Atomism: Democritus And Epicurus

Democracy means a government ruled by the people. Athens were not a democracy because they only allowed 12% of citizen men to vote nobody else could unless they were citizen men. (Doc C) In a true democracy people would have equal say, but the athens did not let women vote or people that weren’t citizens. In ancient athens people couldn’t express their thoughts, if a majority of others disagreed with the idea they could banish the person.

12. Briefly define the following: Matter is anything that takes up space. Element is any substance that can’t be broken down into substances with different properties. Atom is the smallest part of an element that displays the properties of the element.

Aristophanes wrote The Acharnians at a time where the world he saw around him was changing. Athens had been at war for six years with no end in sight, the leader who started the war has been killed by a plague, and just three years prior Athens almost voted to kill off one of its allies for trying to leave the Delian League. He was seeing a whole new side of Athens. A side in which the concept of an independent polis has been lost and Athens is at war with its former allies. These are the things that inspire Aristophanes’ Greek comedy to be born. He uses the theater to address the questions he has about what is

What is democracy? Historians have, for a long time, kept this question in mind as they studied the methods and laws of the Ancient Athenians. After studying the given evidence it can be determined that Ancient Athens was not truly democratic.

Naturalists hold onto the idea that there is No Prime Mover, leaving theists to beg the question, what caused the first “spark?” The theory of cause and effect is clearly definitive and thus can either be true or false. And if there is no first cause, then this theory does not hold up creating internal logical inconsistency.

He stated that this was a mysterious force but never continued his research on it. Then in 460 B.C. there was a philosopher named Democritus. Democritus and his mentor Leocippus posed the question that if he broke bread into multiple pieces how many would breaks would it take until there was no more bread. He then was able to make a few theories being all matter was created of atoms and atoms are solid but not invisible. However, there was a man named Aristotle and many other philosophers who disagreed with Democritus and said matter was composed of four main elements. Earth, fire, air, and water. For example, a liquid was made of water and a stone was made of rock. Therefore, Democritus’s theory “ was rejected by Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers of Ancient Greece; and the atomic theory was ignored for nearly 2,000 years.”(

The book written by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, contains two controversial debates between distinguished speakers of Athens. The two corresponding sides produce convincing arguments which can be taken as if produced as an honest opinion or out of self-interest. The two debates must be analyzed separately in order to conclude which one and which side was speaking out of honest opinion or self-interest, as well as which speakers are similar to each other in their approach to the situation.

In Aristotle's Politics, he focuses much on the regimes of an oligarchy and of a democracy. Democracies exists when the free and poor, being a majority, have authority to rule, and have an equal share in the city. Oligarchies exists when the few wealthy and better born have authority and grant benefits in proportion to a person's wealth (1280a:10-30;1290a:5-10).

Aristotle’s understanding of the four causes begins with the assumption that is present in all Greek philosophy, the notion of pre-existing matter. He observed the world around him and noticed that it was in a state of constant motion, a movement from potentiality to

     Kekule and Couper’s theory was not all without fault; it is suprising that they did not recognize atoms as three-dimensional objects if they were to be understood as true particles of matter in space. It was not until 1875 when van’t Hoff and LeBel proposed their hypothesis of compounds and atoms taking up space. Their hypothesis went as follows: Four bonds of carbon were located at equal angles to each other in space, this would be a rectangular tetrahedron. Immense amounts of proof have been supplied to support this theory, but is not universally accepted. It is believed today that this hypothesis is pure nonsense, proving that van’t Hoff and LeBel were misdirected. It goes to show science is not

     The existence of motion to the existence of a first mover as the cause of movement, was argued by Aristotle. This first mover he called God. The reason for this was that nothing caused God to move yet God was responsible for the motion of all other things. Thisargument is based on presumptions in other cosmological arguments. The first was that something could not cause itself, second something cannot come from nothing, last there could not possibly be an infinite amount of cause and effects.

The theory of the Four Causes refers to an influential Aristotelian principle whereby the causes of movement and/or change are categorized allowing us to have knowledge of our existence and everything around us. Aristotle wrote that "we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its ‘why’, that is to say, its cause." He provided an account of the operation of various individual substances in the universe. Distinctions were made between things of two sorts: those that are contingent on something else’s movement and those that necessary in their own movement. Aristotle not only suggested a proper description of these but also attempted to answer particular questions such as ‘Why does this event happen?’ and ‘Why is this object as

Aristotle defined nature “as an internal origin of change or stability”1. Natural substances are things such as animals, plants and inanimate matter like earth, water, fire and air. Each natural substance according to Aristotle has its own nature, which is what gives rise to its natural behaviour/characteristic. The nature of a natural substance is its inner principle/source of change.2

On the other hand, we cannot know whether Olber’s paradox was due to other unexplained phenomena of physics and must therefore require the development of knew knowledge to disprove it. The knowledge shown to be wrong by Olber however was

Act and potency and their distinction are an important and fundamental theory in philosophy. It helps approach questions in metaphysics concerning substance, essence, and causation. In this essay, I will be using this theory of act and potency to show how the four causes and the theory relate to each other. Thus, the four causes: formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause are related to each other and can be explained through the theory and concepts of act and potency.