Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
c. 500-428 BC · Early Greek Thought · Prominent
Anaxagoras was an Ionian Presocratic who carried the study of nature to Athens, where he told the Athenians that the sun is a red hot stone, a glowing lump of rock. He held that every thing contains a portion of every other thing, so nothing is ever pure. Outside that mixture stands Nous, cosmic Mind, the one principle that takes the whole primordial jumble and sets it turning into order.
Signature
The position Anaxagoras is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- mildly leans Beyond Brain
- Theology
- Panentheism / Pantheism
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- mildly leans Beyond Brain (67 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- leans Realism (29 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (71 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- mildly between Unity and Multiplicity (46 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Anaxagoras refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Panentheism / Pantheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Perception
- Direct Realism / Conceptual Mediation
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Beginning of Things
- Primordial Chaos
What is the origin of reality? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Other
What is human nature?