Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras (in Greek Ἀναξαγόρας) (500 - 428 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher who introduced the notion of nous ( νοῦς, mind or thought ) as a fundamental element of his philosophical conception.

He was born in Clazomenae (in present-day Turkey) and moved to Athens (circa 483 BC), due to the destruction and relocation of Clazomenae after the failure of the Ionian revolt against Persian rule. He was the first foreign thinker to settle in Athens.

Among his students were the Greek statesman Pericles, Archelaus, Protagoras of Abdera, Thucydides, the Greek playwright Euripides, and it is said that also Democritus and Socrates.

Anaxagoras also gave a great boost to the investigation of nature based on experience, memory and technique. He is credited with the rational explanations of eclipses and fish breathing, as well as research on the anatomy of the brain.Knowledgeable of the doctrines of Anaximenes, Parmenides, Zeno, and Empedocles, Anaxagoras had taught in Athens for some thirty years when he went into exile after being accused of impiety for suggesting that the Sun was a mass of hot iron and that the Moon was a rock. it reflected the light of the Sun and came from the Earth. He went to Ionia and settled in Lampsacus (a colony of Miletus), where, they say, he starved himself to death (Diogenes Laertius, II, 14). It is certain, in any case, that in such a place he was venerated (Aristotle, Rhet. 1398 b 16) and there must even have been a group of his followers (Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Ev., 10, 14).

Pluralistic philosophy

Anaxagoras expounded his philosophy in his Peri physeos ( On Nature ), but only fragments of his books have survived.

To explain the plurality of objects in the world endowed with different qualities, he resorts to the assumption that all things would be made up of elementary particles, which he calls "seeds" ( spermata, in Greek). Later Aristotle calls these particles by the name of homeomerism (similar parts).

According to Aristotle, Anaxagoras conceives the nous as the origin of the universe and cause of existence, but at the same time tries to explain himself and calls to find the everyday things of what happens in the world. On the other hand, he made part of his explanation of reality the concept of nous, intelligence, which, being an extremely subtle "fluid", filters through the nooks and crannies of matter, animating it with its movement. The nous penetrates some things and not others, which explains, following Anaxagoras, the existence of animated and inert objects. Plato in the Phaedo agrees with the statement that the nousit is the cause of everything and leads to order and harmony, but it disagrees with the search for material causes undertaken by Anaxagoras.

His nous doctrine was later critically adopted by Aristotle. The differences between the conceptions of one and the other can be seen with this example: for Anaxagoras, humans could become intelligent because they had hands, while for Aristotle man received hands because he had intelligence.

Teleological view

According to Marcus Tullius Cicero in his book On the Nature of the Gods, Anaxagoras was a disciple and successor of Anaximenes. And he was the first philosopher to affirm that the Universe was designed and made by the rational power of an infinite mind. In this sense, Wilhelm Dilthey has considered him the "founder of monotheism in Europe".