Antiquity. Demokrit and Platon

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The Great philosopher-materialist was Demokrit ( V-IV centuries BC), occurring of Abdery in Thrace. Surprise and attention to all essentially unusual was the basic line of its nature. The substantive provision of its philosophy was reduced to that the world consists of atoms and emptiness. What is the atom? It is the smallest homogeneous particle of a matter, minimum pervotelo, invisible because of small size and indivisible because of hardness. Atoms dvizhutsja in emptiness, face with each other, enter connections, and these combinations of atoms form all things, all visible world. Views of Demokrita differ sequence and consistency: all in the world at it is reduced to matter movement (material atoms).

Other outstanding Greek philosopher - Platon (427-347 BC) was the Founder of an opposite philosophical direction - idealism-. On the origin and political views it belonged to the Athenian aristocracy.

On Platon, essence of the world are ' ideas ' by which it meant the objective maintenance of the knowledge consisting of concepts. Ideas form special ' the ideal world ', being for a side of fixed stars. Our terrestrial, the material world is rough, imperfect and even the deformed reflexion of it ' the ideal world '. About the world of ideas people have representation only thanks to that souls before they are installed in a body of the person, live on stars, whence they and can behold the world of ideas. Thus, for Platon's doctrine the sneering attitude to a matter as which he considers rough, amorphous, having value only in that degree in which it is spiritualised ' by idea ' is characteristic sharply negative and even. This sight has laid down in a basis of all subsequent idealistic systems and theories.