Doesn't Lucretius mean "...will equally consist of

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hopefully this looks better

>>8915322
>>8915333
It's more psychological than philosophical, if you can read this post without cringing. Humans think in terms of measuring things, weighing them, separating them and classifying them. To measure things, we need a standard, a goalpost. If everything is infinitely divisible (Lucretius argues) big and small are entirely relative: there will be no set standard by which we can say, this is big, and this is small. Also, we would have to choose a completely random unit of measurement, and yet that standard unit would itself be impossible to define. This is why he argues that there must be an absolute smallest thing. it just makes things easier for his brain.

>>8915350
I understand what you're saying, but then he is not to be taken literally?

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just 1 shamefree bump

>>8915365
I don't even know what this is from DESU. If it's from Plato, probably not, it's just one argument amongst others meant to challenge the mind of the reader and bring them to enlightened skepticism or whatever the fuck Plato's endgame was.

>>8915392
its from the nature of things, lucretius

http://www.loebclassics.com/view/lucretius-de_rerum_natura/1924/pb_LCL181.51.xml?readMode=recto

>>8915395
Ah, Lucretius. He was probably being literal then. My analysis was from my own POV, i.e. his argument is really made from the limitations of the human mind as opposed to rigorous logic, whatever the fuck logic is.

>>8915322
Look up Zeno's paradoxes/Achilles and the tortoise. People are still fighting over this shit to do this day. Lucretius is an Epicurean materialist rejecting the idea that infinity suggests something above matter.

>>8915322
I'm not sure I've got it, but looking at it, I've the following reflections. A part by definition is a part *of* some whole. If there were infinite parts of things, then on the one hand you can have no account of nature, since the parts are unintelligible without being analyzable into more basic simples, because an account of a part explains somehow what the part's function is within a whole, which seems somehow impossible if all of nature is reducible to parts instead of basic smallest intelligibles.

I'm not sure I'm persuaded of it, but this seems like a very good argument to take slowly and keep working out.