Saturday 8 September 2012

Anaxagoras/أنكساغوراس

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.
Anaxagoras


Biography Nationality: Greek
Born: 500 BC
Died: 428 BC
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/anaxagoras.html#O9I6voQpsObTvAoz.99



WIKIPEDIA
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras (Ancient Greek: Ἀναξαγόρας, Anaxagoras, "lord of the assembly"; c. 500 – 428 BC) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than the Peloponnese. According to Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, he fled to Lampsacus due to a backlash against his pupil Pericles.
Anaxagoras is famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous (mind), as an ordering force. He regarded material substance as an infinite multitude of imperishable primary elements, referring all generation and disappearance to mixture and separation, respectively.


Cosmological theory

Anaxagoras, depicted as a medieval scholar in the Nuremberg Chronicle
All things have existed from the beginning. But originally they existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in number and inextricably combined. All things existed in this mass, but in a confused and indistinguishable form. There were the seeds (spermata) or miniatures of wheat and flesh and gold in the primitive mixture; but these parts, of like nature with their wholes (the homoiomereiai of Aristotle), had to be eliminated from the complex mass before they could receive a definite name and character.
Mind arranged the segregation of like from unlike; panta chremata en omou eita nous elthon auta diekosmese. This peculiar thing, called Mind (Nous), was no less illimitable than the chaotic mass, but, unlike the logos of Heraclitus, it stood pure and independent (mounos ef eoutou), a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life.[citation needed]




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