ANAXAGORAS. – Greek philosopher, b. at Clazomenae c. 499 BC. He lived in Athens for 30 years and enjoyed the friendship of Pericles. In 432 he was accused by the latter’s opponents of impiety for having taught that the sun was a burning stone. Condemned to a fine, he retired to Lampsacus, where he d. in 428. He expounded his doctrines in a prose work, of which 24 fragments survive.
Anaxagoras shared with Empedocles and Leucippus the problem of reconciling becoming with the immutability of being proclaimed by Parmenides (B 17). Like Empedocles, he resolved it by affirming the quantitative and qualitative multiplicity of being and explaining coming-to-be and passing-away through the union and separation of parts. Yet he made this multiplicity infinite, elevating to the status of original substance everything that, when divided, remains qualitatively the same. He called such substances “seeds”; later writers, drawing on a term proper to Aristotle’s terminology, called them “homoiomeries” (first attested in Lucretius, I, 830). Infinitely divisible (B 1; 3), they are all commingled and present in everything (B 6; 11–12), yet each possessing the properties of Parmenidean being, they are in themselves immobile. Hence the necessity—common also to Empedocle—of positing an external motive cause, hitherto conceived as inherent in matter. Empedocles had recourse to two mythical forces, Love and Strife. Anaxagoras made Mind (Nous) the principle of motion, understanding it as a “most subtle” substance that alone remains unmixed and possesses, in addition to motion, knowledge (B 12). Scattered, in the precosmic period, throughout the infinite and commingled mass of “seeds” (B 11), Mind becomes localized, once the worlds are constituted, in living beings (ψυχή): plants, animals, man (B 12; A 100–102). Yet it is only in man that it attains the full development of its powers, through a process of gradual elevation (theory of progress), which, by accumulating experience in memory, leads to wisdom and, through the use of the organs with which he is endowed (A 102), to the arts (B 21b).
Like that which, in its knowledge, presupposes the order of things along with their form and does not create it—a principle common to all Greek thought—and unlike the “divine” (τὸ δέον) of earlier philosophy, which “comprehends” (πρεπέχει) the whole and “governs” it according to a law of necessity that is at once providence and “fate” (εἰμάρμενη): cf. Diels, *Vorsokratiker*, Ind., Mind is a substance among others and is “comprehended” by them, not comprehending them (B 14). As a cosmogonic principle, therefore, it can exert no action other than accidental and mechanical. In fact, it merely gives, once and for all and “at an indeterminate point,” the initial impetus to rotary motion, which, received by the adjacent substances and propagated by them to others, brings about, according to the qualities of each, the observations and groupings from which worlds are mechanically constituted and continue to be constituted (B 12; 4).
In perfect consistency with all this and with full awareness, Anaxagoras denied the *hieromoné* (A 66), which, given the technical value the word had in the usage of theologians and philosophers of the 6th century, amounted to a deliberate rejection of providence and with it of divinity. Together with that of Leucippus, it was the first atheistic explanation of the universe and caused a scandal. The theory of progress, later developed by Democritus, passed to Epicurus and was first expounded by Sophocles (Antigone, 332 ff.) and Euripides (Suppliants, 195 ff.). Considered impious, it was likewise condemned by Plato (Laws, 889d). Thus Euripides has one of his characters condemn “the impious tongue” of one who “teaches to consider god his own soul” (fr. 913; cf. 1018). The philosophical reaction came from Diogenes of Apollonia, who, returning beyond Parmenides to the *fisici* of the earliest period, attributed to Anaximenes’ air the faculty of “thought,” proclaiming it the god that embraces and governs all things.
The influence of Anaxagoras on the culture of 5th-century Athens was enormous. It fell to Socrates, with his discovery of the universal, to lay the foundations that enabled Plato and Aristotle to rediscover the nature of the soul and of God.