Discuss the History Of Materialism

Classical Period

Materialism has been a theme in European speculative thought from the earliest periods for which there is any record.

Ionian philosophers in the tradition of Thales (sixth century BCE) attempted to account for the origin and present state of the world by appeal to changes in the state of a fundamental underlying substance (the arche ), which in most cases was held to be of a physical nature. Parmenides of Elea (fifth century BCE) vigorously defended a thoroughgoing monism, maintaining that the world is One, unchanging, eternal, homogeneous, indivisible, indestructible, and without any interior void.

These two threads of thought are combined in the true materialism of Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, who flourished at Abdera in the fifth century BCE. Between them they worked out the first clear conception of matter, the first clear restrictions on the kinds of natural interactions in which material particles could participate, and the first clear program of explanation by appeal to these material interactions alone. The “Great Diakosmos,” a lost work written by one or the other (or both), expounded their position. Their basic idea was that the fundamental stuff was of just one kind (matter) and that the fundamental entities were material atoms that we….

Insofar as it can be reconstructed, their doctrine embraced the following theses:

1. Nothing exists but atoms and empty space.
2. Nothing happens by chance (for no reason at all); everything occurs for a reason and of necessity. This necessity is natural and mechanical; it excludes teleological necessitation.
3. Nothing can arise out of nothing; nothing that is can be destroyed. All novelties are merely new combinations or separations of atoms.