  Ancient sources describe atomism as one of a number of attempts by early Greek natural philosophers to respond to the challenge offered by Parmenides.  Despite occasional challenges (Osborne 2004), this is how its motivation is generally interpreted by scholars today. Parmenides had argued that it is impossible for there to be change without something coming from nothing.  Since the idea that something could come from nothing was generally agreed to be impossible, Parmenides argued that change is merely illusory.  In response, Leucippus and Democritus, along with other Presocratic pluralists such as Empedocles and Anaxagoras, developed systems that made change possible by showing that it does not require that something should come to be from nothing.  These responses to Parmenides suppose that there are multiple unchanging material principles, which persist and merely rearrange themselves to form the changing world of appearances. In the atomist version, these unchanging material principles are indivisible particles, the atoms: the atomists are often thought to have taken the idea that there is a lower limit to divisibility to answer Zeno's paradoxes about the impossibility of traversing infinitely divisible magnitudes (Hasper 2006).  Reconstructions offered by Wardy (1988) and Sedley (2008) argue, instead, that atomism was developed as a response to Parmenidean arguments.