Tobias wrote:
I'd like to think about the idea of the atom and where it came from. I am not suggesting to delve into the atom from the persepctive of natural science. The natural sciences have greatly advanced our understanding of the elemental particles that make up the physical universe, yet I am sure many more discoveries will follow. What I like to do is examine the idea of an elemental particle, a particle that is itself individable (atomos) and fulfills the role of the building block of the universe.

As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there are, and in Europe perhaps no one in the learned world is now so unscholarly as to attach serious significance to it for convenient household use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression) thanks chiefly to the Dalmatian Boscovich and the Pole Copernicus have been the greatest and most successful opponents of visual evidence so far. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last part of the earth that "stood fast" - the belief in substance," in "matter," in the earth-residuum and particle-atom; it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has been gained on earth so far.

One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war unto death, against the "atomistic need" which still leads a dangerous afterlife in places where no one suspects it, just like the more celebrated "metaphysical need": one must also, first of all, give the finishing stroke to that other and more calamitous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the soul atomism. Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses - as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on "the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity," and ''soul as social structure of the drives and affects want henceforth to have citizens' rights in science. When the new psychologist puts an end to the superstitions which have so far flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he practically exiles himself into a new desert and a new suspicion - it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he also concerns himself to invention - and - who knows? - perhaps to discovery.

Tobias wrote:
I wonder though if the self is not the implicit model on which they based metaphysical outlook.

Tobias wrote:
Ahh thanks for the reactions. Hmm, I know the concept of atom was a reaction to the Eleans. But that just replaces the question. The Eleans posited reality as a unity, indivisible, unchangeable, always the same. all change was mere illusion. What can have triggered such an idea? I know they never talked about the self, let alone the self as underpinning their idea of the cosmos. I wonder though if the self is not the implicit model on which they based metaphysical outlook. There is never anything in reality that does not change, everything I see gives me the idea of a jumbled collection of things. Sure there are relations, but nothing 'indivisible', unchangeable etc. The only constant im the flux is 'me'. I am the unifier of this change of perception without me needing to be unified.

It took Descartes, Kant etc. to articulate this 'I' while inconspicuous in Greek times. In fact the subject is so absent in Greek philosophy that it becomes puzzling to modern eyes. Yet I wonder if it is not essentially self knowledge too, albeit implicitly onto which they built their categories, categories which have subsequently been the blue print for the rest of Western philosophy.

Jehu wrote:
The Eleans were what might today be categorized as ‘absolute or objective idealists’. For them, that which is real, and which underlies the appearance of things, does not reside within the things themselves – as the atomists believed, but the other way around. That is to say, that things, given that they partake of only a relative (apparent) existence reside within the one absolute, independent and immutable entity. Things then may be likened to a virtual continuum of ideas residing with in a universal mind, and while its contents (all relative entities) are subject to perpetual change, the receptacle itself (the Absolute entity) is forever immutable.

The real (absolute/mind) and the apparent (relative/thought) abide together in an interdependent and complementary relationship, the result of which is neither real nor not real, nor both nor neither.