Anaxagoras

From Philosopedia

Anaxagoras (c. 500—428 B.C.E.)

A personal friend of Pericles, Anaxagoras (ˌanəkˈsagərəs; ˌanak-) was found guilty of impiety for asserting that the sun is “a mass of red-hot metal . . . larger than the Peloponnesus,” thus conflicting with current religious thought.

J. M. Robertson calls him “the first freethinker historically known to have been legally prosecuted and condemned for his freethought.” (Philolaos was prosecuted but not condemned.) According to Robertson, he taught that the moon is a fiery (or earthy) solid body having in it plains and mountains and valleys, “this while asserting that infinite mind was the source and introducer of all the motion in the infinite universe; infinite is extent and infinitely divisible.” He also taught that the mythical personages of the poets were mere abstractions invested with name and gender. Athenians saw no blasphemy in his saying that Gê (Gaia) or Dêmêter was the earth, for to them the earth was a goddess. But Anaxagoras challenged the divinity of the sun. The trouble, then, lay rather in his negative than in his positive assertion. He is reputedly the first Greek who wrote a book in prose.

Although Anaxagoras was a freethinker according to Robertson, he was cited as being a theist in Shelley’s “A Refutation of Deism.” Joseph McCabe notes that Anaxagoras found - not unnaturally at that time—

• that the materialistic philosophy of the Ionic School was not satisfying and he introduced Reason or Mind (Nous) into the Universe. This was the beginning of the ‘Design Argument’ for the existence of God, which Socrates and Plato developed and modern theists have used so extensively, but Anaxagoras did not mean a personal God. The irony of his life is that in spite of this service to mysticism he was under the protection of Pericles, for impiety; and the particular impiety that annoyed the Athenians was to say that the stars were white-hot material bodies, not the abodes of spirits.”

{BDF; CE; CL; ER; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}

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