ABSTRACT
The term reductionism has often faced fashionable enemies (cf. holism, organicism, vitalism, and systems theory). It has, in fact, been an anathema for half a century. Perhaps the first reductionist idea is attributable to Democritus. Not that he claimed for the first time the existence of atoms or that everything was composed of atoms: Both theses had been sustained before by others (Coulston-Gillispie, 1981, pp. 30-35). Rather, the originality of Democritus was that he claimed that knowledge of specific atoms and their differential properties would allow everything in nature, even the soul that we cannot see, to be explained. At about the same time, Aristotle enunciated the first antireductionist dictum: “The whole is not the same as the sum of its parts” (Barnes, 1985, p. 252). A consequence of Aristotle’s dictum would be that an organism could not be conceived as nothing more than a random aggregation of organs and systems.
