Early Philosophical Atomism: Indian and Greek

The research is a comparative study of the atomic theories of Kanada and Democritus. Because of their pluralistic tendencies, emphasis on causality, materialistic account of sense knowledge, and attempt to explain the physical system by means of reduction to the configuration of its constitutive elements, both philosophers present an epistemological base that could accommodate scientific inquiry. Notwithstanding the early and expansive beginning of Indian atomism, modern scientific atomic theory traces its origin to Democritus. Through cross-cultural critical engagement with parallel ideas between Kanada and Democritus, the paper aims to discover the common problems they dealt with in order to further our understanding of the early history of atomic theory, to evaluate the relative merits and limitations of their proposed solutions, to resolve some difficulties that each account faces by appealing to the other, and to highlight their contributions to the emergence of the atomic worldview.