Philosophy and Science
Democritus followed in the tradition of Leucippus, who seems to have come from Miletus, and he carried on the scientific rationalist philosophy associated with that city. They were both strict determinists and thorough materialists, believing everything to be the result of natural laws. Unlike Aristotle or Plato, the atomists attempted to explain the world without reasoning to purpose, prime mover, or final cause. For the atomists questions should be answered with a mechanistic explanation ("What earlier circumstances caused this event?"), while their opponents search for explanations which, in addition to the material and mechanistic, also included the formal and teleological ("What purpose did this event serve?"). Modern science has focused on mechanistic questions, which have led to scientific knowledge, especially in physics, while teleological questions can be useful in biology, in adaptationist reasoning at providing proximate explanations, though the deeper evolutionary explanations are often held to be thoroughly mechanistic. The atomists looked exclusively for mechanistic questions, and only admitted mechanistic answers. Their successors until the Renaissance became occupied with the teleological question, which arguably hindered progress.
Read more about this topic: Democritus
Famous quotes containing the words philosophy and/or science:
“Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)