Epicureanism – The Very Short Introductions Podcast – Episode 48
The Very Short Introductions Podcast
The Importance of Epicurean Atomism
The world will eventually disintegrate into its individual atoms, and in much shorter intervals, each of us will too. The material soul will just evaporate away at death. And meanwhile, nature is always changing, and changing in unpredictable ways because of the role of chance. Long before darwin, the epicureans had a theory of natural selection for living beings - all sorts of animal type atomic combinations they thought were formed by chance. But only combinations that could live, feed themselves and reproduce lasted. Unlike our modern atoms, or even seventeenth century atoms, which are obedient to the laws of nature, the behaviour of epicurean atoms is not predictable; new combinations are constantly forming.
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