 |
| Electrum coin, Ionian people. ~300 BCE. Anaxagoras holding a globe with his foot on a cippus. |
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was a philosopher who taught in Athens about 2,500 years ago. He is credited with strongly influencing the development of scientific method.1 He wrote about cosmology and physics, but only fragments of his work survive today so scholars easily disagree about what he said and meant. Anyway, here is a revealing snippet2
… the mixture of all things:
of the moist and the dry,
of the warm and the cold,
of the bright and the dark …
and, generally, of seeds infinite in quantity,
in no way like each other.
The fragment presents four of Anaxagoras' key ideas in a succinct poetic form. Clearly he is concerned with sensation, and he selects just a few of them for consideration. Let us call these special sensations Anaxagorean. This brief passage suggests several narrative conventions of a descriptive method that seems to be deeply woven into western thought and science. Explicitly examining them gives us a deeper understanding of physics.
- Anaxagorean sensations are perfectly distinct, they are "in no way like each other".
- Anaxagorean sensations are characterized using binary description. For example, "the moist and the dry", or "the bright and the dark".
- Anaxagorean sensations are objectified as "seeds".5
- "All things" are a "mixture" of these seeds.
 |
| Next step: more about seeds. |
To do: Aristotelian and doxographic versions of Anaxagoras' philosophy designate the fundamental components in his system as homoiomereses (ὀμοιομερῆ). They cite examples such as flesh, marrow and bone. The binary aspect of description seems to have been lost, or glossed over. So it might be fun to hunt for some correspondence between Aristotle's homoiomereses and composite particles where opposite seeds are combined.
