HoP 482 Indivisible, Under God: the Revival of Atomism

Peter Adamson· Host0:00

[instrumental music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to The History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Indivisible Under God: The Revival of Atomism. One thing you need to learn as a baby is that physical objects don't just vanish into thin air, and one thing you need to learn when you get older is that sometimes they do. I don't just mean the magician's assistant who vanishes after stepping into a box on a stage. A young child might observe a puddle on her way to kindergarten and then notice that it's gone when she's heading home at lunchtime. Affronted by this violation of the entirely reasonable laws that have otherwise been governing the universe, she might ask her mother where the puddle has gone. "Oh," the mother will say, "it evaporated." Only much later will the child understand what this means when she finally reads Aristotle on weather phenomena. He explains that water on the surface of the Earth transforms into moist exhalations, which then condense into cloud. Saturated clouds, in turn, produce rain, which is where we get the puddles in the first place. So Mom knew what she was talking about. Aristotle's exhalation is really just the same as the vapor