Anaxagoras

Nor of the small is there a smallest, but always a smaller

(for what-is cannot not be) —

Anaxagoras500-428 BCE

• Came to Athens mid 5th Century

• Born into wealth & gave up fortune to pursue philosophy.

• Associated with court of Pericles

• Attempts to reconcile arguments of Parmenides with the naturalists

• His own interest in “inquiry” is clearly scientific.

Other influential tidbits• Theory of perception• Effluences from a

physical body combine with like material in sense organ and enter through “pores”

• We think with the blood around our heart.

• Living things develop as discreet parts combine.

• Only viable combinations survive.

• Living things house “daimons” that have fallen from grace and have goals in other worlds.

Anaxagoras . . . held that the arche were the “seeds,” for it seemed quite impossible that anything should come into being from the non-existent or be dissolved into it.”

“All things were together, unlimited in both amount and smallness. . . . Air and aither dominated all things, both being unlimited.”

“In everything there is a portion of everything except Mind, but Mind is in some things too.”

“All Mind is alike.”

• The other things have a share of everything, • but nous is unlimited and self-ruling and has

been mixed with no thing, but is alone itself by itself...

• For it is the finest of all things and the purest, and indeed it maintains all discernment about everything and has the greatest strength.

• Nous controlled the whole revolution, . . .

• And nous also ordered this revolution, in which the things being separated off now revolve, the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the aether.This revolution caused them to separate off.

Nous is the unique motive force in the cosmos

“The surrounding ether has a fiery essence and by the vigor of its rotation stones are snatched up from earth, set on fire, and become heavenly bodies.”

“He maintained

that the sun is a molten

mass or red-hot stone.”

“The sun puts the shine in the moon.”

“The moon (is) made of earth, and (has) plains and ravines on it.”

“He was the first to set forth the facts concerning eclipses and illuminations.”

“We do not feel the warmth of the stars . . .

because of their great distance from the earth.”

• "For Anaxagoras makes Nous a deus ex machina for the making of the world, and when he is at a loss to tell from what cause something necessarily is, then he drags Nous in, but in all cases ascribes events to anything rather than to Nous" (Aristotle: Metaphysics, 1.4; 985a 18-22).