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At first sight, it may appear that my proposal is simply a more formal char- Salmon (1989, 137) and Brandon (1990, 178-179) consider consistency with known facts to be a hallmark of HPEs. On the Dray-type side, Forber (2010, 34) appeals to a "causal principle of possibility". Furthermore, HPEs usually considered in the...
and 'q' are true whereas an antirealist may be content if only 'p because q' is true under certain conditions. For an antirealist, the explanatory relationship may be true in the absence of true explanantia and explananda (see Khalifa, 2011 can also consider that we have no evidence that it is the HAE. In fact, we may ...
Contrary to some versions of the Hempel-type and Dray-type, the external conditions I propose are either more or less demanding. They can be more demanding insofar as the mere logical form of an explanation is often not sufficient. A stronger modal appraisal is called for. It requires one to evaluate whether it is true...
In this respect, I would say that Brandon's and Forber's accounts are similar to External conditions Account Internal cond. Possibility Actuality Dray (1957) ♦p because c Epistemic (?) p Necessary c Hempel (1965) p because q Logical -Brandon (1990) ♦(p because q) Epistemic c, 'because' q Forber (2010) ♦(p because q) Lo...
We can find more variance in what external conditions the different accounts put forward. Brandon (1990) appears to say that HPEs should include actual generalizations 'q' and that they should be epistemically possible. Forber's (2010) global HPEs should be causally possible-note the different modality-relative to the ...
Models are not explanations. Explanations are simply sets of propositions satisfying the internal and external conditions stated by one's favourite theory (Strevens, 2013). Whereas explanations are linguistic entities, models are widely viewed as being non-linguistic. This is clearly true of physical models such as the...
Discussing one recent and influential account of models may help to see the evidential role of models and its relationship to possibility. Sugden (2000; argues, especially in his more recent work, that posited similarities between models and the world may license inductive inferences from the model to the world. For in...
While similarity is, according to Sugden, the key notion to license inductive inferences, he argues that one important dimension along which to judge it is credibility. 10 In this context, credibility means that the confidence we have in our inferences is "greater the extent to which we can understand the relevant mode...
Using the account of HPEs developed here helps to clarify Sugden's views and the debate about them. In a discussion of Schelling's (1971; 1978) model of residential segregation, Sugden (2011) argues that the 1971 model is an "explanation in search of an observation" (2011, 722) whereas the 1978 model was really trying ...
But it is also possible to make an argument to the effect that HPEs, while not actually explaining, afford understanding. Having a scientific explanation is a sufficient condition for scientific understanding. But is it necessary? And if propositions afford understanding, does this imply they should be qualified as an ...
Asimov spent more than half of the twentieth century cultivating that transformative unity of art and science. He wrote and edited around 500 books and penned myriad stories, articles and essays. They spanned the rich microscopic worlds of cytoplasm, cells and subatomic particles, and ventured into the boundless wilds ...
Asimov was central to science fiction's Golden Age, as the writer of iconic works such as I, Robot (1950), the Foundation series and The Gods Themselves (1972). As a scientist, he was a popularizer who often drew comparisons with H. G. Wells. The leitmotif of his life was an unstinting thirst for knowledge. In Asimov's...
Asimov's curiosity was first sparked in the windowless back rooms of a string of Brooklyn sweet shops. Born in 1920 in Petrovichi in Soviet Russia, Asimov was three when he and his family arrived at Ellis Island and began to scrape a living in New York. Three years later, his father had saved enough money to set up the...
Asimov started reading science-fiction at nine, just as the genre had begun a journey from pulp extravagance to a more science-centred era. He had convinced his father that Hugo Gernsback's magazine Science Wonder Stories contained serious stuff, despite the covers' motley depictions of space ships and aliens. From the...
A prodigy, Asimov graduated from high school at 15. He was, however, rejected by Columbia College in Manhattan and directed to Seth Low Junior College, a satellite school in Brooklyn. Anti-Semitism was at work. Undeterred, he plodded through his studies. Meanwhile, a distinctive vision of science fiction as "the litera...
Asimov's annus mirabilis spanned 1941 and 1942. He published 'Nightfall' in Astounding, a metaphor for humankind's devastating psychological confrontation with its own cosmic insignificance. In 1968, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever penned. He also produced several...
The next decade was a busy one. Asimov worked as a scientist for the US Navy during the Second World War; completed a doctorate in chemistry at Columbia; and, in 1949, took a post teaching biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts. Even as his science-fiction career gathered pace, his academ...
