Tao Te Ching
Anaxagoras Ἀναξαγόρας
510 – 428 BCE
“The Copernicus and Darwin of his age”
An heroic philosopher and scientist in a time with few scientific instruments but remarkable scientific discoveries, Anaxagoras introduced the concept of Cosmic Mind, correctly explained eclipses and why the moon shines, theorized about meteors, thunder, rainbows, the sun, and stars. He developed an insightful theory for the evolution of animal and human life and helped create the foundation for Greece’s most lasting scientific insight, the atomic understanding of matter. Immortalized in literature, he became a character in Goethe’s Faust and was quoted by Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Marcel Proust, and Gore Vidal. His genius was not always appreciated though. Dante placed him in Limbo (the First Circle of Hell) and he was sentenced to death because of teaching that the sun is a mass of fire instead of a god.
Lineages
Greek Scientists
Eras
Western
Egyptian Civilization (3150 – 305 BCE)Greek Civilization (480 – 146 BCE)
The Axial Age, “The Great Leap of Being” (800 – 200 BCE)
Chinese
Eastern Zhou 東周 (770 – 256 BCE)Spring and Autumn period 春秋时代 (770 – 476 BCE)
Warring States period 春秋时代 (476 – 221 BCE)
Unlisted Sources
Fragments
Quotes by Anaxagoras (7 quotes)
“When in exile and told that the Athenians had condemned him to death because of his blasphemous scientific theories, he replied 'Nature has long since condemned both them and me.'”
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“My purpose in life? The investigation of sun, moon, and heaven.”
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“The descent to hell is the same from every place.”
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“As mind gives order to the chaos of our actions, so the World Mind gave order to the primeval seeds, setting them into a rotary vortex and guiding them toward the development of organic forms.”
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“Each one is... most manifestly those things of which there are the most in it”
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“Mind began to revolve first from a small beginning; but the revolution now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a larger still... this revolution caused a separating—the warm from the cold, the light from the dark, the dry from the moist...”
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“Because of the weakness of our senses, we can't judge the truth. What appears is a vision of the unseen... in everything there is a portion of everything.”
from Fragments
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Quotes about Anaxagoras (5 quotes)
“I eagerly acquired Anaxagoras’ books and read them as quickly as I could.”
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“The divine Anaxagoras who had altars erected to him for teaching men that the sun was bigger than the Peloponnessus, that snow was black, that the sky was of stone, affirmed that the soul sas an aerial spirit, though immortal.”
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“Anaxagoras was the first to introduce philosophy to the Athenians, the first to suggest mind as the primary cause of physical changes... and one of the influences that helped to form Socrates.”
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“PIcture Anaxagoras, who did the work of Darwin for the Greeks, and turned Pericles from a wine-pulling politician into a thinker and a statesman.”
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