Background
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was born around 500 B.C. to an aristocratic and landed family in the city of Clazomenae (or Klazomenai) in the Greek colony of Ionia (on the west coast of present-day Turkey).
Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras; part of a fresco in the portico of the National University of Athens.
Anaxagoras, depicted as a medieval scholar in the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Pericles was a prominent and influential Greek statesman, orator.
cosmologist philosopher scholars
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was born around 500 B.C. to an aristocratic and landed family in the city of Clazomenae (or Klazomenai) in the Greek colony of Ionia (on the west coast of present-day Turkey).
Anaxagoras probably spent his youth in Ionia, learning about new things and becoming interested in the scientific study of the world. Consequently, Anaxagoras moved to Athens, Greece, in order to further pursue philosophy. In fact, he may be the first person to study philosophy as its own discipline in Athens.
Although he was born of wealthy parents, Anaxagoras neglected his inheritance to devote himself to natural philosophy. At the age of twenty, he traveled to Athens, where he spent the next thirty years. There he became a friend of Pericles and brought Ionian physical speculation to Athens at the height of its intellectual development. Subsequently he was prosecuted for impiety and banished because, it was alleged, he held the sun to be a mass of red-hot stone. This charge doubtless was instigated by the political opponents of Pericles, who sought to attack him through his friendship with an atheistic scientist. Anaxagoras wrote only one treatise, completed after 467 B.C.
Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras sought to reconcile Parmenides’ logic with the phenomena of multiplicity and change. Each maintained that there was never a unity in either the qualitative or the quantitative sense and postulated instead a plurality of eternal, qualitatively different substances that filled the whole of space. They accepted Parmenides’ negation of coming-into-being and passing-away but replaced the former with the aggregation of their indestructible elements and the latter with their segregation. Motive forces were introduced to account for motion—a phenomenon whose validity had, prior to Parmenides, been taken for granted.
Anaxagoras evidently did not consider that Empedocles had fully satisfied the demands of Eleatic logic. Empedocles had seen no objection to making secondary substances come into being as various combinations of his elements. A piece of flesh, according to him, consisted of the four elements juxtaposed in almost equal quantities. Theoretically, if it were divided, one would arrive at a minimum piece of flesh and thereafter at particles of the constituent elements. Thus, flesh originally came into being from the elements and, strictly speaking, from what is not flesh. Anaxagoras’ own formulation of the problem is preserved: “How,” he asks, “could hair come to be from what is not hair and flesh from what is not flesh?”.
His answer was to claim that everything preexisted in our food. Thus, he denied the existence of elements simpler than and prior to common natural substances and maintained that every natural substance must itself be elementary, since it cannot arise from what is not itself. Furthermore, to avoid being confuted by Zeno’s paradoxes against plurality, he held that matter was infinitely divisible; that however far any piece of matter might be divided, there always resulted smaller parts of the same substance, each of which always contained portions of every other substance and was itself capable of further division. Its predominant ingredients were responsible for its most distinctive features.
Initially, Anaxagoras held, all things were together in an apparently uniform, motionless mixture. Then Mind (nous) instituted a vortex, causing the dense, wet, cold, and dark matter to settle at the center and the rare, hot, and dry matter to take up peripheral positions as the sky. From the former, the disklike earth was compacted. The sun, moon, and stars, however, were torn from the earth and carried around, ignited by friction.
Although strikingly rational, Anaxagoras’ astronomy was not fruitful because it provided no stimulus to discover the laws of planetary motion. A more important contribution was his concept of a separate, immaterial moving cause, which paved the way for a fully teleological view of nature. His theory of matter, however, was not influential, doubtless as much because of its subtlety and sophistication as because of its lack of economy.
After being forced to leave Athens, he went to Lampsacus where he spent his last years. He died around 428 BC.
Anaxagoras`main achievement was in the development of his metaphysical theories from his cosmological theory. He was the first philosopher to state that the moon reflects the sun’s light. He was of the belief that there are mountains on the surface of the moon and that it was inhabited. Anaxagoras was a genius and applied geometry to the study of astronomy. He was among the first individuals to give the correct explanation for the occurrences of eclipses. He denied that there is any limit to the smallness or largeness of the particles of the original cosmic ingredients, so that infinitesimally small fragments of all other ingredients can still be present within an object which appears to consist entirely of just one material (presaging to some extent the ideas of Atomism).
In the physical sciences, Anaxagoras was the first to give the correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including his claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones.
Anaxagoras wrote at least one book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived in work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th Century A.D.
During his days, the sun was worshipped as a god. He sought to dispel this belief and claimed that the sun was a mass of red-hot metal. He also correctly told that the stars were similar to the sun but their heat could not be felt on earth due to their enormous distance from the planet. He lived for 30 years in Athens, studying and disseminating knowledge. However, his claim that the sun was not a god but a fiery ball of hot metal enraged certain social and political parties and thus he was prosecuted on a charge of impiety.
