I understand trying to nail down what the minimum building blocks of existence are, that makes sense. And I understand how you'd think water is one, and maybe air and fire. But surely you can just look at earth and see it's made of many different little bits, right? And that there are multiple types of metal and wood? I don't see how you could reach the conclusion that any of those are a minimum building block.
>>16884329Earth, Metal, and Wood seem like they are their own thing to them. They just think that they are pure.
>>16884329These kinds of philosophies about the elements are best seen as abstractions and metaphors.It's a different kind of approach to "fundamental building blocks of existence" where one considers the patterns and ideas behind it all rather than any particular one of the myriad manifestations of these patterns such as the material manifestations. There's something Platonic or Pythagorean about viewing the world as built up from patterns and ideas rather than matter.This is no replacement for chemistry and atomic theory of course.
>>16884389To be fair, those philosophies, gave birth to Alchemy, which gave birth to Modern Chemistry.
How is China in anyway a comparison to Rome and thus Greek
