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On the coast of the Aegean Sea, the philosopher’s Leucippus and Democritus pondered about the structure of matter, Socrates disputed about the basic difficulties in our modes of expression and Plato taught that the Idea, the form, was the truly fundamental pattern behind the phenomena. ... The philosophy of materialism, developed by Leucippus and Democritus, has been the subject of many discussions since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and in the form of dialectical materialism has been one of the moving forces in the political changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ... But in spite of the tremendous success that the concept of the atom has achieved in modern science, Plato was very much nearer to the truth about the structure of matter than Leucippus or Democritus.
Leucippus and Democritus, the founders of atomism, tried to avoid the difficulty of the dilemma of the “one” and the “many”, by assuming the atom to be eternal and indestructible, in other words the only thing really existing. ... ”
When Plato took up the problems raised by Democritus, he liked the idea of smallest units of matter, but took exception to the philosophy that atoms are the foundation of all existence. Plato’s atoms were not material but regular solids of mathematics. ... Plato regarded them as composed from the triangles forming their surfaces; therefore by exchanging triangles, these smallest particles could be commuted into each other. In this way Plato was able to avoid the problem of the indefinite divisibility of matter. This whole description fits into the central ideas of Plato’s idealist philosophy.
Approximate Word count = 1321
Approximate Pages = 5.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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