Anaxagoras · Philosophy
Anaxagoras belonged to the great generation that answered Parmenides’ proof that change is impossible. By accepting eternal, uncreated ingredients and explaining all change as their mixing and separating, he saved the changing world while honouring ‘nothing comes from nothing.’
To understand Anaxagoras’ physics, you must first feel the crisis it answers. A generation earlier, Parmenides of Elea had constructed an argument of unprecedented rigour that seemed to prove the impossible: that change cannot happen. His reasoning ran like this. For something to come into being, it must come from what-is-not (since if it already was, it would not need to come to be). But ‘what-is-not’ is nothing - and from nothing, nothing can come; indeed, ‘what-is-not’ cannot even be thought or spoken of, for to think is always to think of something that is. Therefore nothing ever truly comes into being or passes away. Being simply is - ungenerated, imperishable, whole, unchanging, one. The whole world of change, growth, and decay that our senses report is, Parmenides concluded, a deception; reason proves it impossible.
This was a catastrophe for natural philosophy. The Milesians had studied a changing nature - water becoming ice, the cosmos forming, things coming to be and perishing. If Parmenides was right, there was no such nature to study; change was an illusion, and physics was a science of nothing. Every serious thinker after Parmenides had to reckon with him. You could not simply ignore the argument, because its logic seemed airtight - and its core principle, that nothing comes from nothing, was one that the natural philosophers themselves accepted. The challenge was excruciating: how do you save the obvious reality of change without violating the principle that nothing comes from nothing - the very principle Parmenides used to abolish change?
Anaxagoras was not alone in this rescue operation. He belongs to a whole generation of thinkers - the pluralists - who answered Parmenides by the same essential strategy, differing only in its details. Parmenides had argued that Being is one, undifferentiated, and unchanging. The pluralists granted him that each fundamental thing has the character of Parmenidean being - eternal, uncreated, imperishable - but denied that there is only one such being. Instead there are many: a plurality of eternal, unchanging fundamental entities, and change is their rearrangement.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned how Anaxagoras answered Parmenides: he accepted that nothing comes from nothing (so the basic ingredients are eternal and uncreated), but saved real change by recasting it as the mixing and separating of those conserved ingredients. Explain how this rescues change from Parmenides’ proof of its impossibilit…
Leads to Parmenides.
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