The Pluralist school was a school of pre-Socratic philosophers who attempted to reconcile Parmenides' rejection of change with the apparently changing world of sense experience, it can also be said to have included which philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms. Leucippus often appears as the master to his pupil Democritus, a philosopher also touted as the originator of the atomic theory?
Pluralist school The Pluralist school was a school of pre-Socratic philosophers who attempted to reconcile Parmenides' rejection of change with the apparently changing world of sense experience. The school consisted of Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Empedocles. It can also be said to have included the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. The Pluralists rejected the idea that the diversity of nature can be reduced to a single principle (monism). Anaxagoras posited that nature contained an innumerable number of principles, while Empedocles reduced nature to four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) which could not be reduced to one another and which would be sufficient to explain change and diversity.
Change (philosophy) Change refers to a difference in a state of affairs at different points in time. Although it is a familiar experience, an analysis of change provides subtle problems which have occupied philosophers since the Presocratics. Heraclitus is the first philosopher known to have directly raised such issues, with aphorisms such as "one cannot step into the same river twice". The Eleatics were particularly concerned with change and raised a number of problems, including Zeno's paradoxes, which caused them to go as far as insisting that change was impossible, and that reality was one and unchanging. Later philosophers would reject this conclusion, instead developing systems such as atomism in attempts to circumvent the Eleatic problems. In the modern era, some of these problems would enter the domain of mathematics, with the development of calculus and analysis. These developments were regarded by some as solving problems of change, but others maintain that philosophical issues persist.