Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1)

by Peter S. Adamson

notice that each atom in itself is similar to the Eleatic single being. Okay, they move, but they are indivisible, unchanging, and eternal.

Democritus took a more skeptical line, because he was impressed by the fact that the underlying reality of atoms and void is not evident to our senses. Thus he criticized the senses, saying in effect that things in the phenomenal world—the giraffes and tennis-courts—are unreal, because what is really real is the atomic universe we can’t see. He put this in a famous aphorism: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color, but really atoms and void”

Here Democritus has hit upon a perennial issue in philosophy. Scientific theories often tell us that the world is very different from what it seems at first.

one might ask whether the scientific theories replace the phenomenal world with another world, grasped through more specialized methods, or whether the phenomenal world is retained, while also getting explained by the scientific theory.

Democritus takes the first option.1 He thinks that science banishes our familiar everyday reality, rather than securing our familiar reality by explaining it.

Democritus makes this very clear when he contrasts the deliverances of the mind to the deliverances of the senses (§554). Mind tells us about the atomic theory, and thus undermines what the senses tell us, even though sensible reality is supposed to be grounded in events at the atomic level.

Anaxagoras offered an account of how the cosmos is produced and ordered by Mind,

a kind of duality in Anaxagoras’ philosophy. On the one hand, there is his exalted Mind, the purest and most subtle of things, which plays a central role in forming the cosmos. On the other hand, there is his fascination with physical processes, and above all his

startling theory of universal mixture: everything is in everything, according to Anaxagoras, except for Mind. Anyone trying to come to grips with Anaxagoras should try to do what Socrates wasn’t able to. That is, they should try to understand not only the theory of Mind and the theory of mixed physical substances, but also how Mind and the physical substances interact.

sounds like he is talking about god, or a god, when he describes Mind. He says that it is infinite and controls everything that lives (§476). This may recall to us Xenophanes’ version of God or even Heraclitus’ version of fire.

There’s a grand tradition in both philosophy and religion of invoking god, or the gods, to explain the fact that the world looks so well designed.

even the bad things in life seem to be designed to make life better. Socrates assumed that this is, roughly,

where Anaxagoras was heading when he put Mind in charge of the cosmos.

the fragment that tells us about Mind controlling things says that it controls living things, so maybe giraffes and people who can step on rocks, but not the rocks that the people are stepping on. His idea seems to be not that Mind is responsible for how well designed things are, but for the special abilities of things like people, animals, and perhaps plants. He says that of the things that have Mind, some have a greater share and some a lesser share.

explain why some things can think, see, and so on, whereas others can’t. We humans get a healthy portion of Mind, rocks don’t get any. In short, it sounds more like Anaxagoras’ Mind is an ingredient or a power which is distributed unequally through the universe.

universal mixture. Before the cosmos was formed, Anaxagoras says, there was nothing but Mind and another infinite substance in which all other things were mixed together (§467). However, there were, in amongst this mixture, what he calls “seeds” (§468). These seeds were the beginnings of later, distinctive substances like, for example, air or water. Only Mind stands outside this mixture. It must be over and above the things it is going to control, so it alone is, as he says, “unmixed” (§476). Furthermore,

Mind has the important job of kicking off the formation of the cosmos. It somehow initiates a cosmic rotation, in which the infinite mixture of stuff starts to spin around (§§476–8, 488–90). As the rotation goes on, the seeds of lighter things are sifted out towards the edges, and become air and the fiery stuff of the heavens, while the seeds of moist and dense things stay towards the middle.

we already saw in Anaximenes this idea that the bodies in the middle of the cosmos, where we are, collect there because they are dense, whereas air and fire are rarefied and light. It’s almost as if Anaxagoras has put this together with Xenophanes’ God, who just by thinking “shakes all things.”

Even though the seeds are separated out by the rotation that Mind sets in motion, nothing apart from Mind is ever completely separated. Instead, as he puts it in his most famous slogan, “everything is in everything”

You might remember that for Parmenides and his followers motion and change were impossible, because for anything to come into being it would have to come from non-being, but there is no non-being. Aristotle suggests that Anaxagoras accepted part of this reasoning. He agreed that nothing could come from absolute non-being, and yet, like the atomists, he refused to accept that nothing ever really changes or moves.

Anaxagoras, rather ingeniously, suggests instead that absolute change is not required because everything is already everything else.

He’s happy to accept, in the face of Zeno’s paradoxes, that you can take any material body and divide it, divide it again, and so on and so on infinitely (§472). But every portion of that body, no matter how small, will still contain all things.

every single material object or part of an object, no matter how small or large, contains all the ingredients that make up the universe. You can’t separate out any one ingredient to get, say, pure and unmixed bone or flesh. As we saw, only Mind is ever unmixed.

if all the ingredients are in every portion of everything, why doesn’t everything look the same? It should all be one homogeneous mass, with no differentiation between cheese and bone, or anything else. But this objection is easy to answer. Even if all ingredients are present in a given chunk of the world, they might be present in different proportions.

