[asa] Leibnitz' objection to atomism

I was just reading today that Leibnitz believed that atomism was incoherent.
His reasons for believing so are surely ones that we have all entertained,
even naively, at some point.

He wonders that if say X is an atom of substance, then what is X made of.

It seems to me that it is a good question. In our mind's eye, we can "see"
such an atom. But the very fact that we see it as extended appears to entail
that it is made of something. The only way that we can imagine it as not
composed of anything is for it to be infinitesimal and not extended. Yet if
they are infinitesimal, no matter the sum, they will always remain so.

This is the mystery of a discrete, quantized world. That appears to be beyond
our ken.

There are a host of notions that face a similar dilemma. In contemplations on
the temporality of things, on the causal chain of events, and the being of
things one encounters a dilemma. One must choose between an infinite series
or a first element, one necessarily different from all the rest. Whether one
confronts an infinite sequence with no beginning or a unique element, one is
faced with a mystery.

Why should the question "what caused E?" or "what is X composed of?" have an
ending, or how can it go on and on without one?

One last question. It has often been argued that X cannot exist because its
very existence is incoherent. Such arguments are employed against God's
existence from the problem of evil or omnipotence. The presumption is that
anything logically contradictory is not possible. We must either conclude, we
are told, that X does not exist or that our conceptions of X are seriously flawed.

If our notions of atoms are incoherent, does that mean they don't exist?

bill

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Received on Tue Jul 7 00:13:16 2009