ANAXAGORAS

                 

Anaxagoras born 510 BC died circa 428 BC was a Greek philosopher remembered for his cosmology and for his discovery of the true cause of eclipses.  He even associated with the Athenian statesman Pericles.

 

About 480 BC, Anaxagoras moved from Anatolia to Athens, then becoming the center of Greek culture and brought from Ionia the new practice of philosophy and the spirit of scientific energy.

 

After 30 years of residence in Athens, he was persecuted on the charge of impiety for asserting that the sun is an incandescent stone, somewhat larger than the region of the Peloponnese.  The attack on him was intended as an indirect blow on Pericles and although Pericles managed to save him, Anaxagoras was compelled to leave Athens. He spent his last years of retirement at Lampsacus.

 

Only a few fragments of Anaxagoras’ writings have been preserved and several different interpretations of his work have been made.  The basic features, however, are clear.  His cosmology grew out of earlier Greek thinkers who tried to explain the physical universe by an assumption of a single fundamental element. 

 

Parmenides, however, assessed that such an assumption could not account for movement and changes, whereas Empedocles sought to resolve this difficulty by posting four basic ingredients.  Anaxagoras posited an infinite number.  Unlike his predecessor who had chosen such elements as heat and water as the basic substance, Anaxagoras those found in living bodies such as flesh, bone, bark, and leaf.

 

Otherwise, he asked how should flesh come from what is not flesh.  He also accounted for biology changes, in which substances appear under new manifestations as men eat and drink, flesh, bone, and hair growth.   In order to explain the great amount of diversity of change he said that “there is a portion of everything i.e. that is of every element stuff in everything “but” each is and was most manifestly those things of which there is mast.”

 

The most original aspect of Anaxagoras’ system was his doctrine of “nous” (mind or reason).  The cosmos was formed by the mind in two stages: first by a revolving and mixing process that still continues and second by the development of living things.  In the first all the darkness came together to form the night, “the fluid” came together to form the oceans and soon with other elements.  The same process of attraction of “like to like” occurred in the second stage when flesh and other elements were formed together mind in large amounts. This stage took place by animal and plant seeds inherent in the original mixture. The growth of living things, according to Anaxagoras, depend on the power of the mind within the organizing and it enables them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances.  For this concept of Anaxagoras was commended by Aristotle.  Both Plato and Aristotle, however, objected that his notion of mind did not include a view that the mind acts ethically  for "the best interest of the universe,"   

PLEASE DO BE VACCINATED AGAINST COVID - 19 SO THT YOUR BELOVED FAMILIES, FRIENDS, THE WORLD AND YOU WILL REMAIN HEALTHY AND SAFE BECAUSE COVID IS DEATH.