Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Reductionism
Axis: Wholes and parts — Can a whole be fully explained by its parts, or does it have irreducible properties?
Every complex phenomenon is explained, in the final analysis, by its elementary constituents and their interactions: there are only atoms and void. To explain is to break things down to their simplest elements.
Movements 1
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Epicureanisminferable
Since everything, the soul and thought included, is but an aggregate of atoms and void, Epicureanism tends toward reductionism: the properties of compounds are explained by the shape, size and motion of their constituents. Lucretius nonetheless grants assemblages secondary qualities, which tempers the reductionism without abandoning it, hence a marked but not extreme position.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book III (the atomic soul) · Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 68-71
Philosophers 2
Lucretiusexplicit
Sensible qualities are not primary: colour, heat, taste, even life and sensation, arise from the arrangement, motion and collisions of atoms that themselves have neither colour nor heat. The whole therefore adds nothing to its parts: it is only atoms variously disposed, and it is their configuration that explains the world's variety. This bottom-up explanation, in which the higher reduces entirely to the meeting of the smallest, is a that continues the line of .
On the Nature of Things, II, 730-864 (atoms are colourless; colour arises from their arrangement) · On the Nature of Things, II, 865-990 (the sentient arises from the non-sentient)
Descartesexplicit
The living body, the human body included, is fully explained as a machine: circulation, digestion, and the motion of the limbs reduce to the sole laws of shape and motion, with no superadded vital principle required. Life is reduced to mechanism, the soul belonging to another order entirely.
Discourse on Method, V · Treatise on Man