Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#32: The Atomists: Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius

Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius were philosophers of Ancient Greece or Rome who developed the philosophy of atomism, which holds that existence consists entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms.

According to atomism, atoms strike against one another, rebound and interlock in an infinite void, and this explains all action, change and objects of reality. In other words, atomism holds a mechanistic view of nature because it explains nature by the material interactions of bodies.

This mechanistic view of nature necessarily denies the possibility of divine intervention or design; it holds that the universe is controlled by causality, identity and natural, understandable laws -- as opposed to incomprehensible actions of a supernatural being, i.e., miracles. A mechanistic, cause and effect view of the universe is a prerequisite for scientific understanding.

The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, a revolution to which most people living today owe their very lives, was largely a result of combining a mechanistic view of nature, first developed by atomist philosophers, along with mathematics and experimentation.



Go to #33: Avicenna


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