Anaxagoras

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The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (ca. 500-ca. 428 B.C.) was the first to formulate a molecular theory of matter and to regard the physical universe as subject to the rule of rationality or reason.

Anaxagoras was born on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor in the town of Clazomenae, near Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey). Nothing is known about his life before the age of 20, when he began to study philosophy. About 462 he moved to Athens, which was rapidly becoming an attractive cultural center. Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to take up residence in Athens. His teachings influenced the playwright Euripides, but his most famous pupil was Pericles, who dominated the political life of Athens during the 30 years Anaxagoras lived there.

Anaxagoras did not believe that the sun and moon were divinities, as the Greeks did, and he was prosecuted for his teachings. He returned to Asia Minor to a town allied with Athens, Lampsacus (now Lapseki, Turkey). Here he was treated with respect, and his memory was still honored a century after his death.

"About Nature"

Anaxagoras's views are preserved only in excerpts and summaries, more or less authentic. His book, written in prose, was entitled About Nature. It started with this assertion: "All things were together, infinite in number." This abrupt beginning was intended as a blunt contradiction of an earlier contention that the universe was "one continuous whole, which was not in the past," there being only an everlasting unchanging present. In direct opposition to this perpetually static monism, Anaxagoras propounded a constantly changing pluralism. He was the first philosopher to declare the number of separate things to be infinite (the universe as a whole having already been described as infinite).

Each of Anaxagoras's infinitely numerous separate things could be divided and further subdivided endlessly. All the things that were together were infinite not only in number but also in smallness: "Of what is small, there is no smallest part, but always a smaller." By contrast with the thinkers who maintained that matter consisted of those smallest units which were the atoms or indivisible particles, Anaxagoras believed in the infinite divisibility of matter. Nevertheless, as often as this process of subdivision was repeated, the resulting product always emerged as a unit of matter, however infinitesimally small it might be. In this sense Anaxagoras may be regarded as the author of the first molecular theory of matter.

Concept of Mind

His infinitely divisible things, infinite in number, were originally all together. How they had come together and where they had come from were questions not propounded by Anaxagoras. Thus, his universe began with a vast indiscriminate jumble or species of magma, which in the course of time was set whirling by Mind: "The whole rotation was controlled by Mind in such a way that in the beginning there was a vortical motion. At first the turning began on a small scale, but it spins more widely and it will spin even more widely."

What is more, Anaxagoras's Mind itself was not an insubstantial, incorporeal, exclusively mental, spiritual, or divine entity. Unlike a theist, Anaxagoras described his cosmic Mind as being the "most delicate and purest of all things." Nor was Anaxagoras a dualist in the conventional sense of one who counterposes mind against matter, for he declared that "Mind even now is where all other things are too, in the surrounding plenitude as well as in the things that have been assembled and those that have been disassembled."

Anaxagoras rebuked "the Greeks for not thinking correctly about birth and death, since nothing is born or dies; on the contrary, everything is assembled out of existing things and then dissolved. Accordingly, the Greeks would properly call birth 'combination' and death 'dissociation."' In other words, any individual thing comes into being by combining preexisting components and is dissolved into its constituent parts when its existence is terminated. While individuals come and go, the building blocks or molecular particles persist. They move about freely and enter into new combinations without undergoing any change in their essential nature.

This unceasing flux of migration, combination, dissolution, and recombination is not senseless or chaotic. For Anaxagoras, cosmic Mind "is infinite and absolute; it possesses perfect knowledge of everything, exerts the greatest power, and dominates all living things, the biggest and the smallest." Since all life in Anaxagoras's universe is under the control of Mind, each molecular interchange occurs according to rule. His universe therefore is thoroughly rational, and what he called "Mind" is analogous to what was afterward termed the "laws of nature."

