In the middle of the fifth century BCE, a ship from Asia Minor cuts across the Aegean, its hull packed with grain, oil, and pottery. Among the passengers stands a man in his early forties, with the face of someone used to thinking more than talking. He is leaving his home city, Clazomenae, in Ionia, heading toward Athens, which is not yet the cultural capital it will become, but already a restless, ambitious democracy. This man brings with him a different way of thinking about the world, one born on the Ionian coast but sharpened in solitude: a vision in which the cosmos is made not of a single substance but of infinitely many kinds of stuff, all present everywhere, shaped and ordered by a cosmic Mind. His name is Anaxagoras, and he will become, for a brief but intense period, the philosopher of Pericles’ Athens.Anaxagoras was born around 500 BCE in Clazomenae, a small Ionian city on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Ionia had already produced the pioneering natural philosophers: Thales with his water, Anaximander with his apeiron, Anaximenes with his air, Heraclitus with his ever-living fire. These men, in different ways, had tried to explain the world’s diversity by pointing to a single underlying stuff or principle. Anaxagoras inherited their ambition but not their simplicity. When he looked at nature, he saw not one thing in many forms, but countless distinct qualities and structures—flesh and bone, blood and bark, gold and stone, hair and leaf. He asked: can all of this really be the unfolding of one homogenous thing? And if not, how can we think of a world in which everything seems to come from everything else without violating Parmenides’ injunction that nothing comes from nothing?Selenius Media

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