Philosophy
c. 500 to 428 BC, Clazomenae
Mind (Nous) orders the cosmos; in everything there is a portion of everything.
Start learning Anaxagoras →Anaxagoras was the first to set Nous - Mind - at the origin of the world: an intelligent ordering principle that set the primordial chaos spinning and arranged all things. With it, reason itself enters the explanation o…
Anaxagoras solved the puzzle of how things change - how bread becomes flesh, how the many arise - with a radical thesis: there is a portion of everything in everything , infinitely divisible, and a thing is simply whate…
Anaxagoras declared the sun a vast incandescent rock, the moon an earth lit by reflected light, and the heavens made of the same stuff as the ground. For naturalising the gods of the sky, he was tried for impiety in Ath…
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 c…
In making Nous ‘mixed with nothing,’ pure and separate from all matter, Anaxagoras drew the first sharp line between mind and the material world - opening the deepest problem in philosophy: how mind relates…
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