from Clazomenae in Asia minor, fifth century. Like Empedocles, from a noble family in line to rule - renounced this in order to dedicate hinself to the theoretic life. Indeed - the exemplary one
He enjoys the distinction of being the first philosopher in Athens - but not tolerated well by the Athenlans. He was accused and sentenced - freed by Pericles - went to Lampsacus. But beginning wlth his time, Athens becomes the leading philosophical city in Greece
The homoiomereiai - not four, but an infinite number of elements. There is everything in everything. The homogeneous parts, the miniscule particles of which things are made, the homoiomereiai.
If we take a thing and divide it, we will not come up with the Empedoclean roots - we will find the homoiomereiai. In the smallest part of everything there are minute parts of all other things. Panspermia - everything contains seeds of all other things.
The formation of things occurs by the union and separation of the homoiomereiai. Things differ because the homoiomereiai group themselves in various ways, according to their positions. Anaxagoras. discovers here the importance of the form, the eidos, - the arrangement of things.
(Such a conception not only anticipates the atomistic theories of Democritus and Leucippus - not to mention our own: more originally, Anaxagoras, hereby brings the Parmenidean Entity [to on] into the world - or the world into the Entity. Unity is explained in terms of everything interpenetrating everything else - but there is diversity in this unity, a radical multiplicity. While Anaxagoras., in postulating the homoiomeraiai, preserves in some measure the Parmenidean distinction between Being and appearance, he subverts this distinction by making Being into matter, in contrast with the sharp dichotomy drawn by Parmenideas between Being as known by nous and things as known by sense.
Nous - the cause of motion - probably the subtlest form of matter, but not spiritual (the concept of spirit is foreign to this epoch). The other things are not found in the nous, - but some of these, the living things, have nous.
Seems to have arrived at this doctrine through consideration of astronomy. Nous is the ruling principle of the universe - apparently connected with the origin of Greek monotheism.
Jones is basically correct, I think in his "estimate" of Anaxagoras - that first of all there is something of an advance here insofar as Anaxagoras reduces the number of "forces" from two (Love and Strife in Empedocles) to one (nous or Mind)
Secondly, Jones rightly suggests that Anaxagoras brings us around full circle. To "explain" the diversity of the world with an account of everything as containing everything, where "everything" consists of an infinite number of infinitely small seeds of everything in various mixtures - does not seem like a terribly satisfactory explanation. If it is not satisfactory - perhaps this is because the explanation seems to present us with a more complicated picture of the world, rather than with a more intelligible picture - a picture, moreover, which seems to merely replicate the world.
This suggests, that is, that what we have been seeking from the beginning - and this is Jones' point - and what we continue to seek in "explanation" is a reduction of complex diversity to simplicity and unity. Already, then, there is the implicit recognition here of what will later be formulated as Occam's razor - that good explanation accounts for the world with the fewest number of "explanatory entities," and, moreover, that such an explanation should drive in the direction of simplicity. (whatever that means)
(Introduce the shift to atomism by way of: comment on the fallacy of Parmenides' arguments; Zeno's paradoxes. Indicate especially that the latter are designed to reinforce Parmenides' point about the illusory character of motion and change.)
[on to Democritus]