Split-Level Universe

To this overall vision of an orderly cosmos, Anaxagoras contributed some valuable details. Of these, unquestionably the most spectacular was his discovery that the moon does not shine by its own light. By contrast, in the Hebrew Bible the moon was the lesser of the two great lights; like the sun, which was the biblical greater light, the Hebrew moon was self-luminous. Presumably it is because the earth too receives light from the sun that Anaxagoras declared the moon to be earth. His earth and moon resembled each other also in having "flat areas and depressions." Anaxagoras's amazingly prescient description of the moon's ups and downs and his implicit denial that the lunar surface was perfectly spherical waited more than 2,000 years for visual confirmation by Galileo's telescope, and then more than 3 additional centuries for the direct physical proof provided by the American astronauts on the moon.

Anaxagoras believed (mistakenly) that the sun was a red-hot stone. Apparently generalizing from the instances of the sun and moon, he asserted that all the heavenly bodies were stone. His opinion that rock was the material of those bodies may have been inspired by the fall of a huge meteorite, said to have been as big as a wagon, near the Dardanelles when he was a young man. Since Anaxagoras correctly classified the meteorite as an object fallen from the sky to the earth, his universe was all alike. Later the cosmos was divided into an ethereal heaven, reserved for divinities, and the coarse earth, to which mere mortals were consigned. The painful process of reunifying this post-Anaxagorean split-level universe amounted to a return to the one world of Anaxagoras.

Further Reading

Daniel E. Gershenson and Daniel A. Greenberg, Anaxagoras and the Birth of Physics (1964), is a collection of the ancient references to Anaxagoras, arranged in chronological order and analyzed as to content; the bibliography is annotated. Also useful is Felix M. Cleve, The Philosophy of Anaxagoras (1949). Among the general books on early Greek philosophy that discuss Anaxagoras are John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; 4th ed. 1930); Theodor Gomperz, Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy (3 vols., 1896-1909; trans., 4 vols., 1901-1912); and G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (1962).

Additional Sources

Schofield, Malcolm., An essay on Anaxagoras, Cambridge Eng.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Anaxagoras., The fragments of Anaxagoras, Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1981.

Anaxagoras (c.500–c.428 BC), of Clazomenae in Ionia, the first philosopher to reside in Athens, probably between 480 and 430 (the chronology of his life is disputed). He became the friend and mentor of Pericles. Later he was prosecuted for impiety (and perhaps for having Persian sympathies) by Cleon and so withdrew to Lampsacus, where he founded a school and was held in high esteem. He appears to have written only one book, On Nature, a prose work of which several extensive fragments are preserved by quotation. He belongs to the Ionian tradition of philosophy (see PHILOSOPHY 1 and PROSE 1), and his interests were in cosmology and physics, but conflicting testimonies make it difficult to reconstruct his thought. His universe is composed of ‘seeds’ of every distinct substance, which take their quality from their prevailing component but contain at the same time infinitesimal particles of every other substance (‘everything has a share of everything’). Changes in things therefore occur as a consequence of the regrouping of the constituent substances. The animating principle of plants and animals and the initiator of cosmic motion is Mind, Nous, which is ‘the finest of all things and the purest’, and is itself separate and unmixed, omnipresent and eternal. In this cosmology Mind starts a rotary motion which gradually spreads and separates the seeds, the dense, moist, cold, and dark going to the centre and their opposites to the circumference. To Anaxagoras the heavenly bodies were huge stones (‘the sun is larger than the Peloponnese’) torn from the earth and rendered incandescent by their motion. This view may have been influenced by the famous fall of a meteorite in the region of Aegospotami in 467. Anaxagoras believed that the earth was flat and floated on air, but he understood that the heavenly bodies rotated and that the moon received its light from the sun, and he therefore grasped the principle of eclipses. Doctrines such as his, destructive of the traditional and official pantheon, exerted great influence on late fifth-century thought.

For other uses, see Anaxagoras (disambiguation).

