ANAXAGORAS
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.
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.He is best known for his cosmological theory of the
origins and structure of the universe. He maintained that the original state of
the cosmos was a thorough mixture of all its ingredients, although this mixture
was not entirely uniform, and some ingredients are present in higher
concentrations than others and varied from place to place. At some point in
time, this primordial mixture was set in motion by the action of nous
("mind"), and the whirling motion shifted and separated out the
ingredients, ultimately producing the cosmos of separate material objects (with
differential properties) that we perceive today
For Anaxagoras, this was a purely
mechanistic and naturalistic process, with no need for gods or any theological
repercussions. However, he did not elucidate on the precise nature of Mind,
which he appears to consider material, but distinguished from the rest of
matter in that it is finer, purer and able to act freely. It is also present in
some way in everything, a kind of Dualism.
Anaxagoras developed his
metaphysical theories from his cosmological theory. He accepted the ideas of Parmenides
and the Eleatics that the senses cannot be trusted and that any apparent change
is merely a rearrangement of the unchanging, timeless and indestructible
ingredients of the universe. Not only then is it impossible for things to come
into being (or to cease to be), he also held that there is a share of
everything in everything, and that the original ingredients of the cosmos are
effectively omnipresent (e.g. he argued that the food an animal eats turns into
bone, hair, flesh, etc, so it must already contain all of those constituents
within it). 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.
Based on my research about Anaxagoras and based on what I understand
about his philosophy are the most original aspect of his system was his
doctrine of nous the “mind” or “reason” the cosmos of was formed by mind in two stages and first is by
a revolving and mixing process that still continues and second by the
development of living things. The same process of attraction of “ like to like”
occurred in the second stage. The growth of living things according to
Anaxagoras are depends on the power of mind within the organisms that enables
them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. For this concept of
mind Anaxagoras objected that his notion
of mind did not include a view that mind acts ethically acts for the “best interests” of the universe.
Anaxagoras also discusses biology. He believed humans are more intelligent than
other animals because we have hands, since this allows us to create and use
objects as instruments.
