Democritus and the Landing Zone

The physical sciences look to ontology - a branch of metaphysics - for principles and rules that explain the world in which we live, move and have our being. 

Today's dominant ontology can be trace all the way back to Ancient Greece and a philosopher by the name of Democritus. Democritus claimed: 'The vulgar/naive believe in (qualities,) colour, the sweet and the bitter, but in reality there is only atoms and the void.' 

That dominance is relatively new, however. It was not until the well known Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) began arguing that only shape, number, movement and contact exist in an object itself, there was any hint Aristotle's Substantial Form was going to be sidelined in preference for reality being devoid of 'colour, the sweet and the bitter'.

This usurpation had collateral implications too. The great thinker Aquinas made a point of reconciling Aristotle with the teaching of the Catholic Church. He did this ingeniously by positing that Aristotle's potency to act was an 'act of being' that came from none other than the creator Himself.

Alfred North Whitehead the Cambridge mathemarician who co-wrote the weighty tome 'Principia Mathematica' with the august philosopher Bertrand Russell was up in arms about the return of atomised ontology. He dubbed the new realism, bifurcation (a small change causes sudden qualitative shift) and disparaged it greatly in his book entitled Science and the Modern World. 

Whitehead's tour of the US and UK universities between the two world wars did little to alter Democritian hegemony. It seems as though scientists had taken to, and preferred a realism that had little to say about qualities along with the added bonus of there being no need for a God hypothesis. However, as the credibility of quantum physics grew and grew on account of its power to predict experimental outcomes, a little known academic by the name of Wolfgang Smith (1930-2024) published a book entitled 'The End of Quantum Reality'. 

Smith argued that the Schrodinger description of atoms is brought to an instantaneous end whenever a person or a thing of corporeal existence interacts with the physical world of atoms. Moreover, that our corporeal bodies are tripartite having body, soul and spirit. Comparing this to the cosmos in Platonic terms gives three levels of reality each with a different combination of space and time. In others words, in order to understand reality it is necessary to recognise that space and time together only manifest on the corporeal level. Yet that level being the world in which we exist and have our being must also interact instantanoeusly with Smith's intermediary level that in turn connects to Aquinas's aeviternal level.     

Have you opened a new location, redesigned your shop, or added a new product or service? Don't keep it to yourself, let folks know.  In contrast, secondary qualities, like taste, odor, color, and heat, do not exist in the objects themselves but are instead the result of the interaction between the object and the observer's senses. Essentially, secondary qualities are subjective and depend on the observer's perception. 

 Without Substantial Form there is no being; and without being there is nothing: not even quantum particles!