11 Deep Dive Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras is a pre-Socratic philosopher who lived in the 5th century BCE, known for introducing the notion of Nous, or Mind, as a cosmic principle governing the universe. He hailed from Clazomenae in present-day Turkey and spent significant time in Athens, where his ideas greatly influenced not only contemporary thinkers like Socrates and Plato, but also the development of Western philosophy. Therefore, understanding Anaxagoras is essential for grasping the evolution of thought regarding natural phenomena and moral philosophy.

What Anaxagoras is particularly famous for is his radical conception of the cosmos, where he proposed a world composed of infinitely divisible particles. This idea holds that everything is made up of small, infinitely tiny fragments, which he termed "seeds" or "seeds of all things." Thes ...