On 4 October 1957, the world was galvanized as the Soviet Union propelled the 84-kilogram satellite Sputnik 1 into elliptical Earth orbit. In the United States, panic rose over the gap in research progress. As US citizens turned on short-wave radios to listen for its eerie 'beep-beep', Sputnik mania sparked a massive d...
Asimov recognized that this troubling disconnect had grave planetary consequences. In his perceptive 1971 essay 'The Good Earth Is Dying', he pointed out that, with accelerating technological advancement, harmful impacts on society and the environment had already reached a global scale. Meanwhile, attitudes such as the...
Many decades before the rise of idioms of anxious sociotechnical reflection such as 'the sixth extinction', or the 'Anthropocene epoch', Asimov was writing about how "anthropogenic processes" were poisoning the planet. From the 1970s onwards, he wrote about how atmospheric pollution was destroying the ozone layer, acid...
As someone who has published more than a trillion P values, I disagree that testing an association for statistical significance should be banned (see V. Amrhein et al. Nature 567, 305-307; 2019). We might just as well argue in favour of banning exams. Associations are ranked on P values, rather as exams are assigned a ...
Concerned scientists met the research minister in March, supported by more than 12,000 signatures on a petition demanding that the 50 positions be reinstated (see go.nature.com/2vcuey). Together, these would cost €5 million (US$5.6 million) per year, much less than the roughly €6 billion given in tax credits to private...
Moral dilemmas in psychology play a critical role in probing our intuitions and revealing the complexities underlying our moral judgments. In the interest of understanding the foundations of moral reasoning, people have been asked if it is okay to sacrifice one person to save five (e.g., Cikara, Farnsworth, Harris, & F...
The extent of these contributions to the psychology of moral reasoning is perhaps the more striking because the moral scenarios that enabled them are, prima facie, remote from human psychology. Most of us will live all our lives without encountering anything very like the dilemmas above. We do of course enact decisions...
Here we are interested in ''the rest of the time": times when we experience neither moral conviction nor moral complacency, although the stakes (in comparison to the scenarios above) are relatively low. We suggest that the scenarios we experience as moral dilemmas do not typically involve questions of intentionality, o...
We will start with a trivial example: the moral status of Pogs. (For those of you who were neither a parent nor child in the 1990's, Pogs are collectible colored disks, originally from bottle caps.) Clearly in the world at large, if someone steps on a Pog, uses one to prop up a table leg, or publically disparages them ...
Of course what is bad in this example is hurting your child's feelings, not hurting Pogs. Nonetheless, we suggest that the effect of moral alchemy is to (locally) change the moral status of Pogs. You cannot disregard them as objects worthy of care and attention without insufficiently valuing your child's values. Critic...
Of course many morally neutral things can take on moral content in specific contexts. Basement stairs for the parents of toddlers, or earthquakes for residents of the Pacific Northwest, can be morally relevant insofar as failures to attend to them appropriately could cause harm (and subsequent guilt). Critically howeve...
Why important? It is after all, uncontroversial that people value idiosyncratic things and that morality requires respecting things that others value. However, we suggest that taken together, these commonplaces of human psychology play a key and underappreciated role in real life moral dilemmas, moral learning and mora...
We would contend that although the proposition ''Academic achievement is important" has no moral content, the proposition ''My parents value academic achievement" does. Insofar as your parents may find your actions hurtful and disrespectful to them because you did not take their utilities as your own, a moral issue is ...
We have stressed the importance of close interpersonal relations. Why should it matter that these interactions occur in the context of loving relationships? Why morally, should it matter, that your child cares about Pogs, or your parents care about academic achievement, if, in the world in general, these are largely ma...
All of the above requires substantial unpacking, in particular to note the ways in which this idea is distinct from a number of other ideas to which it is, nonetheless, indebted. First, notwithstanding our emphasis on concern for others' feelings, our topic is orthogonal to debates about the relative contribution of em...
Second, in emphasizing caring about others, we are not suggesting that moral cognition reduces to concerns about care and harm. Rather, we believe that obligations of care can give morality a reach that extends beyond the scope even of pluralist taxonomies of morality. That is, through care of others, we can be morally...
Finally of course, there is nothing new in the proposal that moral cognition is connected to attachment, kinship and empathetic concern for members of one's own social groups (e.g., Barragan & Dweck, 2014; Brewer, 1979; de Waal, 1982 de Waal,, 1996 de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007...