Anaxagoras

Western Philosophy Ancient philosophy
Anaxagoras, part of a fresco in the National University of Athens.
Full name	Anaxagoras
Born	c. 500 BC Clazomenae
Died	c. 428 BC Lampsacus
School/tradition	Pluralist school
Main interests	Natural philosophy
Notable ideas	Cosmic mind (Nous) ordering all things
Influenced by Milesian school
Influenced Socrates,Archelaus

Anaxagoras (Greek: Ἀναξαγόρας, Anaxagoras, "lord of the assembly"; c. 500 BC – 428 BC) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than the Peloponnese. He was accused of contravening the established religion and was forced to flee to Lampsacus.

Anaxagoras is famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous (mind), as an ordering force. He regarded material substance as an infinite multitude of imperishable primary elements, referring all generation and disappearance to mixture and separation respectively.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Cosmological theory 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Biography

Anaxagoras appears to have had some amount of property and prospects of political influence in his native town of Clazomenae in Asia Minor. However, he supposedly surrendered both of these out of a fear that they would hinder his search for knowledge. Although a Greek, he may have been a soldier of the Persian army when Clazomenae was suppressed during the Ionian Revolt.

In early manhood (c. 464–461 BC) he went to Athens, which was rapidly becoming the centre of Greek culture. There he is said to have remained for thirty years. Pericles learned to love and admire him, and the poet Euripides derived from him an enthusiasm for science and humanity.

Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry from Ionia to Athens. His observations of the celestial bodies and the fall of meteorites led him to form new theories of the universal order. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a mass of blazing metal, larger than the Peloponnese. The heavenly bodies, he asserted, were masses of stone torn from the earth and ignited by rapid rotation. However, these theories brought him into collision with the popular faith; Anaxagoras' views on such things as heavenly bodies were considered "dangerous."

About 450^[1] Anaxagoras was arrested by Pericles' political opponents on a charge of contravening the established religion (some say the charge was one of Medism). It took Pericles' power of persuasion to secure his release. Even so he was forced to retire from Athens to Lampsacus in Troad (c. 434–433 BC). He died there in around the year 428 BC. Citizens of Lampsacus erected an altar to Mind and Truth in his memory, and observed the anniversary of his death for many years.

Anaxagoras wrote a book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived, through preservation in work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the sixth century AD.

Cosmological theory

Anaxagoras, depicted as a medieval scholar in the Nuremberg Chronicle

All things have existed from the beginning. But originally they existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in number and inextricably combined. All things existed in this mass, but in a confused and indistinguishable form. There were the seeds (spermata) or miniatures of wheat and flesh and gold in the primitive mixture; but these parts, of like nature with their wholes (the homoiomereiai of Aristotle), had to be eliminated from the complex mass before they could receive a definite name and character. Mind arranged the segregation of like from unlike; panta chremata en omou eita nous elthon auta diekosmese. This peculiar thing, called Mind (Nous), was no less illimitable than the chaotic mass, but, unlike the logos of Heraclitus, it stood pure and independent (mounos ef eoutou), a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life.^{[citation needed]}

Mind causes motion. It rotated the primitive mixture, starting in one corner or point, and gradually extended until it gave distinctness and reality to the aggregates of like parts, working something like a centrifuge, and eventually creating the known cosmos. But even after it had done its best, the original intermixture of things was not wholly overcome. No one thing in the world is ever abruptly separated, as by the blow of an axe, from the rest of things.

It is noteworthy that Aristotle accuses Anaxagoras of failing to differentiate between nous and psyche, while Socrates (Plato, Phaedo, 98 B) objects that his nous is merely a deus ex machina to which he refuses to attribute design and knowledge.

Anaxagoras proceeded to give some account of the stages in the process from original chaos to present arrangements. The division into cold mist and warm ether first broke the spell of confusion. With increasing cold, the former gave rise to water, earth and stones. The seeds of life which continued floating in the air were carried down with the rains and produced vegetation. Animals, including man, sprang from the warm and moist clay. If these things be so, then the evidence of the senses must be held in slight esteem. We seem to see things coming into being and passing from it; but reflection tells us that decease and growth only mean a new aggregation (synkrisis) and disruption (diakrisis). Thus Anaxagoras distrusted the senses, and gave the preference to the conclusions of reflection. Thus he maintained that there must be blackness as well as whiteness in snow; how otherwise could it be turned into dark water?

