The Pluralist school was a school of pre-Socratic philosophers who attempted to reconcile Parmenides' rejection of change with the apparently changing world of sense experience, it can also be said to have included which philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms. Leucippus often appears as the master to his pupil Democritus, a philosopher also touted as the originator of the atomic theory?
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Pluralist school The Pluralist school was a school of pre-Socratic philosophers who attempted to reconcile Parmenides' rejection of change with the apparently changing world of sense experience. The school consisted of Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Empedocles. It can also be said to have included the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. The Pluralists rejected the idea that the diversity of nature can be reduced to a single principle (monism). Anaxagoras posited that nature contained an innumerable number of principles, while Empedocles reduced nature to four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) which could not be reduced to one another and which would be sufficient to explain change and diversity.
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Leucippus Leucippus ( ; Greek: Λεύκιππος , "Leúkippos"; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms. Leucippus often appears as the master to his pupil Democritus, a philosopher also touted as the originator of the atomic theory. However, a brief notice in Diogenes Laertius’s life of Epicurus says that on the testimony of Epicurus, Leucippus never existed. As the philosophical heir of Democritus, Epicurus's word has some weight, and indeed a controversy over this matter raged in German scholarship for many years at the close of the 19th century. Furthermore, in his "Corpus Democriteum", Thrasyllus of Alexandria, an astrologer and writer living under the emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE), compiled a list of writings on atomism that he attributed to Democritus to the exclusion of Leucippus. The present consensus among the world's historians of philosophy is that this Leucippus is historical. The matter must remain moot unless more information is forthcoming from the record.
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Euclid (disambiguation) Euclid, Euclides, or Eucleides generally refers to the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria (3rd century BC), who wrote a work on geometry called the "Elements".
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Atomism Atomism (from Greek ἄτομον , "atomon", i.e. "uncuttable", "indivisible") is a natural philosophy that developed in several ancient traditions. The atomists theorized that nature consists of two fundamental principles: "atom" and "void". Unlike their modern scientific namesake in atomic theory, philosophical atoms come in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes, each indestructible, immutable and surrounded by a void where they collide with the others or hook together forming a cluster. Clusters of different shapes, arrangements, and positions give rise to the various macroscopic substances in the world.
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Noumenon In metaphysics, the noumenon ( , , from Greek: [εν]νοούμενον) is a posited object or event that exists without sense or perception. The term "noumenon" is generally used in contrast with or in relation to "phenomenon", which refers to anything that can be apprehended by or is an object of the senses. Modern philosophy has generally been skeptical of the possibility of knowledge independent of the senses, and Immanuel Kant gave this point of view its canonical expression: that the noumenal world may exist, but it is completely unknowable through human sensation. In Kantian philosophy, the unknowable noumenon is often linked to the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (in Kant's German, "Ding an sich"), although how to characterize the nature of the relationship is a question yet open to some controversy.
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Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen (18 May 1922 – 10 July 1982), who published as G. E. L. Owen, was a British philosopher, concerned with the history of Ancient Greek philosophy. He was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. where his undergraduate career was interrupted by five years of military service. He became the foremost authority on Aristotle in his generation, at least in the English-speaking world.
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Plato Plato ( ; Greek: Πλάτων "Plátōn", ] in Classical Attic; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition. Unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Plato's entire work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Others believe that the oldest extant manuscript dates to around AD 895, 1100 years after Plato's death. This makes it difficult to know exactly what Plato wrote.
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Xenocrates Xenocrates ( ; Greek: Ξενοκράτης ; c. 396/5314/3 BC ) of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader (scholarch) of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements. He distinguished three forms of being: the sensible, the intelligible, and a third compounded of the two, to which correspond respectively, sense, intellect and opinion. Unity and duality he considered to be gods which rule the universe, and the soul is a self-moving number. God pervades all things, and there are daemonical powers, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, which consist in conditions of the soul. He held that mathematical objects and the Platonic Ideas are identical, unlike Plato who distinguished them. In ethics, he taught that virtue produces happiness, but that external goods can minister to it and enable it to effect its purpose.
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Euclid's Elements The Elements (Ancient Greek: Στοιχεῖα "Stoicheia") is a mathematical treatise consisting of 13 books attributed to the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt c. 300 BC. It is a collection of definitions, postulates, propositions (theorems and constructions), and mathematical proofs of the propositions. The books cover plane and solid Euclidean geometry, elementary number theory, and incommensurable lines. "Elements" is the oldest extant large-scale deductive treatment of mathematics. It has proven instrumental in the development of logic and modern science, and its logical rigor was not surpassed until the 19th century.
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Meta-discussion The term meta-discussion means a discussion whose subject is a discussion. Meta-discussion explores such issues as the style of a discussion, its participants, the setting in which the discussion occurs, and the relationship of the discussion to other discussions on the same or different topics. It is one of many terms based on the inferred meaning of the "meta-" prefix. The etymology for the prefix dates back to use of "Metaphysics" as the title of the treatise by Aristotle that came after his works on physics in the traditional ordering of his books. The fundamental meaning of the prefix in Greek is simply "after." The modern, inferred meaning of a higher-order, self-referential consideration of the nature of an activity—rather than actual, first-level participation in the activity—has led to many neologisms such as meta-wiki.