Like other Pre-Socratic philosophers of his time, Anaxagoras chose to interpret the world through a lens of science, observation, and logic instead of through traditional Greek mythology. Because of this rejection of traditional Greek mythology, Anaxagoras was convicted of atheism and exiled from Athens in the 430s. While many rejected his ideas as dangerous, he helped start the trend of philosophical thought in Athens that would be carried on by major thinkers like Plato and Aristotle.
The Pre-Socratic philosophers observed that the world is made up of very diverse objects, and they all attempted to develop theories that explained this diversity. Anaxagoras theorized that there are numerous (perhaps infinite) fundamental, physical substances that combine in unique ways to construct this diversity we see. Anaxagoras never listed what these fundamental substances were, so we must assume that these substances refer to both opposing forces (hot-cold, light-dark, etc.) and elements (fire, water, bone, flesh, etc.). These fundamental substances act sort of like ingredients that combine in certain ratios to produce different things or beings on Earth. These things (like trees, furniture, etc.) and beings (humans, animals) thus have a sort of secondary existence because they are composed of fundamental substances.
Anaxagoras insisted on a few main principles when it comes to these fundamental substances:
(A) There is no becoming and no passing-away. In other words, these fundamental substances have always existed. Nothing can ever be truly created from nothing and likewise, nothing ever truly goes out of existence. For example, when people die, they do not truly cease to exist. Instead, the fundamental substances that composed them simply separate.
(B) Everything is in everything. This principle means that all of these fundamental substances are inextricably intertwined. Therefore, we can never find one of these fundamental substances in its purity; all of the other fundamental substances are always present. For example, a dog is made up of the exact same fundamental substances as both a human and a chair. It's just that the ratio of these fundamental substances differs in each object or being. This is an odd concept, so consider this analogy: smear together red, green, blue, and yellow paint. Once you smear these colors together, you can never truly separate them again. The colors literally seem to be in one another.
(C) The principle of predominance states that a thing's appearance is determined by whatever fundamental substance(s) dominate that thing's makeup. To go back to our smeared paint example, if you add more green paint, what you see may look totally green to you because the green predominates over the other colors. But remember that remnants of the other colors will always be there, even if they are infinitesimally small, because, after all, nothing can go out of existence.
Anaxagoras’ innovative theory of physical nature is encapsulated in the phrase, “a portion of everything in everything.” Its primary expression is found in the following difficult fragment:
"And since the portions of both the large and the small are equal in amount, in this way too all things would be in everything; nor can they be separate, but all things have a portion of everything. Since there cannot be a smallest, nothing can be separated or come to be by itself, but as in the beginning now too all things are together. But in all things there are many things, equal in amount, both in the larger and the smaller of the things being separated off."
Here is how Anaxagoras emphasizes the autonomy and separateness of Mind:
"The rest have a portion of everything, but Mind is unlimited and self-ruled and is mixed with no thing, but is alone and by itself. For if it were not by itself but were mixed with something else, it would have a share of all things, if it were mixed with anything. For in everything there is a portion of everything, as I have said before. And the things mixed together with it would hinder it so that it would rule no thing in the same way as it does being alone and by itself. For it is the finest of all things and the purest, and it has all judgment about everything and the greatest power."
Quotations:
“Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock."
“The Greeks do not think correctly about coming-to-be and passing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed together and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they would be correct to call coming-to-be mixing-together and passing-away dissociating.”
“Mind is god and god is Mind.”
“Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.”
“And since the portions of both the large and the small are equal in amount, in this way too all things would be in everything; nor can they be separate, but all things have a portion of everything. Since there cannot be a smallest, nothing can be separated or come to be by itself, but as in the beginning now too all things are together. But in all things there are many things, equal in amount, both in the larger and the smaller of the things being separated off.”
Anaxagoras was blessed with a brilliant mind and had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
Quotes from others about the person
"Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, son of Hegesiboulos, held that the first principles of things were the homoeomeries. For it seemed to him quite impossible that anything should come into being from the non-existent or be dissolved into it. Anyhow we take in nourishment which is simple and homogeneous, such as bread or water, and by this are nourished hair, veins, arteries, flesh, sinews, bones and all the other parts of the body. Which being so, we must agree that everything that exists is in the nourishment we take in, and that everything derives its growth from things that exist. There must be in that nourishment some parts that are productive of blood, some of sinews, some of bones, and so on-parts which reason alone can apprehend. For there is no need to refer the fact that bread and water produce all these things to sense-perception; rather, there are in bread and water parts which only reason can apprehend." - Aetius of Antioch.
"Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus say that its [the earth's] flatness is responsible for it staying still: for it does not cut the air beneath but covers it like a lid, which flat bodies evidently do: for they are hard to move even for the winds, on account of their resistance." - Aristotle.
His long time admirer and friend Pericles spoke in his defense at his trial around 450 BC. Though Pericles managed to save him from a harsher punishment, Anaxagoras was forced to leave Athens.
Pericles was a prominent and influential Greek statesman, orator and general (strategos) of Athens during its golden age – specifically the time between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars.
