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ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
EMPEDOCES, DEMOCRITUS
LECTURE
PROFESSOR JULIE YOO
Reactions to Parmenides’s Monism
Comparison Chart
Complication About Change
Empedocles
Democritus
The Atoms: The Basic Constituents of Objects and Features
Atomism and Reduction
Mechanism v Teleology
Lecture on the Presocratics: Empedocles and Democritus
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REACTIONS TO PARMENIDES’S MONISM
Comparison Chart
Parmenides’s monism sparked a great deal of dissent. The philosophical works of Empedocles
and the Atomists, such as Democritus, are important reactions against monism. For Parmenides,
(1) – (5) are only appearances that we perceive through our inferior faculty of sense perception.
Reason, according to Parmenides, reveals that they are illusory. These other philosophers
attempt to give greater weight and credibility to our observations.
Parmenides
Empedocles
Democritus
SINGLE UNITY
FOUR ELEMENTS
ATOMS
VOID
DENIED
DENIED
ACCEPTED
MOTION
DENIED
ACCEPTED
ACCEPTED
GENERATION…
DENIED
DENIED
DENIED
CHANGE
DENIED
DENIED FOR ELEMENTS
ACCEPTED FOR OBJECTS
DENIED FOR ELEMENTS
ACCEPTED FOR OBJECTS
PLURALITY
DENIED
ACCEPTED
ACCEPTED
NATURE
The philosophies of Empedocles and Democritus are considered philosophies of pluralism, since
these thinkers allow for the existence of more than one thing – the four elements, in the case of
Empedocles, and “atoms,” in the case of Democritus.
Complication About Change
The views of Empedocles and Democritus on change can be a bit confusing, but once we draw a
distinction between change in the fundamental entities themselves and change in ordinary
observable objects (the macrophysical), the confusion can be cleared up. The idea is this: both
deny that there is change at the level of the fundamental entities -- the four elements, in the case
of Empedocles, and the atoms, in the case of Democritus. The reason for this denial is their
endorsement of Parmenides's requirement that in order for something to be real, it must be
unchanging. (We will see this idea resurface in the work of Plato, which follows this principle
about reality.) Empedocles and Democritus, however, accept that there is "apparent change"
when it comes to ordinary objects, as when piece of paper get crumpled or a banana goes from
unripe to ripe, and so on. They account for these kinds of macroscopic changes in terms of the
rearrangement of the elements (for Empedocles) and the rearrangement of the atoms (for
Democritus).
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EMPEDOCLES
The Four Elements
The basic nature of the world, for Empedocles, consists of the four elements – fire, water, air,
and earth. This is clearly a denial of Parmenides’s token monism. Nonetheless, Empedocles
claimed that each of the elements were as unchanging and indestructible as the Being of
Parmenides. Earth, for instance, is eternally and unchangeably earth; the same goes for water
and the others. Thus, there is something Empedocles borrows from Parmenides in characterizing
the nature of the basic constituents of nature.
Whereas Parmenides disparaged the senses as a source of knowledge about the nature of the
world, Empedocles, as well as Democritus, gave them greater credibility. He thus acknowledged
that there was change, as well as plurality, as the senses testify with clarity and immediacy. On
Empedocles’s model, we get change and plurality by moving the four elements through space in
and having them combine together or come apart according to the forces of Love and Strife.
Empedocles on Change
Where he fundamentally agrees with Parmenides is in his denial of the void as well as generation
and destruction. For Empedocles, something’s coming into being (or passing away) is a function
of the elements accruing in their mass to form a bigger and bigger object (from a acorn to an oak
tree, from a baby to an adult). This account of generation, however, is an account of apparent
generation only. There is no genuine generation, where this is understood as something coming
into being out of complete nothing. Empedocles denies that generation understood in this ex
nihilo fashion is possible. The elements are always there. Making a chair or making tree is just
a matter of assembling the pre-existing elements into the new object before us.
How change and motion and generation are possible without any empty space (void) through
which bits of the elements can travel is a bit of a mystery on Empedocles’s view. However, a
view that is more cogent in this regard is the view of the Democritus, the premier philosopher of
Atomism.
