Anaxagoras (c. 500 - c. 428 BC) was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who brought natural philosophy from Ionia to Athens and proposed that a cosmic Mind, or Nous, sets the universe into ordered motion. [1] Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, he taught that all things contain a portion of everything and that matter is composed of infinitely divisible seeds arranged by Mind rather than by chance.
Early life
Anaxagoras was born around 500 BC in Clazomenae, an Ionian Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor. [2] Ancient tradition holds that he came from a wealthy family but abandoned his inheritance to devote himself to the study of nature. In middle life he moved to Athens, then emerging as the intellectual centre of the Greek world, where he is said to have spent some thirty years.
Philosophy in Athens
Anaxagoras is credited with introducing philosophy to Athens, and he counted the statesman Pericles among his pupils and friends. [3] He set out his ideas in a prose treatise, of which only fragments survive through quotation by later writers. His work continued the Ionian tradition of seeking natural explanations for the cosmos while advancing several distinctive theories of his own.
Cosmology and Nous
Anaxagoras taught that the universe originated from an undifferentiated mixture in which everything was together. From this mixture an infinite, self-ruling intelligence he called Nous (Mind) initiated a rotation that gradually separated things out and imposed order. He also held that every substance contains a portion of every other, so that nothing truly comes into being or perishes but is only mixed and separated. [1]
Astronomy and natural science
Applying his mechanistic outlook to the heavens, Anaxagoras argued that the Sun was not a deity but an incandescent mass larger than the Peloponnese, and that the Moon shone by reflected sunlight and had a surface with plains and ravines. [4] He gave a correct account of the causes of solar and lunar eclipses and studied a range of physical and meteorological phenomena, reinforcing his reputation as a natural scientist.
Trial and later years
His naturalistic teachings, which denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies, brought him into conflict with Athenian religious sentiment. He was charged with impiety, a prosecution widely thought to have been aimed indirectly at his patron Pericles. [3] Anaxagoras left Athens and settled in Lampsacus on the Hellespont, where he died around 428 BC and was long honoured by the city.
Legacy
His concept of Mind was discussed by Plato and Aristotle, who praised him for introducing an ordering intelligence yet faulted him for not making fuller use of it. [1] Anaxagoras's insistence on rational, physical explanations of natural events marks him as an important figure in the early history of science and philosophy.