Anaxagoras marked a turning-point in the history of philosophy. With him speculation passes from the colonies of Greece to settle at Athens. By the theory of minute constituents of things, and his emphasis on mechanical processes in the formation of order, he paved the way for the atomic theory. .

See also

• Anaxagoras (crater) on the Moon
• Squaring the circle

Notes

1. ^ A.E. Taylor, "On the date of the trial of Anaxagoras" Classical Quarterly 11 (1917), pp 81–87.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Further reading

• Bakalis Nikolaos (2005) Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics Analysis and Fragments, Trafford Publishing, Victoria, BC., ISBN 1-4120-4843-5
• Barnes J. (1979) The Presocratic Philosophers, Routledge, London, ISBN 0-7100-8860-4, and editions of 1982, 1996 and 2006
• Burnet J. (1892) Early Greek Philosophy A. & C. Black, London, OCLC 4365382, and subsequent editions, 2003 edition published by Kessinger, Whitefish, Montana, ISBN 0-7661-2826-1
• Cleve, Felix M. (1949) The Philosophy of Anaxagoras: An attempt at reconstruction King's Crown Press, New York OCLC 2692674; republished in 1973 by Nijhoff, The Hague, as The Philosophy of Anaxagoras: As reconstructed ISBN 90-247-1573-3
• Curd, Patricia (2007) Anaxagoras of Clazomenae : Fragments and Testimonia : a text and translation with notes and essays University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario, ISBN 978-0-8020-9325-7
• Gershenson, Daniel E. and Greenberg, Daniel A. (1964) Anaxagoras and the birth of physics Blaisdell Publishing Co., New York, OCLC 899834
• Graham, Daniel W. (1999) "Empedocles and Anaxagoras: Responses to Parmenides" Chapter 8 of Long, A. A. (1999) The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 159–180, ISBN 0-521-44667-8
• Guthrie, W. K. C. (1965) "The Presocratic tradition from Parmenides to Democritus" volume 2 of A History of Greek Philosophy Cambridge University Press, Cambridge OCLC 4679552; 1978 edition ISBN 0-521-29421-5
• Kirk G. S.; Raven, J. E. and Schofield, M. (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers: a critical history with a selection of texts (2^nd ed.) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ISBN 0-521-25444-2; originally authored by Kirk and Raven and published in 1957 OCLC 870519
• Taylor, C. C. W. (ed.), Routledge History of Philosophy: From the Beginning to Plato, Vol. I, pp. 192 – 225, ISBN 0-203-02721-3 Master e-book ISBN, ISBN 0-203-05752-X (Adobe eReader Format) and ISBN 0-415-06272-1 (Print Edition).
• Teodorsson, Sven-Tage (1982) Anaxagoras' theory of matter Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Göteborg, Sweden, ISBN 91-7346-111-3, in English
• Zeller, A. (1881) A History of Greek Philosophy: From the Earliest Period to the Time of Socrates, Vol. II, translated by S. F. Alleyne, pp. 321 – 394

External links

Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Αναξαγόρας

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Anaxagoras

• "Anaxagoras" article by Patricia Curd in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Anaxagoras", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Weisstein, Eric W., Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (ca. 500–ca. 428 BC) at ScienceWorld.
• Anaxagoras in English and Greek, Select Online Resources
• Translation and Commentary from John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy.

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Persondata
NAME	Anaxagoras
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	c. 500 BCE
PLACE OF BIRTH	Clazomenae, Asia Minor
DATE OF DEATH	428 BCE
PLACE OF DEATH	Lampsacus in Ionia

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