#atomism

• Asclepiades — The name borne by several prominent personalities of Greek Antiquity. The most famous is Asclepiades of Bithynia (b. c. 124 BC), a renowned Greek physician and philosopher who practiced in Rome. He founded the methodical school of medicine, rejecting Hippocrates' humoral theory and advocating an atomistic theory stating that disease results from the blocked movement of atoms through body pores, promoting humane treatments such as massage, diet, and physical exercise.
• Atomism — An ancient materialistic philosophical doctrine, formulated by Democritus and Leucippus and expanded by Epicurus and Lucretius, stating that all matter and the universe are composed of tiny, indivisible, and indestructible particles called atoms moving in a vacuum. In a modern sense, it describes theoretical or methodological orientations in physics or psychology that explain complex phenomena by reducing them to independent minimal components.
• Archaic atomism — An old or regional graphic and phonetic variant of the noun 'atomism'; the ancient materialist doctrine based on the existence of atoms as indivisible units of matter moving in a vacuum. The term appears sporadically in early 19th-century translations of philosophical texts before being modernized.