We are sympathetic to the concern that relationist motives are in tension with universal moral values (e.g., Kant & Gregor, 1988; Rawls, 1971) but not to the tension between ''ethics of care" and analytic rational thought. We suggest that the ability to care about relationships is predicated on, not in opposition to, a...
What are the implications of moral alchemy for real world moral dilemmas? When we think of moral failings we are prone to consider problems caused by doing immoral things (stealing, lying, cheating, etc.) or failing to do moral ones (helping the afflicted, preventing harm, etc.). As above, we may also think of the diff...
In the respect that the rightness or wrongness of these actions depends on whether someone cares about them, alchemical norms have something in common with social-conventional norms: we may believe it is right to hang up our backpacks and wrong to leave them in our lockers if this is an expectation but the expectation ...
Thus perhaps it is unsurprising that everyday moral problems frequently take the form of considering whether other people have a right to care as much as they do. Suppose for instance, my own reward in having a clean house, together with my recursive value in promoting my partner's goals, fail to overcome the costs of ...
We suggest that the phenomenon of moral alchemy matters to human psychology not only because it may be the source of much of our moral anxiety but also because it is a potential route to moral change. Consider again the belief that ''homosexuality is wrong." As noted, this belief has moral content all by itself; it doe...
In addition to playing a role in real world moral dilemmas and moral transformation, we believe that moral alchemy has implications for moral learning. Developmental psychologists have long looked at the effects of parenting styles and particular attitudes and beliefs expressed by parents on children's moral behavior (...
In light of this emphasis on moral learning, and considerable evidence that pro-social and empathetic concerns are innate or very early-emerging (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012; Hamlin, 2013; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Hamlin et al., 2007; Hamlin et al., 2010; Joyce, 2006; Katz, 2000; Martin & Clark, 1982; Mikhail, 2011; Sagi &...
Arguably, children may simply subscribe to a broader morality than adults do. Evidence that children distinguish arbitrary conventions from morals (e.g., Nucci & Turiel, 1978) does not speak to how broadly children may construe moral values themselves. Like the ancient Greeks, they may take all traits that constitute a...
However, we suggest that children may subscribe to a broad notion of ''goodness" because they correctly ascertain that the people they care about most deeply, care deeply about many things, including being hardworking, attractive, intelligent, athletic, kind, artistic and helpful. Although some of these are moral value...
Of course the heart of our contention is that this kind of slippage between moral and non-moral concerns is not limited to moral reasoning in early childhood, it is a feature of every close relationship; thus indications that we moralize non-moral concerns when others care deeply about them should be manifest even in a...
We note, pre-emptively, that insofar as the feelings of close others influence moral judgment, one might expect that effect to obtain broadly, regardless of whether one is asked to think about a close other or not. Additionally we recognize that relative shifts in people's permissibility or value judgments are not tant...
Finally, because it is a relatively subtle distinction, we stress that the moral alchemy hypothesis is distinct from the idea that people might share values with our close others, either because people choose to affiliate with those who share their values (e.g., Buss, 1995) or because close others influence each other ...
Participants were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid for their participation. One group of participants (N = 46, m age = 33.96 years, 52% female) was used to norm the stimulus items. Another group of participants (N = 298) was recruited for the experimental conditions. Participants were excluded for (1) havin...
Forty-eight items in this study, three from each of 16 categories, were adapted from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2009 ), the Schwartz' Value Scale (Schwartz, 1992), the Portrait Values Questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001), and the European Social Survey (Davidov, Schmidt, & Schwartz, 2008 ). An...
In norming study, half of the participants rated all three items from ten categories while the other half rated all three items from the other eleven categories. Items were presented in a fixed random order, and participants were also asked to rate how easy the question was to read. In the experimental conditions, a si...
2.1.3. Procedure 2.1.3.1. Stimulus norming. Participants were tested online using the Qualtrics survey program. They were shown a sliding scale (see example in Fig. 1 ) that they could manipulate with their computer mouse. They were told that they would be given a series of statements and asked to judge how much they a...
The norming study was used to establish (1) that participants understood the task and used the sliding scale appropriately with respect to common sense judgments of more and less severe wrongs; (2) that there was variability both within and across items in participants' responses, and (3) that the items in each categor...
2.1.3.2. Experimental design. 2.1.3.2.1. Phase 1. Participants were also tested online using the Qualtrics survey program. They were introduced to the sliding scale as in the norming study. In Phase 1, the items were phrased to reflect endorsement of positive statements (see Appendix A, part 1) rather than judgments of...
