From the Beginning to Plato

CHAPTER 6
Anaxagoras and the atomists
C.C.W.Taylor
ANAXAGORAS
In the course of the fifth century BC the political and cultural pre-eminence of
Athens attracted to the city a considerable number of intellectuals of various
kinds from all over the Greek world. This phenomenon, the so-called ‘Sophistic
Movement’, is fully described in the next chapter; here it suffices to point out that,
in addition to the discussions of moral and theological questions for which the
sophists are more widely known, the activities of many of them included
popularization and extension to new areas, such as the study of the origins of
civilization, of the Ionian tradition of general speculative enquiry into the natural
world (see Chapter 2). Anaxagoras stands out from his sophistic contemporaries
as a truly original thinker, who sought not merely to transmit the Ionian tradition,
but to transform it radically in a number of ways, and in so doing to enable it to
meet the challenge of Eleatic logic, which had threatened the coherence of the
cosmological enterprise.
An Ionian from Clazomenae on the central coast of Asia Minor, Anaxagoras
was a contemporary of Protagoras and Empedocles. Aristotle says (Metaphysics
984a11–12: DK 59 A 43) that he was older than the latter, and (probably) that
his writings are later than those of Empedocles (the interpretation of the crucial
sentence is disputed). It is reliably attested that he spent thirty years in Athens
and that he was closely associated with Pericles, though there is some dispute
among scholars on when the thirty years began and ended, and whether they
were a single continuous period or discontinuous. Socrates in the Phaedo (97b–
98c: DK 59 A 47) describes reading Anaxagoras’ book as (probably) quite a
young man, but implies that he was not personally acquainted with him; some
have taken this as evidence that Anaxagoras had already left Athens for good by
about the middle of the century, but the evidence is weak. It is clear that, in
common with other intellectuals, his rationalistic views on matters touching on
religion (in his case, his materialistic accounts of the nature of the sun and other
heavenly bodies) made him unpopular in certain circles, and there is a tradition
(questioned by Dover [6.6]) that he had to flee from Athens (with the assistance