display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
3357 | Democritus denies reality to large objects, because atomic entities can't combine to produce new ones [Benardete,JA on Democritus] |
Full Idea: Democritus appears to rule out from his austere ontology all so-called emergent entities - even mountains and rivers - on the ground that two or more entities can never combine to produce a new one. | |
From: comment on Democritus (fragments/reports [c.431 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.24 |
598 | Democritus said that substances could never be mixed, so atoms are the substances [Democritus, by Aristotle] |
Full Idea: Democritus claimed that one substance could not be composed from two nor two from one; for him it is the atoms that are the substances. | |
From: report of Democritus (fragments/reports [c.431 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1039a10 |
12024 | If we combined two clocks, it seems that two clocks may have become one clock. [Forbes,G] |
Full Idea: If we imagine a possible world in which two clocks in a room make one clock from half the parts of each, the judgement 'these two actual clocks could have been a single clock' does not seem wholly false. | |
From: Graeme Forbes (The Metaphysics of Modality [1985], 7.4) | |
A reaction: You would, of course, have sufficient parts left over to make a second clock, so they look like a destroyed clock, so I don't think I find Forbes's intuition on this one very persuasive. |