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.