Two Philosophical Questions

ATOMIST: Apparently Democritus and Leucippus founded a group around the ideas they offered about the world. We were not the first to ask questions about reality, but I think we were the first to do so in a way that attempted to look at the nature of reality directly rather than through some mystical force such as had been suggested by Anaxagoras. Whenever he could not explain something in concrete terms, he turned to the gods as the source of reality. This was not a useful system. When we did look at reality, though, we determined that it was not as solid as it appeared and was made up of smaller units we called atoms, the ultimate property, indivisible, ubiquitous.

Different ones of us took different views of how to explain this underlying reality. Leucippus, along with Democritus, was the leader of the group of philosophers who became known as "the atomists." They saw the world as composed of material bodies themselves composed of groups of "atoms," meaning something indivisible, something that cannot be divided into a smaller component. Leucippus explained how the indivisible atoms could come together to form the world we see around us--the atoms move in the void, collide, and interlock to form larger

. . .
reality can be perceived at all, for to assume that would be to make an assumption that what we observe is not real. All we can really know is that what we observe is real. I suppose this does not mean that it is, but for all practical purposes we accept it as being real and base our actions accordingly. To doubt its reality is to leave us with no reality at all, for if we cannot observe it, we have no criteria at all for judging it. The only criterion we have now is that we can observe it. The hidden things of the world must remain hidden, for we can never have knowledge of them because we have no standards by which to judge our knowledge of them or their reality. We could only evaluate them through rational means such as logic or analogy, and there is no evidence that such an approach is more than an exercise in logic rather than a means to reach a valid conclusion. We are Skeptics precisely because we cannot accept dogma or the arguments of dogmatists and seek not full knowledge but peace of mind. ARISTOTLE: I was originally one of Plato's students, but I came to disagree with what I call the "other-worldliness" of my teacher. For Plato there were two worlds, the world perceived by the senses, and the world of the F
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
SEXTUS EMPIRICUS, COMMENTS Philosophers, Final Cause, Empedocles Anaxagoras, Instead Epicurus, Anaxagoras Lucretius, Classical Mind, Leucippus Democritus, Neo-Platonism Plato, Plato Ultimate, nature reality, history philosophy, empty space, epistemology based, mind york, mind york harcourt, learn learn, lucretius stated, physical world, york harcourt brace, medieval mind, knowledge peace mind, reality unknowable, brace jovanovich 1970, harcourt brace jovanovich,
Approximate Word count = 4146
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Two Philosophical Questions