Atomism - Paper

Atomism Atomism is the final development of a school of thought called pluralism, which is an attempt to explain a very fundamental question, “What is the nature of the universe?” Monism, the opposing view of pluralism, asserts that only one being, or type of being, exists, and that the variety in our everyday experience is caused by the different states of this single all encompassing substance. Pluralism rejects this idea, and claims that the material that makes up our universe is many in nature. However, Pluralism has some problems, and Atomism does it best to avoid the mistakes that the early Pluralist made. The culmination of all the materialist’s theories since its origins comes to fruition in Atomism. Retaining the idea of plurality of the basic elements and the doctrines of a Parmindean indestructibility (nothing is created or destroyed), Atomism claims that reality is comprised of only two things; atoms and empty space. Surprisingly, there are only 4 known Atomists that history knows of; Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. Almost nothing is known of Leucippus, and from what is known it is impossible to distinguish his ideas from those of his predecessors. For Democritus, almost all of his work is fragmented cited from another person, though it is clear that his ideas differed from Epicurus and Lucretius. Lucretius, on the other hand, was not even a Greek, but a Roman poet who was so enthralled by the ideas of Epicurus that he wrote a poem about them, and to this day it is the most complete single work of an atomist. And even though he himself did not contribute a single original idea to the evolution of the theory, his translation of the theory into Latin was nevertheless instrumental in our comprehensive understanding of the discipline. From the time that Leucippus (middle of fifth century BC) to the times of Lucretius (first century BC) the atomist concepts with regards to their ideas on the physical