Anaxagoras

Earlier this week I got ahead of myself and skipped a reading. Oops… So I’m going to backtrack and look at Anaxagoras.

Anaxagoras claims that all things are made from ingredients, or as phrased in our nifty Presocratics Reader, “homogeneous stuffs.” He explains how the ingredients function thus: “Anaxagoras says just the opposite of Empedocles about the elements. For Empedocles claims that fire and earth, and things of the same rank, are elements of bodies and that all things are compounded of them; but Anaxagoras says the opposite. For he claims that the homogeneous stuffs are elements—I mean, for instance, flesh and bone and each of the things of that sort—and that air and fire are mixtures of them and of all the other seeds; for each of them is a collection of all the invisible homogeneous stuffs.” Translation: everything is made up of ingredients that, when separated or brought together in different combinations, make up the perceivable world as we see it. Whereas Empedocles thought everything was made up of varying combinations of the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air), Anaxagoras claims that even those are formed by baser ingredients. I’ll borrow from the information in the introduction here, but apparently the Nous set forth and put in motion the original mixture of all the ingredients. From that point on, they are able to mix together to form the world as we see it.

The slip up I made with reading ahead actually worked out quite nicely, because I read Anaxagoras in the light of later theories. Leucippus and Democritus had their atomism theory that all things were made up of combinations of what they called atoms. I won’t make the automatic jump to say Leucippus and Democritus based their ideas directly off of Anaxagoras’ ingredients, but it’s interesting to see how a concept can change and develop from one philosopher to the next.