Anaxagoras Philosopy

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                “Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun is a hot rock.”

― Anaxagoras

                    It is one of the famous quote of Anaxagoras. 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). Anaxagoras maintained that the original state of the cosmos was a mixture of all its ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients are thoroughly mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is evident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or homogeneous. Greek philosopher of nature remembered for his cosmology and for his discovery of the true cause of eclipses. He was associated with the Athenian statesman Pericles.

                    Anaxagoras, (born c. 500 bce, Clazomenae, Anatolia [now in Turkey]—died c. 428, Lampsacus), Greek philosopher of nature remembered for his cosmology and for his discovery of the true cause of eclipses. He was associated with the Athenian statesman Pericles.

                    About 480 Anaxagoras moved to Athens, then becoming the centre of Greek culture, and brought from Ionia the new practice of philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry. After 30 years’ residence in Athens, he was prosecuted on a charge of impiety for asserting that the Sun is an incandescent stone somewhat larger than the region of the Peloponnese. The attack on him was intended as an indirect blow at Pericles, and, although Pericles managed to save him, Anaxagoras was compelled to leave Athens. He spent his last years in retirement at Lampsacus.

                    Only a few fragments of Anaxagoras’s writings have been preserved, and several different interpretations of his work have been made. The basic features, however, are clear. His cosmology grows out of the efforts of earlier Greek thinkers who had tried to explain the physical universe by an assumption of a single fundamental element. Parmenides, however, asserted that such an assumption could not account for movement and change, and, whereas Empedocles sought to resolve this difficulty by positing four basic ingredients, Anaxagoras posited an infinite number. Unlike his predecessors, who had chosen such elements as heat or water as the basic substance, Anaxagoras included those found in living bodies, such as flesh, bone, bark, and leaf. Otherwise, he asked, how could flesh come from what is not flesh? He also accounted for biological changes, in which substances appear under new manifestations: as men eat and drink, flesh, bone, and hair grow. In order to explain the great amount and diversity of change, he said that “there is a portion of every thing, i.e., of every elemental stuff, in every thing,” but “each is and was most manifestly those things of which there is most in it.”

                    The most original aspect of Anaxagoras’s system was his doctrine of nous (“mind” or “reason”). The cosmos was formed by mind in two stages: first, by a revolving and mixing process that still continues; and, second, by the development of living things. In the first, all of “the dark” came together to form the night, “the fluid” came together to form the oceans, and so on with other elements. The same process of attraction of “like to like” occurred in the second stage, when flesh and other elements were brought together by mind in large amounts. This stage took place by means of animal and plant seeds inherent in the original mixture. The growth of living things, according to Anaxagoras, depends on the power of mind within the organisms that enables them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. For this concept of mind, Anaxagoras was commended by Aristotle. Both Plato and Aristotle, however, objected that his notion of mind did not include a view that mind acts ethically—i.e., acts for the “best interests” of the universe.

                    The Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras is credited to have introduced the Athenians to the concept of philosophy. His contributions to the field of cosmology have been immense as he was probably the first person to state the correct reason behind the occurrence of eclipses.He claimed that the sun was not a god as people of his time believed, but a heavenly body composed of blazing metal. This observation of his led to him being charged of impiety.

                    After being forced to leave Athens, he went to Lampsacus where he spent his last years. He died around 428 BC.An altar to Mind and Truth was erected in his memory by the citizens of Lampsacus who observed his death anniversary for years.

                    My favorite philosophy of Anaxagoras is the Anaxagorean CosmosAnaxagoras gave a complete account of the universe: of the heavens, the earth, and geological and meteorological phenomena. The accounts of the action of nous and the original rotation and its consequences appear in the fragments: B9 describes the force and velocity of the rotation, B12 and 13 explain the beginning of the rotation and the subsequent breaking up and remixing of the mass of ingredients, while B15 and 16 specify the cosmological consequences of the continued rotation (Curd 2007 and 2008, Graham 2006, Gregory 2007). Most of the other information comes from the testimonia, but there is enough in the remaining fragments to make it clear that everything is ultimately explained by the great rotation set in motion by nous. Further, and intriguingly, Anaxagoras claims that the cosmic rotary motion could produce other worlds like our own.