Does void exist?

Does void exist?

How does it exist? What is it?

This is the same as our questions about place.

The views taken of it involve arguments both for and against, in much the same sort of way.

For those who hold that the void exists regard it as a sort of place or vessel which is supposed to be ‘full’ when it holds the bulk which it is capable of containing, ‘void’ when it is deprived of that-as if ‘void’ and ‘full’ and ‘place’ denoted the same thing, though the essence of the three is different.

Anaxagoras is among those who refute the existence of the void. They ingeniously demonstrate that air is something.

They strain wineskins and show the air resistance. Then they cutt it off in clepsydras.

But people really mean that there is an empty interval in which there is no sensible body.

They believe that:

• everything which is in body is body
• what has nothing in it at all is void (so what is full of air is void).

Thus, it is not the existence of air that needs to be proved, but the non-existence of an interval.

This interval:

• is different from the bodies, either separable or actual-an interval
• divides the whole body breaking its continuity
  • This is what Democritus and Leucippus assert
• is something which is outside the whole body, which remains continuous.

These people, then, have not reached even the threshold of the problem.

Some assert that the void exists.

1. They argue that change in place (i.e. locomotion and increase) would not exist if there we no void

This is because what is full cannot contain anything more.

If it could, and there were 2 bodies in the same place, then any number of bodies could be together.

For it is impossible to draw a line of division beyond which the statement would become untrue.

If this were possible, it would follow also that the smallest body would contain the greatest; for ‘many a little makes a mickle’: thus if many equal bodies can be together, so also can many unequal bodies.

From these, Melissus infers that the All is immovable.

• If it were moved, then there must be void, but void is not among the things that exist.

2. They say that things contract and are compressed because there is void in it that contraction goes into.

3. They say that expansion also happens because of void.

This is because nutriment is body, and it is impossible for 2 bodies to be together.

A proof of this they find also in what happens to ashes, which absorb as much water as the empty vessel.

4. The Pythagoreans believe that void:

• exists
• enters the heaven itself, which as it were inhales it, from the infinite air.

It is the void which distinguishes the natures of things, as if it were like what separates and distinguishes the terms of a series. This holds primarily in the numbers, for the void distinguishes their nature.