(no subject)

Sextus Empiricus:

Some of the natural philosophers, Epicurus being one of them, said that the motion whereby things change is one particular type of the process whereby things move from one place to another: because the admixture which undergoes qualitative changes, always and in every respect, according to and because of the transpositional motion of its constituents. And we are to identify those constituents by reasoning about them. For example, when something changes and becomes bitter after it has initially been sweet, or black after it has been white for this to happen it must needs be the case that its constituent masses have shifted around so that their relative order and arrangements have changed and received new ordering structures. And this could not happen in any other way except by the masses moving from place to place <relative to each other.> Similarly, again, for something to become soft after it has been hard, or hard after it has been soft, it must needs be the case that the particles, of which it is made up, have moved from place to place. Indeed, when the particles move apart, a thing becomes soft, and when they gather closer together, it becomes hard. From all this it follows that the motion whereby change is effectuated is not different, in genus, from the motion by means of which something moves from one place to another.

This is a pretty good summary of the modern schoolbook perspective of non-nuclear chemistry, although the electrons are not really said to have positions.

This kind of stuff takes science down a peg I think, in terms of what it can take credit for, just as similar stuff takes Christianity down a peg. Reading pre-Christian philosophy confirms my belief that Christians give God credit for informing us of certain ethical principles, when it fact people figure out those principles just fine on their own without needing them divinely revealed to them through sacred texts. But stuff like this shows me that some stuff which science takes credit for, such as this perspective on matter, was already there. Science turned it into a predictive model, it gets credit for that, but not for the underlying concepts. I used to think the mortality of the soul was something I could credit the scientific perspective for. Science provided evidence for it, certainly, but Epicurus shows there was a very good argument to be made for it before science as well. Science gets no credit for adding it to the library of thinkable or believable things, that's for certain.