Pluralism
Pluralism
is a Greek Pre-Socratic school of philosophy of the 5th Century B.C.,
consisting of three major philosophers: Anaxagoras, Archelaus (5th
Century B.C.) and Empedocles.
In general
terms, they attempted to reconcile the complete rejection of change by Parmenides
and the Eleatic School, which generally speaking they accepted, with the
apparently changing world of sense experience (things like birth and
death and creation and destruction), and thereby find the basis for all change.
The Ionian
philosopher Anaxagoras believed that all things have existed from the beginning
as an endless number of infinitesimally small fragments of
themselves, but in a confused and indistinguishable form. The segregation
of like from unlike was carried out by a pure and independent thing
called "Nous" (mind), which also causes all motion.
Some of his ideas presaged the later development of Atomism.
Archelaus,
a student of Anaxagoras, asserted that air and infinity are the
principles of all things, that primitive Matter is air mingled with
Mind, and that the principle of motion was the separation of hot from cold,
from which he endeavoured to explain the formation of the Earth and the creation
of animals and humans.
Empedocles
was a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek colony in Sicily, and is best known
for being the origin of the cosmogenic theory of the four classical
elements (fire, air, water and earth) which he held to be simple, eternal
and unalterable, and which are eternally mixed and separated by
two divine powers, Love and Strife. Like the Eleatics, he held
that it is not possible for something to come into existence from a
non-existence, or vice versa, only that original materials are combined
and recombined. Empedocles was also influenced by Pythagoreanism in his support
for the doctrine of reincarnation.
Pluralism
as a philosophical doctrine is a concept used in many different ways,
but, in general terms, it is the theory that there is more than one
basic substance or principle, whether it be the constitution of
the universe, of the mind and body, the sources of truth, etc (see the section
on the doctrine of Pluralism).
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