On each trial in Phase 2, participants in the Close Other condition were asked, ''How strongly would the person you love endorse this statement?" and participants in the Distant Other condition were asked, ''How strongly would the person you know endorse this statement?" Note that our interest was not in how accurate p...
Following Phase 3, participants were asked to report whom they were thinking about as a reference when they responded to the Phase 3 questions. If they did not answer that they were responding based on how most people would rate the statements (i.e., rather themselves or a specific other person) they were excluded from...
To assess this we first identified categories in which participants' Phase 2 ratings (ratings of how much the other person cared) were higher than their Phase 1 ratings (ratings for themselves). Recall that participants rated different specific items in each phase, in different fixed, random orders, and were never aske...
We can also ask whether the effect of Condition (Close versus Distant other) depends on the individual ratings in Phase 1 and Phase 2. We did this in two ways. First, we ran a regression analysis Table 1 Mean Phase 3 ratings by condition for each category where the other person cared more than the participant. Categori...
These results suggest that failing to engage in a behavior is perceived as ''more wrong" by people in general when someone you care about cares more about the behavior than you do. This is consistent with our account of moral alchemy, in which behaviors ranging from matters of negligible import to actual moral imperati...
It might of course be the case that thinking about a loved one leads people to value all positive behaviors more than they would otherwise (and thus view failing to act in accord with these behaviors as more than usually wrong). Our results however, suggest that this was not the case. Participants in the Close Other co...
Arguably, having just indicated that someone believed, relatively strongly, that a behavior was important in Phase 2, participants might have been more likely to provide higher ratings for comparable items in Phase 3. Relatedly, because people in Phase 3 were asked to respond on the basis of how ''people in general" wo...
It remains possible that the Phase 2 responses were nonetheless more salient (and therefore more likely to prime subsequent responses) in the Close Other than the Distant Other condition. However, we believe the experimental design makes a simple carry over effect very unlikely. In Phase 2, participants rated how passi...
As researchers have long noted, there are many beliefs and behaviors that are normative within a culture -e.g., habits of dress or manners -to which people broadly subscribe, but in which they are nonetheless not deeply invested; such social conventional norms can change by general agreement or by the will of an author...
Our aim here is not to reify distinctions among these categories but to look at how caring about someone who cares about a behavior might affect the distinctions people make. That is, given that valued behaviors can exist ''along a continuum of relative importance" (Rokeach, 1973, p. 5), we can ask whether moral alchem...
Participants were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid for their participation. One group of participants (N = 38, m age = 35.66 years, 58% female) was used to norm the stimulus items. Another group of participants (N = 305) was recruited for the experimental conditions. Participants were excluded for 1) failur...
There are some beliefs people hold, and expect others to hold, but don't feel too strongly about (like believing the napkin belongs on the left side of the plate). We will call these conventions. For other kinds of beliefs, people differ widely. Some people care a great deal and others not at all (like believing that t...
Again, the norming study was used to establish (1) that participants understood the task and used the sliding scale appropriately with respect to common sense judgments; (2) that there was variability both within and across items in participants' responses, and (3) that the items were easy to read. All of these results...
We looked first at categories where the participant believed the other person cared more, corresponding to a higher rating in Phase 2 than Phase 1 for items drawn from a single category. As in Experiment 1, we did not impose any threshold on the difference scores. We used participants' raw scores: a ''higher" rating re...
Also as in Experiment 1, we ran a regression analysis looking at the effect of Condition after including the other variables (as controls) in the model. Recall that items with higher Phase 1 and Phase 2 scores will have higher Phase 3 scores because they are different behaviors drawn from the same category. Nonetheless...
Finally, to ensure that these effects were specific to cases where the participant believed the other person cared more, we compared the Phase 3 ratings between conditions, looking at cases where participants had not rated the other person as caring more about that kind of behavior than themselves. Again, as predicted,...
As in Experiment 1, we believe the results are unlikely to be due to participants' Phase 2 estimates directly influencing their Phase 3 estimates. Both the proportion of behaviors identified as more valuable to the other than the self, and the degree to which behaviors were valued, were similar between conditions in Ph...
We do not want to overstate the results here. In both Experiments 1 and 2, the differences between participants' mean ratings of the moral status of the behaviors in the two conditions were small (3.60 points in Experiment 1 and 2.46 points in Experiment 2). The small change in ratings may seem insufficient to warrant ...
