Anaxagoras Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Anaxagoras was born around 500 BCE in Clazomenae, an Ionian city on the western coast of Asia Minor. He lived during a period when Greek thinkers from Ionia were developing naturalistic accounts of the world, following earlier figures such as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. The political context of his youth included the Persian Wars and the rise of Athenian power, factors that drew many intellectuals toward Athens. Ancient traditions place Anaxagoras among those who left Ionia and carried the Ionian style of inquiry into the mainland Greek world.

Move to Athens and Intellectual Milieu
Anaxagoras spent a significant part of his adult life in Athens, where he became associated with Pericles. Sources describe him as a figure welcomed into Pericles' circle at a time when the city attracted diverse thinkers and artists. In this environment he would have encountered, directly or indirectly, Sophists such as Protagoras, visiting philosophers like Zeno of Elea, and creative figures including the sculptor Phidias and the playwright Euripides. Later writers linked the young Socrates to discussions of Anaxagoras' work, an association echoed in Plato's dialogues, though precise personal connections remain uncertain. Ancient biographical traditions also name Archelaus as a pupil of Anaxagoras and as a teacher of Socrates, a lineage that underscores the role of Anaxagoras in the intellectual genealogy of classical Athens.

Philosophical Vision: Nous and the Structure of Nature
Anaxagoras is best known for introducing Nous, Mind, as a distinct and initiating cause in nature. In the fragments of his prose treatise, later authors quote him describing a primordial mixture in which all things were together until Nous began a separating and ordering motion. He held that nothing truly comes to be from nothing or wholly perishes; instead, apparent generation and destruction are reconfigurations within an all-encompassing mixture. Every substance contains portions of every other, and recognizable qualities arise from predominance rather than exclusive purity. Aristotle later called these constituents homoiomeries, a term not used by Anaxagoras himself but helpful in discussing his view that things like flesh, bone, and seed are divisible into like parts.

Nous, in his account, is separate, pure, and the finest of all things, capable of initiating motion without being confused with the mixture it organizes. This sets Anaxagoras apart from earlier monists and from Empedocles' theory of four roots governed by Love and Strife. It also differentiates his position from the later atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, who posited indivisible bodies moving in void. In dialogue with Parmenides' challenge to change and plurality, Anaxagoras preserved the permanence of being by denying absolute coming-to-be while still explaining the world of change through mixture and separation.

Natural Philosophy and Cosmology
Anaxagoras offered natural explanations for celestial and meteorological phenomena. He described the sun as a fiery stone and the stars as burning masses carried by the rotation initiated by Nous. He argued that the moon does not emit its own light but reflects the light of the sun, and he offered accounts of the causes of solar and lunar eclipses. He suggested that the moon possessed features like mountains and valleys, thereby approaching a physical, earth-like understanding of the lunar body. Later writers tied his cosmology to the famous fall of a meteorite near Aegospotami, seeing in that event support for his claim that stones can exist in the heavens; whether he predicted such an occurrence is not established by reliable evidence.

These views, which dispensed with mythic narratives in favor of physical causes, were part of the larger Ionian effort to render the world intelligible. In Athens, such explanations drew attention not only from philosophers but also from dramatists and public figures, who were navigating the intersection of traditional piety and new learning.

Conflict, Trial, and Exile
Ancient accounts report that Anaxagoras faced a charge of impiety in Athens. The details and exact date vary across sources, but the episode is often placed in the context of political attacks on Pericles, whose associates, including Phidias and Aspasia, also came under scrutiny. According to these traditions, Anaxagoras' explanations of the sun and moon as natural bodies played a role in the accusation. He left Athens and spent his final years in Lampsacus on the Hellespont. He died there around 428 BCE. The people of Lampsacus honored him; later reports even say they established a memorial and observed a local commemoration, details that reflect the esteem he enjoyed despite the controversies of his Athenian period.

Writings and Transmission
Anaxagoras wrote in prose, and his principal work was known as On Nature. The text itself does not survive intact. What is known of it comes through quotations and reports in later authors, including Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and the late antique commentator Simplicius. The surviving fragments preserve core claims: the original mixture of all things, the initiating and ordering role of Nous, and the principle that everything contains portions of everything else. These pieces suggest a method that combines bold cosmological hypothesis with careful attempts to account for observable phenomena in consistent terms.

Reception and Influence
Plato presents Anaxagoras in a probing light. In the Phaedo, Socrates recounts his early hope that Anaxagoras' appeal to Nous would explain the world in terms of what is best, only to find a largely mechanical cosmology; this critique is part of Plato's own search for teleological explanation. Aristotle engaged Anaxagoras extensively, adopting and revising analyses of change, causation, and mixture, and questioning how a pure Nous interacts with a mixed world. Theophrastus recorded further doxographical details that shaped later understanding.

In the wider cultural sphere, Anaxagoras' rational treatment of the heavens resonated with the intellectual climate that surrounded Pericles. Later tradition linked Euripides with Anaxagoras, reflecting the broader traffic between philosophical speculation and dramatic exploration of human and divine order. Whether as a teacher of Archelaus or as a touchstone in Socratic and Aristotelian reflection, Anaxagoras stands at a pivotal point where Ionian physics entered the civic culture of Athens.

Legacy
Anaxagoras left a durable imprint through two intertwined ideas: that mind is a distinct, ordering principle in nature, and that the world of multiplicity and change can be understood by mixture, separation, and predominance rather than by absolute generation and destruction. His astronomy and cosmology exemplified the move to natural explanation that characterized early Greek science. Through the testimony of Plato, Aristotle, and their successors, his arguments continued to shape debates about causation, matter, and intellect. Although the precise contours of his life are outlined only in broad strokes, the arc from Clazomenae to Athens and on to Lampsacus mirrors the transmission of Ionian inquiry into the heart of classical Greek thought and beyond.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Anaxagoras, under the main topics: Wisdom - Peace - Mortality - Reason & Logic.

Other people realated to Anaxagoras: Parmedides (Philosopher), Empedocles (Philosopher)

• -450 On Nature (Philosophical treatise)

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