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Noosphere The noosphere ( ; sometimes noösphere) is the sphere of human thought. The word derives from the Greek νοῦς (nous "mind") and σφαῖρα (sphaira "sphere"), in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere". It was introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his "Cosmogenesis". Another possibility is the first use of the term by Édouard Le Roy (1870–1954), who together with Teilhard was listening to lectures of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky at the Sorbonne. In 1936, Vernadsky accepted the idea of the noosphere in a letter to Boris Leonidovich Lichkov (though he states that the concept derives from Le Roy). Citing the work of Teilhard's biographer—Rene Cuenot—Sampson and Pitt stated that although the concept was jointly developed by all three men (Vernadsky, LeRoy, and Teilhard), Teilhard believed that he actually invented the word: "I believe, so far as one can ever tell, that the word 'noosphere' was my invention: but it was he [Le Roy] who launched it."
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Spinozism Spinozism (also spelled Spinoza-ism or Spinozaism) is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being attributes of such.
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Isaac Beeckman Isaac Beeckman (10 December 1588 – 19 May 1637) was a Dutch philosopher and scientist, who, through his studies and contact with leading natural philosophers, may have "virtually given birth to modern atomism".
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Atomic energy Atomic energy is energy carried by atoms. The term originated in 1903 when Ernest Rutherford began to speak of the possibility of "atomic energy". The term was popularized by H. G. Wells in the phrase, "splitting the atom", devised at a time prior to the discovery of the nucleus. Atomic energy may include:
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Polydeism Polydeism (from Greek "πολλοί" (" 'poloi' "), meaning 'many', and Latin "deus" meaning god) is a polytheistic form of deism encompassing the belief that the universe was the collective creation of multiple gods, each of whom created a piece of the universe or multiverse and then ceased to intervene in its evolution. This concept addresses an apparent contradiction in deism, that a monotheistic god created the universe, but now expresses no apparent interest in it, by supposing that if the universe is the construct of many gods, none of them would have an interest in the universe as a whole.
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Syncretism (Chinese philosophy) Syncretism or the Mixed School in Chinese philosophy is an eclectic school of thought that combined elements of Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, and Legalism. The Syncretist texts include the "Huainanzi", "Lüshi Chunqiu", and the "Shizi". The (c. 330 BCE) "Shizi" is the earliest of the Syncretist texts.
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Change (philosophy) Change refers to a difference in a state of affairs at different points in time. Although it is a familiar experience, an analysis of change provides subtle problems which have occupied philosophers since the Presocratics. Heraclitus is the first philosopher known to have directly raised such issues, with aphorisms such as "one cannot step into the same river twice". The Eleatics were particularly concerned with change and raised a number of problems, including Zeno's paradoxes, which caused them to go as far as insisting that change was impossible, and that reality was one and unchanging. Later philosophers would reject this conclusion, instead developing systems such as atomism in attempts to circumvent the Eleatic problems. In the modern era, some of these problems would enter the domain of mathematics, with the development of calculus and analysis. These developments were regarded by some as solving problems of change, but others maintain that philosophical issues persist.
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Early life of Plato Plato (Ancient Greek: Πλάτων , "Plátōn", "wide, broad-shouldered"; c. 428/427 – c. 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, the second of the trio of ancient Greeks including Socrates and Aristotle said to have laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture.
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Pre-Socratic philosophy Pre-Socratic philosophy is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates and schools contemporary to Socrates that were not influenced by him. In Classical antiquity, the Presocratic philosophers were called "physiologoi" (Greek: φυσιόλογοι ; in English, physical or natural philosophers). Aristotle called them "physikoi" ("physicists", after "physis", "nature") because they sought natural explanations for phenomena, as opposed to the earlier "theologoi" (theologians), whose philosophical basis was supernatural. Diogenes Laërtius divides the "physiologoi" into two groups: Ionian, led by Anaximander, and the Italiote, led by Pythagoras.
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The Development of the Monist View of History The Development of the Monist View of History is the major work of the Russian philosopher Georgi Plekhanov, published in 1895. Plekhanov gives an account of modern social and philosophical thought as culminating in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx and seen through the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach.
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Western philosophy Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with Hellenic (i.e. Greek) philosophy of the Pre-Socratics such as Thales (c. 624 – c. 546 BC) and Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC), and eventually covering a large area of the globe. The word "philosophy" itself originated from the Hellenic: "philosophia" (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" (φιλεῖν "philein", "to love" and σοφία "sophia", "wisdom").
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Scholarch A scholarch (Ancient Greek: σχολάρχης , "scholarchēs") was the head of a school in ancient Greece. The term is especially remembered for its use to mean the heads of schools of philosophy, such as the Platonic Academy in ancient Athens. Its first scholarch was Plato himself, the founder and proprietor. He held the position for forty years, appointing his nephew Speussipus as his successor; later scholarchs were elected by members of the Academy.