ABSTRACT
These forms vary. Reductivism comes in two phases. First, there is the monistic move by which we explain a great range of things as only aspects of a single stuff. Thus, Thales says that all the four elements are really just water and Nietzsche says that all motives are really just forms of the will to power. Second, there sometimes follows the separate atomistic move, made by Democritus and the seventeenth-century physicists, in which we explain this basic stuff itself as really just an assemblage of ultimate particles. The wholes that are formed out of these particles are then secondary and relatively unreal.