We might say that there are “trace elements” of other things

Apparently this sort of predominance has always been present, because there were “seeds” of things already in the infinite mass that Mind began to rotate.

Another thing we might wonder is, what exactly is the list of the ingredients? Is it really the case that everything is in everything?

Some have thought that he was working with a very short list of “ingredients,” which in fact don’t look much like ingredients at all.

These would be things like hot, cold, rare, and dense.

This would be in keeping with other Pre-Socratic philosophers, and even some later thinkers like Aristotle, who speak of things like “the hot” and “the cold” as kinds of stuff rather than measurable properties.

Other interpreters find this version of Anaxagoras harder to swallow

This doesn’t need to mean that the ingredients included more complicated things, like plants, animals, and humans,

he seems to have had in mind the simplest materials out of which such things are made. In the case of the Eiffel Tower this would be metal, in the case of a giraffe it would be good old bone, flesh, and blood.

With this theory, Anaxagoras put on the table a philosophical problem which was going to worry philosophers for many generations to come: the problem of mixture.

this problem was at the heart of ancient attempts to understand the nature of material objects.

According to this second answer, it is indeed possible for one body to be completely mixed or fused with another. In fact, the Stoics said it was possible for a single drop of wine to mix with the entire ocean, so that every portion of the ocean, no matter how small, would have some of the wine in it.

Anaxagoras, then, brings together many of the themes we have seen in other Pre-Socratic philosophers, but he offers a bridge to Socrates and post-Socratic philosophy as well. With Anaxagoras we have brought philosophy to Athens, seen another response to Parmenides, and also been reminded of the grand cosmic theories of the Milesians. Along with the Eleatics and the atomists, Anaxagoras exemplifies the ambitious system-building that we find in fifth-century BC philosophy up until Socrates, and even during Socrates’ own lifetime, for instance with the development of Leucippus’ atomism at the hands of Democritus.

As with the atomists and Anaxagoras, one of the main worries for Empedocles is how change is possible, despite the arguments that Parmenides and his followers gave for the impossibility of change. We’ve seen that, in their own ways, the atomists and Anaxagoras sort of agreed with the Eleatics that absolute change can’t happen: nothing comes to be from complete and utter non-being. Rather, what happens is that the things which already exist, whether this

means Anaxagoras’ infinite mixture or the atomists’ infinity of unchanging atoms, alter or recombine in different ways. This is Empedocles’ solution too. He says, echoing Parmenides, that in a way nothing ever changes. The basic building-blocks of the cosmos, which Empedocles called “roots” but which Aristotle and later philosophers will call “elements,” are always the same. They just get separated and combined in different ways, which yields the universe we see around us (§349).

The roots, or elements, are air, earth, f...

Empedocles was the first person to establish these as the basic ingredients of the world.

there are two someones, or two somethings, in charge.

Empedocles calls them Love and Strife. These two principles, which we might think of as cosmic forces, are ultimately responsible for the formation of plants, animals, stars—the whole cosmos—out of the four roots (§§349, 355, 360). They play something like the role that Mind plays in the cosmology of Anaxagoras, except that, of course, in Anaxagoras Mind has no other force opposing it. The fact that Empedocles has two principles gives him the opportunity to put forward a grandiose and influential idea: his theory of cosmic cycles.

According to this theory, there is a kind of waxing and waning in the power of both Love and Strife. When Love is completely dominant, all the four elements are mixed together in total peace and harmony. Empedocles describes the cosmos in this condition as a sphere (§§357–8), which might remind us of the spherical one being in Parmenides. Unlike Parmenide...

elements are sifted out from one another (§360). Ultimately the elements become completely separate, so that all the fire is gathered together, all the water gathered somewhere else, and the same for air and earth. Obviously, when the cosmos is dominated totally by Love or by Strife, there will be no people, animals, or plants. It’s only when we are somewhere in between these moments of total domination that things get really interesting. A cosmos like ours results when Strife has broken down the unified oneness of Love (the “sphere”), but not pulled it apart com...

He says that animals emerge in stages.

Without an explanation of inherited features, Empedocles cannot really tell us why it is the so-called “suitable” animals that survive.

A long-standing point of debate among Empedocles scholars is what, if anything, his story of cosmic cycles and organic generation might have to do with his theory of reincarnation.5 The former looks like Anaxagorean natural philosophy, the latter like Pythagorean religion. As we’ve seen, Empedocles claimed to be a god banished to this world. He believes that he and other gods have become lesser beings, called “spirits” or “demons” (daimones). These spirits then come to be trapped in fleshly bodies (§§402–7). Ultimately they can rise back to divine status, by becoming outstanding humans (like “prophets” or “doctors”) and then escaping from this world of mortality.

confirms a link between the reincarnation cycle and the cosmic cycle.

On the one hand there is the material process undergone by the elements, on the other, the more spiritual process each spirit undergoes,