reasoning
o P14: Leucippus wanted to give an account of the world that was consistent with
our experiences and also wanted to include coming into being, perishing,
motion, and plurality
▪ Remember that Parmenides gets rid of motion, coming into being,
plurality
▪ Believes that plurality is necessary to account for the different things –
explains these things with atoms
o P17: Democritus believes that there is a void or vacuum, because space is
necessary for motion of atoms
▪ Descartes later believes that there is no empty space between the atoms
– but that view makes change and motion among the atoms very difficult
o P18: you cannot deny division and plurality, thus you cannot deny division and
plurality at the fundamental level
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Document Summary
Very difficult to say anything about because succeeding generations attributed things to him that he may not have said/wrote: kind of like a mythic figure, religious rites attributed to him, mystery cult that had oral traditions. Trans-migration of souls, reincarnation can be reasonably attributed to pythagoras. P18: empedocles also talks about the cosmic cycle. Seeing both sides of an argument to gain a well-rounded understanding of something. First philosophers to take a genuine and sustained interested in moral philosophy: turn attention away from metaphysics to moral and ethical philosophy, develops rhetorical skills to make arguments about those topics. Usually hired by men who want a lot of attention and to be great. Philosophies coming out of the sophists are born of the competition. Can be thought of, overall, as a philosophical movement towards certain topics, towards. Lot of rivalries among the sophists money, and certain methods of doing philosophy. Sophist comes from the greek word sophia, which means wisdom.