Note that participants were randomly assigned to the Close versus Distant Other condition and the results are consistent with the causal claim that consideration of the values of close others elevates the degree to which those values are seen as moral. As predicted, we also found that these results held only when the p...
We have already discussed the respects in which we believe these results cannot be explained by simple carry over effects, or by a general enhancement of the importance of positive behaviors in the context of loving relationships. For similar reasons, the results can also not be explained as a kind of ''chameleon effec...
Note that although participants treated behaviors valued more by loved ones than themselves as more morally important to the world at large, this does not mean that participants necessarily changed their personal estimate of the behaviors. Our experiment did not address this directly (because endorsements for the self ...
In line with most work on moral reasoning, we also looked here at moral judgment rather than moral behavior (and there is evidence that hypothetical moral judgments do not necessarily align with behavior; see e.g., Crockett et al., 2014). However, in the case of moral alchemy it is especially true that shifts in moral ...
Similarly, more work is necessary to understand why people shift their judgments in close relationships but not more distant ones. Future work might see whether the shifts in moral judgment seen here correlate with particular measures of closeness in the social psychology literature. For instance, people might be more ...
We have asserted that failing to endorse the values of close others risks hurting their feelings (and is therefore a legitimate source of moral concern). However we have elided the question of when and why value differences should be painful. That they are not always so is clear; many of us have delighted in debate and...
Finally, although here we have tested our account of moral alchemy with adults, future work might look at whether the findings here extend to young children and whether it leads not just to transient shifts in moral judgments but to more enduring behavioral changes. To the degree that it does, the phenomenon is potenti...
The physiological theory of Asclepiades of Bithynia (fl. later second/earlier first century BC) stated that the human body, like all perceptible objects, is composed of imperceptible particles referred to as onkoi. Health is maintained by the free and balanced motion of these onkoi through imperceptible pores in the bo...
The nature of the pores and the question of void in Asclepiades' theory thus remain points of controversy, though these issues are clearly fundamental to our understanding of his theory and its intellectual background. The present paper attempts to resolve at least some of the controversies surrounding Asclepiadean por...
That there are certain void spaces in both water and air follows from the doctrine of Epicurus and Asclepiades on the elements. λέγω δὴ ἀραιὰν ἧς τὰ μόρια διαλαμβάνεται χώραις κεναῖς, ἐπισταμένων ἡμῶν δηλονότι καὶ μεμνημένων ἀεὶ πῶς λέγεται χώρα κενὴ πρὸς τῶν ἡνῶσθαι φασκόντων τὴν οὐσίαν, ὅτι μὴ καθάπερ ᾽Ε
By 'rarefied' (substance) I mean that which has parts which are separated by empty spaces, understanding of course and recalling always the way in which 'empty space' is meant by those who say that substance is continuous, (i.e.) that in all rarefied bodies 'empty space' is not as Epicurus and Asclepiades think, but fu...
For if everything is constituted out of atom and void according to the theory of Epicurus and Democritus, or out of certain onkoi and pores according to the physician Asclepiades -for in this way he changed only the names, speaking of onkoi instead of atoms, and pores instead of void, and wanting the substance of what ...
8 Secondly, Galen would not appear to gain much by falsely attributing a theory of void to Asclepiades. He is 5) For useful discussions of various kinds of distortive strategies employed by Galen in reporting the views of his medical opponents, see e.g. von Staden (1997), 192-96; Allen (2001); Tecusan (2004), 29-36. 6)...
The main proponent of a sceptical attitude towards Galen's testimony is Vallance. Based on the divisibility of the onkoi and the indivisibility of atoms, Vallance denies any Epicurean influence on Asclepiades' theory of matter. If this were correct, it would obviously undermine Galen's testimony on Asclepiades as a voi...
10 This is simply not true, however, of any of the passages quoted above in which Galen explicitly characterizes arguments against Asclepiades' theory of matter, namely the failure of the onkoi to account for the phenomenon of pain. 9) Leith (2009). 10) Vallance (1990), 57: 'If we look more closely at the context of th...
Indeed, Galen elsewhere can be quite clear about the Methodists' views on void. In his Method of Healing, he argues that their use of certain kinds of terms commits them to a theory of matter similar to that of Asclepiades, since the use of such terms 'is legitimate only for those who posit onkoi and pores or atoms and...
