ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 6: ANAXAGORAS
ANAXAGORAS:
- beginning of Athenian philosophy (no longer colonies)
- part of Percelean circle (Sophocles, Protagoras)
- exiled for contradicting religion
- beginnings with Parmenides & Empedocles (rejection of generation, aggregation, etc.)
- multiple principles: not one, seeds (spermata), infinite in variety, infinitely divisible
Seeds:
- in the beginning everything was together, mixture of all things, infinitely small
- many things of all sorts in each thing
- all seeds are different from each other
- some event began the aggregation of the seeds and the emergence of properties proper
- seeds hold the properties
- everything that comes to be is already in the seeds themselves
- atom-esque → but infinitely divisible, and all different from each other
- everything is in everything, but a rock is a rock because it has rock seeds as its predominant
- seeds of gods, of rocks, of hot, of cold…
- properties and substances are ontologically the same
- Parmenides: everything that comes to be already is
From Undifferentiated Mass to Cosmos:
- Nous: cosmic mind (first rational principle): mover, knower
- vortex movement that breaks unity, introduces differentiation via the Nous
- Nous is a rational, knowing body/agent, only this can explain the world
- A&P also have a Nous, but its incorporeal and transcendent
H: order arises from strife
A: order arises from a rational agent
Plato’s Phaedo: if the primary principle is non-rational, the world is simply a necessity; if its a rational principle, then the world was made in the best way possible
- but Anaxagoras does not use it as a cause proper (doesn’t explain why Earth is the way it is with it)
- Anaxagoras ends up confusing necessary conditions (the fundamental requirements for…, i.e. having legs) and true causes (the actual cause of a given event, i.e. me deciding to sit down)
- almost a rational cause reduced to materiality