The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today's episode, The Final Cut, The Atomic Theory of Lrecipus and Democritus.

If you stop a historian of philosophy in the street and ask him or her to name one idea from

pre-ocratic philosophy that turns out actually to be true, the answer you're most likely to get

is atomism.

We've looked at some pretty extravagant theories in this series of podcasts.

We started with Thales telling us that the principle of everything is water and that magnets have

souls, and last week Zeno was trying to persuade us that it's impossible to walk across a tennis court.

After all this, it's comforting to come across an idea that looks familiar,

that all bodies are made of particles so tiny they are invisible to the naked eye

and that the interaction of these particles explains the phenomena we see in the visible world

around us. The particles are of course atoms and hopefully you've listened to enough

of these podcasts to guess where the word atoms comes from yes it's ancient Greek

to main means to cut and Atoma means quite literally uncutables.

In other words, atoms are things that cannot be divided into smaller parts.

Not because you don't have a sharp enough knife, but because they are by their nature

indivisible.

But here we've gone no further than the word atoms and already discovered a big difference

between ancient atomism and the atomism of modern science.

The atoms of modern science are misnamed.

They do have parts which can be divided from one another.

Adams can nowadays be split, with callous disregard to etymology.

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