DEMOCRITUS
The Atoms: The Basic Constituents of Objects and Features
The Atomists are pluralists, like Empedocles, but they reject the four elements in favor of an
infinite number of eternally persisting atoms, which, according to the Atomists, are capable of
accounting for the four elements, and are therefore more fundamental. As the most fundamental
entities, they are not further divisible. What separates the atoms from each other is the void, and
it is through the void that atoms can travel to cohere with other atoms or depart from where they
originally were. They are the basic constituents of all things, like tables, chairs, plants, animals,
and people, not just the four elements.
Although macroscopic, middle-sized, objects such as these, vary amongst each other in what
they are and which features they have, all the atoms that constitute this plurality and variety are
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made of the same stuff. They differ only in shape, size, and relative position, and these are the
differences that account for the two kinds of plurality we see in nature: the first is the plurality
of objects, like tables, chairs, animals, and plants, on the one hand, and the second is the plurality
of features in any given object, like its texture, size, shape, and temperature.1 To give an
example, some atomists hypothesized that heat and fire come from very small and pointy atoms,
while cold and watery stuff come from large round atoms (67A14).
Atomism and Reduction
Although hypothesis of heat and cold in terms of small pointy atoms and large round atoms may
sound puerile to modern ears, the strategy is a sophisticated and forward-thinking one laid the
foundation for an immensely fruitful form scientific explanation that flourishes to this day. The
strategy is reductionism. Reductionism is the attempt to explain a certain phenomenon – a
rainbow, disease, family traits, diet and weight loss – in terms of smaller, microscopic, processes.
Disease, for instance, is understood in terms of the transmission of tiny little germs; family traits
are understood in terms of DNA, and the role of diet in weight loss is understood in terms of the
body’s metabolic processes at the cellular level. With this reductive strategy, we can get a grip
on how things occur, not just that they occur.
Mechanism v Teleology
Reductionism goes hand in hand with what philosophers call mechanism, which is at the core of
Atomism. Atomism is mechanistic in that the atoms move strictly as a function of how they are
struck by other atoms. Their motions, importantly, are not the result of a divine force, or Love
and Strife, which for Empedocles, function as the principles of motion.
This raises a question the question of how atoms got to be in motion in the first place, and the
lack of a clear answer to this question led Aristotle to criticize the Atomists of for failing to
address this question. Aristotle and Plato were both staunch critics of mechanism, favoring
instead the opposing view of teleology.
A teleological conception of the world assumes that there is cosmic purpose or a humanly
interpretable reason for nature to work as it does, and teleological explanations of a phenomenon
typically cite some desire for a certain outcome to explain why something happens. A famous
example of this is Aristotle’s explanation of why moving objects eventually slow down and
come to a stop: it is in the nature of all objects to want to be at rest, and because of this, things
like rolling marbles eventually come to a halt (on a flat surface).
There’s a funny cartoon of teleological explanations in the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes,”
where Calvin’s father offers a teleological account of why ice floats: “because it’s cold and ice
wants to get warm, so it goes to the top of liquids in order to be nearer the sun.”
1
This distinction between objects and features is a crucial one in this history of Western metaphysics. Even to this
day, we still operate with an object/property ontology.
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This is a mockery of a teleological explanation, and giving Aristotle the benefit of the doubt, he
would have found it as amusing as we do. But the comic strip captures the general idea of
teleological explanations in its explicit appeal to the “desires” and “purposes” natural objects are
said to have. A mechanistic explanation would invoke only a thing’s constituent parts and
explain how the thing behaves by citing how the parts causally interact with each other; there
would be absolutely no mention of purposes, desires, or final ends.
These days, scientists and most philosophers favor mechanism over teleology in the explanation
of all parts of nature. On the modern mechanist view, things happen strictly because there are
causal laws that govern the behavior of the objects within their scope. These laws are not
expressions of a higher will or anything intelligent. They are just a brute fact about the universe.
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