I read Lucretius as a sophomore in college and he simply blew me away. This article has a nice summary of items contemplated in "De Rerum Natura", but there's a lot more, including things like the theory of evolution by natural selection, the contest of religion and science, and lots more. Every page of it amazed me. It is not any exaggeration to say that you could plucked Lucretius out of the 1st century BC and dropped him in late Victorian or Edwardian England, and he'd still be intellectually AND scientifically at home. It's jaw-dropping. I had to stand up in class and say, "Hey, hold up, wait a second! You are kidding me!" The thing is, none of these ideas even belonged to Lucretius. He had gone to Greece, learned Epicurean philosophy, returned home, and then written "De Rerum Natura" in Latin as a summary of it all for the benefit of his patron who could not read Greek.
How is it possible that these ancient men, using purely their minds, without the benefits even of algebra, much less any scientific instrument or apparatus of note, arrive in all these places that took 2000 years of Herculean effort by a wide concert of Western minds? This was not "getting lucky", this was not "a curious flash in the pan" -- they had some very powerful way of doing "natural philosophy" that was very different from the turns that Western philosophy and science would take. And these pre-Socratics were clearly on to something. Something big. It is really beyond dispute, Lucretius laid it all out, it's a staggering achievement.
What they were doing is a process known as "ontological reasoning". That is the effort to understand things through breaking things down into separate substances and then understanding the properties of these substances, their relationships and the necessary consequences that then fall out. A well-known relic of this thought here, and the one that Western philosophy would adopt for centuries, is Aristotle's conclusion that all the base substances composing the world were Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Democritus and Lucretius had gone further (and more powerfully) by understanding the world in terms of the Atom and the Void, and then analyzed the world along these terms.
The methods of both Plato and Aristotle offer a different way of doing philosophy that is centered around a "subject vs. object" duality investigated by Reason, and this seems to offer a more sure epistemology, or "way of knowing what you know", than ontological reasoning. For, how do you know that you've decided on the "correct" set of base substances or categories? Isn't there an uncomfortable sense of arbitrariness about these choices? Well, yes -- but as we've discovered, and I hope you realize, the rational approach of post-Socratics very much did not escape these problems. But, in the interim, the ontological approach languished in ill-repute as an unserious way of doing philosophy.
Well, it isn't. Hello, Lucretius. He will disabuse you of these false notions, and hopefully re-kindle the fires that lit the amazingly successful trails of the pre-Socratics.
There's a third way. Aristotle couldn't wrap his head around it, so he dismissed the possibility when he said, "Nature abhors a vacuum." Now that is a profoundly dumb thing to say, so much so that it's uncharacteristic of Aristotle's genius. The correct form of this is: "Aristotle abhors a vacuum" -- but the weight of his genius transmuted the sloppy thought to the status of wisdom, and this catastrophe echoed across millenia.
The Void, or "space", is a substance. It is akin to the weird problem of the concept of "zero", which Aristotle may have also abhorred, because it seems like we're talking about nothingness in both cases. But we're not, are we? Zero turns out to be an essential, if weird, number. In the same way the Void, the Aether, or "space" is an essential substance. Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius give it full ontological status as an essential substance that make the world possible, and also, once removed, make the world impossible. You can have a coordinate system inside of empty space, can you not? I mean, it has locations, it has geometric properties. So, it cannot be "nothing". You cannot have locations within "nothing", can you?
So, space never was "nothing". It's one of the basic, essential substances that compose the world. It a thing that exists, it's an object of reality. And, if it has geometric properties, might it have other properties? Yes, I submit that it does. All such cogitations were disallowed by Aristotle, and this was a huge mistake. When Lucretius says things are "Atoms and Void", he really does mean "Atoms AND Void", a spatiomaterial whole composed of TWO substances. Matter AND space. Together, contributing to a whole. Aristotle could only perceive Objects and Nothingness. A false dualism.
Same. The very idea of 'atoms' is immediately suspect. They were supposed to be indivisible units, quantums of matter. And then they found those where made of smaller things yet. Turtles and Epicycles all the way down.
You're going to enjoy where I'm going with this. It's not one or the other which has been the historical picture: waves OR particles. Nor is it one entity with both properties at the same time which is the conventional wisdom, today. Instead, it's waves AND particles, two separate phenomena that work together. It'll take a while, but we'll be getting there.
