Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras was a fifth-century BCE Greek philosopher who held that matter is infinitely divisible and that Nous, or Mind, initiated cosmic order.
Nous: In Anaxagorean philosophy, Nous is the pure, unmixed Mind that initiates cosmic motion and orders the universe. This is the ordering principle Anaxagoras introduced to explain how cosmic mixture began to separate.
Cosmogony: Cosmogony is an account of how the universe or cosmos originated. Anaxagoras describes an initial mixture set into motion and progressively ordered.
Clazomenae: Clazomenae was an ancient Greek city in Ionia, on the western coast of Asia Minor. Ancient sources identify it as Anaxagoras’s birthplace.
Teleology: Teleology explains things by reference to ends, purposes, or the functions they serve. Anaxagoras’s Nous suggests an intelligent source of order, though his explanations often rely on physical causes.
Homeomeries: In ancient accounts of Anaxagoras, homeomeries are matter-parts whose portions retain the same character as the wholes they compose. They express how like-stuff persists within every mixture, though the label is associated with later interpreters.
Cosmic vortex: A cosmic vortex is a rotating motion proposed in ancient cosmology to organize matter and form celestial bodies. For Anaxagoras, rotation spreads outward from Nous’s initial impulse and separates the mixture.
Athens in the fifth century BCE: Athens in the fifth century BCE was a major Greek city whose civic, artistic, and intellectual life expanded greatly. Anaxagoras spent much of his career in the city and became associated with its elite.
Socrates: Socrates was an Athenian philosopher whose questioning shaped later Greek ethics and philosophy. In Plato’s account, Socrates initially hoped Anaxagoras’s appeal to Mind would explain why things are arranged as they are.
Pluralism (philosophy): Philosophical pluralism is the view that reality contains multiple fundamental kinds or principles rather than one. Anaxagoras explains the world through indefinitely many ingredients instead of a single basic substance.
Qualitative change: Qualitative change is a change in an object's properties without requiring its underlying matter to vanish. Anaxagoras treats apparent generation and destruction as changes in mixtures, not creation from nothing.