Why study philosophy - Atomism
Philosophy is misunderstood a lot these days. People view it as this soft, social study which is just a bunch of nerds who argue about unimportant things. No, they instead thing the sciences are where the smart people go, and the sciences are far more important. Well, what they don’t realize is that all the sciences started out as philosophy.
Philo (love) Sophia (wisdom) is the study of the world. It is the practice of someone asking a question which there is no real answer to and reasoning it down to an answer. Everything started here, all the sciences. Why? Because for the longest time there was no reliable way to test scientific claims. Every scientist knows that you must come up with a hypothesis, then test it and then present what evidence you find. Well philosophy was where this started when the tests were basic and not conclusive. Let me explain to you an ancient philosophy that took over 2000 years to test.
One of the most interesting periods of ancient Greek philosophy is ancient Greek atomism. This is the theory that everything in the natural world is made up by tiny indivisible parts (Atomos – indivisible). This was a theory which was arrived at by reasoning, but unable to be tested for thousands of years. Once it was tested, it was found to be largely true.
The first two known proponents of this philosophy were Leucippus and Democritus. Leucippus being a teacher for whom not much is known and Democritus the one who consolidated all the teachings in writing. It is reported that Democritus made the argument that you would not be able to split a piece of matter infinitely. That you’d get it down to an indivisible body, an atom. He said they were to be intrinsically unchangeable; they could combine into different clusters within the void and give rise to the different bodies we see.
They even said that when atoms differed in shape or had barbs and hooks on their surfaces to bond with different atoms and make different physical objects. Also theorizing that the amount of space between the atoms which bonded constituted the form in which is took in the real world, whether the texture was soft or firm, malleable or hard. In our vocabulary we would say if matter were solid, liquid or gas.
Democritus did descend this philosophy down into a reductionist argument, where he argued that everything was just atoms and void, that everything atoms made up did not really exist, that it was only a temporary amalgamation of atoms in an otherwise empty void. But this is beside the point. He argued that atoms existed, the only evidence being his reasoned argument of indivisibility.
In wasn’t until 1808 when this theory was once again proposed and 1827 when it was able to tested with a microscope and found to be true. Now, there were some things which the Greeks didn’t know or couldn’t know, which were only discovered after the first discovery of an atom and all the subsequent testing and theories were done. From the first discovery came the periodic table of elements, Brownian motion, right down to the atomic bomb.
It is wild to me that this was purely arrived at by arguing that you could not divide matter for infinity. That it had to stop somewhere. In the 21st century we wouldn’t call people who study atoms or even the structure of the universe philosophers, we would now call them physicists or chemists, but these disciplines come from philosophy and share the same practices.
When you are a scientist, you must have a hypothesis about something in the world, then you must test if to see if it is true, you then reason based on your evidence and results towards the conclusion. This is philosophy, with a different a name and more advanced tests!
People must study philosophy because it is the root of all scientific inquiry. It gives them the skills to reason and argue properly in whichever field they’re in. Things are only called philosophy until there is an adequate test to test them. I am sure we are still advancing enough to test the impossible theories which still exist.