I read Lucretius as a sophomore in college and he simply blew me away. This article has a nice summary of items contemplated in "De Rerum Natura", but there's a lot more, including things like the theory of evolution by natural selection, the contest of religion and science, and lots more. Every page of it amazed me. It is not any exaggeration to say that you could plucked Lucretius out of the 1st century BC and dropped him in late Victorian or Edwardian England, and he'd still be intellectually AND scientifically at home. It's jaw-dropping. I had to stand up in class and say, "Hey, hold up, wait a second! You are kidding me!" The thing is, none of these ideas even belonged to Lucretius. He had gone to Greece, learned Epicurean philosophy, returned home, and then written "De Rerum Natura" in Latin as a summary of it all for the benefit of his patron who could not read Greek.
How is it possible that these ancient men, using purely their minds, without the benefits even of algebra, much less any scientific instrument or apparatus of note, arrive in all these places that took 2000 years of Herculean effort by a wide concert of Western minds? This was not "getting lucky", this was not "a curious flash in the pan" -- they had some very powerful way of doing "natural philosophy" that was very different from the turns that Western philosophy and science would take. And these pre-Socratics were clearly on to something. Something big. It is really beyond dispute, Lucretius laid it all out, it's a staggering achievement.
What they were doing is a process known as "ontological reasoning". That is the effort to understand things through breaking things down into separate substances and then understanding the properties of these substances, their relationships and the necessary consequences that then fall out. A well-known relic of this thought here, and the one that Western philosophy would adopt for centuries, is Aristotle's conclusion that all the base substances composing the world were Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Democritus and Lucretius had gone further (and more powerfully) by understanding the world in terms of the Atom and the Void, and then analyzed the world along these terms.
The methods of both Plato and Aristotle offer a different way of doing philosophy that is centered around a "subject vs. object" duality investigated by Reason, and this seems to offer a more sure epistemology, or "way of knowing what you know", than ontological reasoning. For, how do you know that you've decided on the "correct" set of base substances or categories? Isn't there an uncomfortable sense of arbitrariness about these choices? Well, yes -- but as we've discovered, and I hope you realize, the rational approach of post-Socratics very much did not escape these problems. But, in the interim, the ontological approach languished in ill-repute as an unserious way of doing philosophy.
Well, it isn't. Hello, Lucretius. He will disabuse you of these false notions, and hopefully re-kindle the fires that lit the amazingly successful trails of the pre-Socratics.
Those are the only 2 ways of slicing it since forever. 1) Bumping particles 2) Universal aether. I fall into the aether camp, myself.
There's a third way. Aristotle couldn't wrap his head around it, so he dismissed the possibility when he said, "Nature abhors a vacuum." Now that is a profoundly dumb thing to say, so much so that it's uncharacteristic of Aristotle's genius. The correct form of this is: "Aristotle abhors a vacuum" -- but the weight of his genius transmuted the sloppy thought to the status of wisdom, and this catastrophe echoed across millenia.
The Void, or "space", is a substance. It is akin to the weird problem of the concept of "zero", which Aristotle may have also abhorred, because it seems like we're talking about nothingness in both cases. But we're not, are we? Zero turns out to be an essential, if weird, number. In the same way the Void, the Aether, or "space" is an essential substance. Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius give it full ontological status as an essential substance that make the world possible, and also, once removed, make the world impossible. You can have a coordinate system inside of empty space, can you not? I mean, it has locations, it has geometric properties. So, it cannot be "nothing". You cannot have locations within "nothing", can you?
So, space never was "nothing". It's one of the basic, essential substances that compose the world. It a thing that exists, it's an object of reality. And, if it has geometric properties, might it have other properties? Yes, I submit that it does. All such cogitations were disallowed by Aristotle, and this was a huge mistake. When Lucretius says things are "Atoms and Void", he really does mean "Atoms AND Void", a spatiomaterial whole composed of TWO substances. Matter AND space. Together, contributing to a whole. Aristotle could only perceive Objects and Nothingness. A false dualism.
Same. The very idea of 'atoms' is immediately suspect. They were supposed to be indivisible units, quantums of matter. And then they found those where made of smaller things yet. Turtles and Epicycles all the way down.
You're going to enjoy where I'm going with this. It's not one or the other which has been the historical picture: waves OR particles. Nor is it one entity with both properties at the same time which is the conventional wisdom, today. Instead, it's waves AND particles, two separate phenomena that work together. It'll take a while, but we'll be getting there.
This is an excellent piece on atomism as well. It covers similar ground: https://www.thecollector.com/ancient-greeks-discover-atoms-atomism/