Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980

Anaxagoras became the first critic of Empedocles. But, like Empedocles he had similar views on the outset:
1) The stuff of the world is eternal
2) There is a many (pluralism), but each one of the many is a Parmenidean one
3) There is motion

Whereas Empedocles had maintained that everything that exists in the visible world is made up of a mixture of one of the four roots (the elements), Anaxagoras claimed that everything contained miniscule and infinite bits of all the stuffs. We just saw things like flesh or hair as flesh or hair because the flesh bits dominated in flesh and the hair bits dominated in hair.

Whereas Empedocles had Love and Strife as the causation for the mixing of the bits, Anaxagoras had "Mind". Mind is material and it sets all things in order. But, the Mind is purely mechanical in nature and doesn't necessarily mean intention when setting all things in order.

In the beginning, according to Anaxagoras, all the bits and stuffs were so together it would have been impossible to see any particular stuff. Then Mind entered in, creating a vortex and separated off the many stuffs. As the process of separation continues eventually all the infinitely tiny stuffs will be sorted out completely, that just hasn't happened yet.

The problem with Anaxagoras is that while he (like Empedocles) was able to arrive at the problems plaguing Greek thought up to this point, namely 'How does the world get to where its at now, a quantitatively plural amount of things from the qualitatively single stuff?' But, because of the numerous difficulties in his system of separation he introduced an idea of an infinitely plural stuff and killed some of the scientific spirit that was going on in the Greek thought.

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972

Anaxagoras - Chapter 8

-An Ionian from Clazomenae circa 500 BC
-Introduced Athens to philosophy and lived there from 462-432 BC
-Was brought to Athens by Pericles
-Left Athens after the Athenians charged him with some charges amounting to sacrilege
-held that everything was infinitely divisible
-held that every small portion of matter contains some of everything and that things appear as what they contain the most of
-believed that mind entered into the living things and differentiated them from the dead things
-Mind had the power over all things living
-Mind is infinite and mixed with nothing
-mind is the source of motion
-mind is uniform
-"Man's apparent superiority [to animals] is due to the fact that he has hands; all seeming differences of intelligence are really due to bodily differences" (Russell, 63).
-he was probably an atheist
-rejected necessity and chance as being causes, but also did not subscribe to providence

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

-a follower of Anaximenes, he attempted to revive the Milesian's theories in a post-Parmenidean world of thought
-wasn't really interested in politics and euphemistically called the heavens his country. He also is reported to have said after somebody asked him about dying in a foreign country, 'Wherever you start from, the descent to Hades is the same'.
-believed the sun to be a fiery mass
-believed there to be inhabitants on the moon
-thought is what all things moved by
-"Anaxagoras' universe began as undifferentiated mass. Thought, or mind, worked on the mass, and the articulated world developed. The materials of Anaxagoras' world are uniform and continuous stuffs, not collections of particles or atoms. The cosmic development does not, and cannot, produce any 'pure' stuffs - every stuff always contains a 'portion' or 'share', however small, of every other stuff" (Barnes, 189).
-the mind is unmixed with anything else. it is independent and pure. It has knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; hence, it can control the other stuffs.

-thought has power over whatever exists

-everything shares a portion with everything else

-"each single thing is and was most clearly those things of which it contains most" (Barnes, 193).

-believed in multiple worlds, which were bound up together before the separating process began 

-there is no creation or destruction, only separation (dissociation) and coming together (association)

-argued against the senses: "we are not capable of discerning the truth by reason of their feebleness" (Barnes, 197).