woensdag 23 mei 2018

Ancient Atomism

Intuitively, in immanent concrete nature continuity always trumps discreteness since natural particles are extended and extension is paradigmatically continuous. Concrete yet extensionless natural particles seem utterly inconceivable. So ancient atomism is cognitively incoherent. Here ancient atomism is understood as the claim that nature is fundamentally discrete or that nature is discretely grounded. By saying that ancient atomism is cognitively incoherent I mean to say that it is cognitively incoherent from the ancient perspective. For ancient metaphysical thought was predominantly if not solely based on reasonable intuitions.

So on ancient atomism the world is ultimately not just continuous but hypercontinuous. Why? Well, because each atom is extended and thus in and on itself a continuous manifold. But then on ancient atomism the world is ultimately grounded in overwhelmingly many continuous manifolds. From this it follows that modern physics can in fact be seen as a succesful attempt to drive back or undo the radical continuity of ancient atomism. For modern physics takes it that the world is ultimately grounded in just a few continuous fields.

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