Another materialist was Anaxagoras - perhaps the most material of materialist. He was so material that they charged him with impiety, which could have been especially wrong during the time of the Peloponnesian war. Though exiled from Athens, his arguments largely influenced later thinkers and arguably laid the foundation for atomists and sophists.
I like Anaxagoras arguments of everything in the physical world coming from each other, I think his observations in medicine, bodily health, nature, and science point to the truths in his assumptions. More of Parmenides bleeds through with him because he essentially denies “reality” and points to prior data or thoughts being misleading. This is of course is a trend with those who I am now calling perspective materialist because the root of their argument is just that.
One thing that uniquely stuck out about Anaxagoras though was the idea of the Nous or Mind. First, I have to commend him for postulating on the cause of the orders of the universe since those prior had only told Homeric stories of what was or wasn’t, is or isn’t, when or why but never really how. According to Anaxagoras, the agent responsible for what he explains as the rotation and separation of the primordial mixture (that everything is) is Mind: “And when Mind began to cause motion, separating off proceeded to occur from all that was moved, and all that Mind moved was separated apart, and as things were being moved and separated apart, the rotation caused much more separating apart to occur”. In my studies and in my beliefs I always felt sternly that our minds are so deeply rooted and connected to the cosmos ironically more than we can imagine. If all of this is accepted, then maybe ghosts are real, those that have “super” cognitive powers probably do, and we really are the center of our universe. I’ll probably write more on this later, but in short Anaxagoras’ viewpoints are pretty legit to me.
I like Anaxagoras arguments of everything in the physical world coming from each other, I think his observations in medicine, bodily health, nature, and science point to the truths in his assumptions. More of Parmenides bleeds through with him because he essentially denies “reality” and points to prior data or thoughts being misleading. This is of course is a trend with those who I am now calling perspective materialist because the root of their argument is just that.
One thing that uniquely stuck out about Anaxagoras though was the idea of the Nous or Mind. First, I have to commend him for postulating on the cause of the orders of the universe since those prior had only told Homeric stories of what was or wasn’t, is or isn’t, when or why but never really how. According to Anaxagoras, the agent responsible for what he explains as the rotation and separation of the primordial mixture (that everything is) is Mind: “And when Mind began to cause motion, separating off proceeded to occur from all that was moved, and all that Mind moved was separated apart, and as things were being moved and separated apart, the rotation caused much more separating apart to occur”. In my studies and in my beliefs I always felt sternly that our minds are so deeply rooted and connected to the cosmos ironically more than we can imagine. If all of this is accepted, then maybe ghosts are real, those that have “super” cognitive powers probably do, and we really are the center of our universe. I’ll probably write more on this later, but in short Anaxagoras’ viewpoints are pretty legit to me.
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