International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

particles. Atomist materialism as an ontological position dates back to an-
cient Greece in the 5
th
century BC, especially to the work of Democritus and 
his idea of atoms (a-tomos meaning “indivisible). In Democritus’ cosmology, 
the universe is assumed to consist of indivisible atoms that move in an empty 
space. These particles are discrete, hard, unchangeable, and eternal. Epicurus 
developed this idea further in the 4
th
century AD. An opposing position also 
existed in ancient Greece which assumed the world to be a process of contin-
ual flux (Heraclitus), but it was not widely accepted. 
As you will learn in this unit, the perspective of atomism fundamentally 
shaped philosophical thought in European history and culture and forms a 
key part of classical, modern science, above all classical physics. What 
Democritus believed in ancient Greece later became part of the dominant 
world view of the modern natural sciences. With modern physics and chemis-
try, science finally provided atomism – that is, the idea of a universe made of 
elementary particles, with a natural foundation and proved though observa-
tion and experiments. Elementary particles have been shown to be the entities 

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that constitute the material world. Consequently, atomism as a materialist on-
tological position is mainly associated with modern particle physics (also 
called classical physics). The search for the ultimate elementary particles that 
comprise the material world has fundamentally shaped the development of 
classical physics. The ancient Greek belief in the indestructibility of atoms 
was disproved by nuclear fission in the 20
th
century: the atom has been 
demonstrated as consisting of other elementary particles, e.g.. neutrons and 
protons. With the progress of modern technology, experiments have now 
proven the existence of far more elementary particles such as quarks, gauge 
bosons, leptons, hadrons, and probably quite soon the Higgs-Boson. The idea 
of a world of matter consisting of material particles is familiar to all of us 
who have been educated in the findings of natural science, especially classi-
cal physics. In case you are not familiar with these topics, take some time and 
do your own research. For example, read about the search for the Higgs-
Boson (sometimes called the “God particle”) in the Large Hadron Collidor at 
CERN. 
The atomist perspective of the natural sciences about “matter” is im-
portant because it can lead to a better understanding of scientific thought in 
other sciences. In both the natural and social science disciplines, positivist 
science implicitly (and only rarely explicitly) shares a fundamental atomist 
material ontological position – sometimes also called