Causes of Human Behavior

Compare the views of Leucippus and Holbach concerning the causes of human behavior. How are they similar? How do they differ?

Both Leucippus and Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) d'Holbach might be fundamentally characterized as materialists in their philosophical orientations. Leucippus is called the founding father of atomism, or the idea that human beings and everything else in the universe is made up of tiny particles called atoms that are constantly in motion. Ultimately, all causes of events and behaviors can be attributed to atomic phenomenon. Atoms are indestructible and unchanging at their essence, and "in the atomist system, change only occurs at the level of appearances: the real constituents of being persist unchanged, merely rearranging themselves into new combinations that form the world of appearance" (Berryman 2002).

Likewise, Holbach states nature only consists as "matter and motion and nothing else. Nature is known to us, when it can be known, as a sequence of causes and effects" on a material level (LeBuffe 2002). Thus, "to understand human beings and human society in terms of matter and motion, then, is simply to understand them in terms of causes and effects" not morality (LeBuffe 2002). However, unlike Leucippus, Holbach is not simply interested in the science of materialism, and is more apt to entertain different explanations for specific types of matter. There is more to be understood than mere appearance in the rearrangement of material essences: "Determinism is universal, in Holbach's view, but different sorts of bodies may have peculiar properties that require peculiar explanations. Despite his avowed materialism, Holbach does not demand the sorts of reductive explanations of mental events that materialism might ordinarily seem to require (LeBuffe 2002). For Holbach, there is more interesting unpredictability in the behavior of types of matter, and the observation of what Leucippus might call mere surface differences.

Works Cited

Berryman, Sylvia. "Leucippus." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002. April 18, 2009.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leucippus/#2

LeBuffe, Michael. "Holbach." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002. April 18, 2009.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/holbach/#2