Blog Post #1

I am currently reading the book Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder. In this novel, Sophie is a young teenager beginning to dabble in philosophy. The story is very entertaining and all, but there was one section that I really latched onto: Democritus. Democritus was the first philosopher that I had extreme respect for. He believed that the entire world was made up of little blocks, all arranged differently to make different things. This was a man who saw the world, and was able to mentally break things down into smaller and smaller chunks. He did not have access to a microscope or any scientific instrument that we take for granted today. He looked at a piece of wood and somehow was able to determine that that twig was made up of tiny things that, when arranged in a certain order, create a twig. He called these little things “atoms,” which is potentially the part of this story that I find most intriguing. Atom literally means “uncuttable.” I love this concept. He mentally cut the thing in half, then in half again, and again and again and again until he reached something that he could not cut in half, thus uncuttable. Democritus then took this thought process a step further to connect it to the earlier greek philosophers. He stated that these building blocks of nature have to be recycled, since nothing can come from nothing. Yet there is one aspect of Democritus’s ideas that I still find confusing, the aspect of a soul. Democritus believed that there were smooth, soul atoms. These soul atoms make all life. I do not understand how someone could be so scientific as to be the first to conceptualize atoms, yet still believe in a soul, much less a soul being material.