19 Hence Asclepiades is listed among those who posit large-scale void. Immediately, however, the fact that Anaxagoras is also numbered among the void theorists, where he certainly does not belong, undermines the reliability of this testimony for Asclepiades, and a case could accordingly be made for a more general doxog...
20 Therefore, if there is any truth to the attribution of void to these authorities, then we would expect it to be true of Asclepiades most of all. And of course we know that it is not entirely inaccurate, since the attribution is at least true of Democritus and Epicurus. Calcidius' testimony 17) I assume that what is ...
18) On the Placita tradition in Calcidius and other sources, see Mansfeld (1990), 3112-17, and esp. 3113 n. 238 on this passage; on Asclepiades and the referent of Calcidius' solidae moles, Switalski (1902), 53 and especially Polito (2007). 19) In Tim. 215: 'aut enim moles quaedam sunt leves et globosae eaedemque admod...
In the third sense, hypothesis means the basis of a proof, that is, a postulate for establishing something. In this sense it is said that Democritus uses as a hypothesis atoms and void, and Asclepiades onkoi and pores. ps. Def. 138.8 [p. 166 Heiberg] The ps.-Galenic author of the Introductio sive Medicus explicitly sta...
22) The passage comes from a series of extracts added to Hero's Definitions by a Byzantine compiler (cf. Heath (1921), 316). There is a similar account, likewise referring to Asclepiades' doctrine of pores and onkoi, in Sextus Empiricus' book Against the Geometers (M. 3.3-5, partially quoted below), and presumably both...
26 Epicurus appears simply to have accepted this argument, and concluded that indeed the atoms were in 24) As confirmed at S.E. M 3.5: δευτέρᾳ δὲ ὅτι πάντοθεν ὑγροῦ μέρη καὶ πνεύματος ἐκ λόγῳ θεωρητῶν ὄγκων συνηράνισται δι᾽ αἰῶνος ἀνηρεμήτων ('Second, that the parts of moisture and pneuma are gathered together from all...
29 I offer here a revised text based on autopsy of the papyrus: 30 10... ὅτι τρέφεται, (φησίν), πᾶν μέρος ἡμῶ̣ ν τ]ο̣ ῦ σώμα̣ τ̣ ο̣ ς καὶ, λό̣ γου εἵνεκ̣ α̣, σ̣ ώ̣ μα διὰ σώ(ματος) οὐ χωρεῖ], κ̣ αὶ τὸ σύν̣ π̣ α̣ ν καὶ τἄλλα τ̣ ο̣ ῦ σ̣ ώ̣ μ̣
ὅτι δὲ μᾶλλον αὔξησις οὐκ ἔστι μὴ ὄντος κενοῦ, φανερόν. τὴν μὲν γὰρ αὔξησιν δεῖ γίνεσθαι πάντη προσκρινομένης τῷ αὐξανομένῳ σώματι τῆς τροφῆς, τοῦτο δὲ οὐκ ἂν γένοιτο μὴ πάντη διιούσης αὐτῆς, ἀδύνατον δέ ἐ
It is clear furthermore that growth cannot exist without the existence of void. For it is necessary that growth occurs by the assimilation of nutriment everywhere in the body which is being increased, and this would not happen if it was not dispersed everywhere. But it is impossible for it, being body, to pass through ...
Both Asclepiades' argument and that reported by Themistius and Simplicius infer from the uniform growth of animals that nutriment is distributed to every part of the body. A disjunction is then introduced, such that the distribution of the corporeal nutriment must occur either through space that is full or space that i...
Asclepiades' version is paralleled so closely by the argument described by Themistius and Simplicius that it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he knew at least an earlier version of it. His use of an atomist argument for the existence of void, then, clearly points to his acceptance of the same conclusion. Alth...
Asclepiades, nevertheless, does not mention the existence of void in his own version, but only the existence of invisible pores. I suggest, however, that this apparent difference need only be one of emphasis, for this argument from growth will yield not only void per se, but in particular void within a living body, and...
Some further points of interest are raised by Asclepiades' use of the principle 'body does not pass through body.' Robert Todd has argued convincingly that the discrepancy between Aristotle's phrase 'it is impossible for two bodies to be in the same place' and the commentators' 'body does not pass through body' reflect...
37 I would suggest, however, that an Epicurean origin for the principle 'body does not pass through body' is much more likely. It is only for the Epicureans (i.e. insofar as the Epicureans are the only, or at least most prominent, post-Aristotelian void theorists) that a constructive use of the principle can be found, ...

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