Epicurus Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In one of his paradoxes Zeno of Elea had argued for the indivisibility of being. For being to be divisible, its parts should either be divisible themselves, or indivisible. If indivisible, they would have no extension, but how could parts... more

In one of his paradoxes Zeno of Elea had argued for the indivisibility of being. For being to be divisible, its parts should either be divisible themselves, or indivisible. If indivisible, they would have no extension, but how could parts without extension make up an extended whole? If divisible, the same conclusions would apply to the parts as to the whole, and so ad infinitum, and being would turn out to consist of infinitely many parts, but how could infinitely many parts, however tiny, make up a finite whole? Depending on which horn of the dilemma one chooses divisible being would turn out to have no extension at all or be infinitely large. Therefore, Zeno concluded, being could not be divisible at all.
Zeno’s conclusion, so contrary to the evidence of the senses, was rejected by most subsequent philosophers, who thus had to accept one of the two horns of Zeno’s dilemma: finite of infinite divisibility.
Leucippus and Democritus, convinced by Zeno’s argument against infinite divisibility, went for the first option, and introduced a minimal material unit, the atom, which they claimed did have spatial extension, despite its being indivisible.
Aristotle, on the other hand, strongly rejected the notion of indivisible extended bodies, which caused more problems than it solved, and instead went for the other horn of Zeno’s dilemma: matter was infinitely divisible after all, but only potentially so: never would a substance be actually divided to infinity and so consist of infinitely many parts.
Afterwards, the atomist position was revived by Epicurus, who modified the theory in response to certain points of Aristotle’s criticism, without, however, touching upon the most important point: the conceptual inconsistency of indivisible extension. Accordingly, Epicurus’ reformed atomism does not seem to have made a great impression on the adversaries of atomism, who could simply repeat the ancient arguments against Democritus.
In this lecture I will provide a sketch of the ancient debate about the divisibility of matter, and discuss some of the arguments brought forward in favour of and against each position. It will be shown that, however plausible some of the arguments may seem, in the end they were too much bound up with the general theory of their proponents to convince their critics.