To understand what RS is, one has to define it relationally in its opposition to categorical, essentialist, substantialist,
atomist, and fixist approaches, like rational choice, normative functionalism, and positivist variable analysis, which conceive of the world as a hapless conglomerate of contingently related, free-standing entities.
Predictably, he lauds instead the Greek
atomist Democritus and his
There's much more to be said about this phrase, which comes from an imagined language in Borges's "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," and means something like "onstreaming it mooned." Just to indicate the trailhead of an interpretation of this intertextuality, the idealism of Tlon exemplified by this phrase draws into question even the most basic assertion of identity, which is fundamental to the
atomist claims of our narrator (his representation of language as a set of indivisible elements).
Featley's concerns about the Baptists illustrate the assessment of Brown University professor, William McLoughlin, who wrote in 1991: "What Puritans foresaw, even if dimly, in the thrust of the principles advocated by the Baptists was the overthrow of the medieval ideal of the corporate Christian state and the substitution for it of a voluntaristic, pluralistic, individualistic, or
atomist social order.
The 'great books' of the thomists, Mortimer Adler, etc., have to be supplemented and to a large degree supplanted by
atomist studies.
At one point Palmer asserts that "understanding Lucretius's
atomist system was certainly possible in 1417," but she does not satisfactorily substantiate this rather important claim.
This means that individuals are these ends, which contradicts the depiction of the self by liberals as being free, unencumbered and
atomist. Indeed, unlike communitarians, liberals emphasize people's capacity to change their ends.
Clitophon's use of
atomist theories of vision to explain the way he fell in love, then, is a bad idea, for it reveals his folly in making too much out of the images that he receives, and not subjecting them to critical scrutiny.
The simple number schemes he favored for this purpose are more ancient than the
atomist theory of Lucretius, and more obvious.
(8) The Stoics had some common points with the Epicureans and
atomists, and the
atomist Democritus said that everything, even our mind or soul, is made up of indivisible atoms.