Anaxagoras
Mind orders the cosmos. He brought philosophy to Athens and was exiled for saying the sun is a hot rock, not a god.
Anaxagoras came from Ionia to Athens and became the first philosopher to live and teach there. He proposed that an infinite number of seeds make up all things, and that Nous (Mind) set the cosmos in motion. He was a friend of Pericles. The Athenians put him on trial for impiety because he taught that the sun is a mass of burning metal, not a deity. He was convicted and exiled. He spent his last years in Lampsacus.
What survives
His book is lost. 5 lines survive, each because a later writer quoted it.
Places
Ideas
Words
“All things were together. Then Mind came and arranged them in order.”
“The sun is a hot stone, larger than the Peloponnese.”
“Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing. It is the finest of all things and the purest, and it holds all knowledge about everything and the greatest power.”
“The sun is a fiery mass of stone, larger than the Peloponnese.”
Works
Life & Moments
Philosophy Comes to Athens
Arrived in Athens from Ionia and became the first philosopher to teach there. He was a close associate of Pericles.
Arrives in Athens as first resident philosopher
Around 480 BCE, Anaxagoras left Clazomenae on the Ionian coast and settled in Athens: the first philosopher, as far as we know, to make the city his permanent home. Athens was not yet the intellectual center it would become. He helped make it one. He brought with him the habits of Ionian inquiry: careful observation, skepticism toward myth, a belief that the world could be explained on its own terms. He would stay for roughly thirty years.
Teacher of Pericles and the Athenian circle
By around 460 BCE, Anaxagoras was at the center of the most important intellectual circle in Athens. Pericles was his student and friend, close enough that his enemies later used Anaxagoras as a weapon against him. Euripides may have learned from him. The tragedian's plays carry traces of his ideas: the role of mind in ordering chaos, the indifference of the cosmos to human hope. Anaxagoras taught that Nous, mind, had set the original whirl of matter in motion, then stepped back. The universe runs on its own. He watched it with clear eyes.
Trial for Impiety
Charged with impiety for claiming the sun is a hot rock, not a god. Convicted and exiled from Athens. Pericles could not save him.
Tried for impiety
Around 450 BCE, Anaxagoras was put on trial in Athens for impiety. The charge centered on his claim that the sun was not the god Helios but a mass of incandescent rock, larger than the Peloponnese. The moon, he said, was made of earth and reflected the sun's light. These were not casual observations, they were a direct challenge to the religion of the city. The trial was also political. His friendship with Pericles made him a convenient target. He was convicted.
Exiled to Lampsacus
Convicted and driven from Athens around 450 BCE, Anaxagoras settled in Lampsacus, a city on the Hellespont. The citizens there welcomed him. He spent his final years teaching, and the community honored him after his death with an annual school holiday for children, a gesture that outlasted most monuments. When asked how he felt about leaving Athens and facing death, he reportedly said the road to the underworld is the same from everywhere. He had thought about the sky long enough. He was ready.
Influence
Influenced by
- Anaximenes
Anaxagoras inherited the Milesian project of explaining the whole cosmos from a single material starting point.
Influenced
- Socrates
Socrates describes in the Phaedo how he seized on Anaxagoras' book because it made Mind the cause of everything, then found it explained nothing by Mind at all. The disappointment set him looking for a different kind of explanation.
- Aristotle
Aristotle credits Anaxagoras with being the first to make intelligence rather than blind necessity responsible for order, and then faults him for wheeling it in only when nothing else would do.
