Representationalism takes the notion of separation as foundational. It separates the world into the ontologically disjunct domains of words and things, leaving itself with the dilemma of their linkage such that knowledge is possible. If wor…Bohr’s break with Newton, Descartes, and Democritus is based not in “mere idle philosophical reflection” but on new empirical findings in the domain of atomic physics that came to light during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Boh…
Democritus
philosopher · 3 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Democritus appears as a foundational figure in the atomistic tradition that modeled matter and knowledge through discrete, separable units—a conceptual framework that representationalism inherits and that Bohr later had to break from when quantum physics revealed the inadequacy of classical atomism. His invocation here marks how early modern philosophy locked itself into a subject-object dualism that persists through Descartes and Newton until the empirical surprises of twentieth-century physics forced a reckoning with non-representational ontologies. The course treats him as a historical marker: the origin point of a mechanistic worldview that AI and cybernetics both rely on and exceed.
Mentioned in 2 readings
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