Early Greek Philosophy

8. Anaxagoras: Science and Speculation in the Golden Age

Daniel W. Graham 8 S Anaxagoras Science and Speculation in the Golden Age I. Introduction On February 17, 478 B.C., shortly before noon, the sky in Athens began to grow dark. The winter sun became dim and its bright disk narrowed to a crescent. Suddenly it went completely dark, except for a narrow ring of fire at the circumference. The eclipse could be seen clearly only in reflections from water or pinhole projections, but it was visible to those who looked. The people of Athens were witnessing a rare solar eclipse; this one an annular eclipse in which the sun is not completely obscured. Traditionally , such an event was understood as a dire portent from heaven and struck observers with foreboding. But a new spirit of discovery was in the air, ever since the philosopher Thales had allegedly predicted a solar eclipse that was seen in Asia Minor roughly a century earlier. The present eclipse in Athens would usher in a new era, because for the first time someone looking up at it understood what was happening. There had been a number of ingenious explanations of eclipses advanced by philosophers in the century since Thales’s “prediction,” but none had even come close to a correct understanding. Now, a young refugee from Ionia, across the Aegean sea from Athens, had a hypothesis about what could make the sun grow dark in a solar eclipse, and what could make the moon grow dark in a lunar eclipse. Standing in the rubble of Athens—for the great city had recently been demolished by Persian invaders—he made calculations that confirmed his hypothesis. Then he went down to the port city of Piraeus day after day for weeks or months 139 140  Daniel W. Graham and collected information from travelers and correspondents. When he was done, he knew he had made a first-rate discovery. The young man with the hypothesis was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who at about twenty-two years of age worked out a problem that no one in the history of the world had ever solved, and he proved his hypothesis empirically, on the basis of his own observations and those of others —or so I will argue in the course of trying to explain the thought of this remarkable philosopher. Anaxagoras spent thirty years in Athens at the time of the Golden Age. His name became synonymous with esoteric knowledge, a kind of philosophical and scientific icon of his time, the nerdy intellectual, like Einstein today. But in the course of time, the book he wrote was lost, his theories were transmitted in a muddled form, and his contributions were obscured. The challenge in studying Anaxagoras, as in the case of most Presocratics, is to understand him in his historical context, and also to appreciate him as a thinker in a kind of timeless context as well, as someone with whom we might want to have a philosophical conversation. The basic facts of Anaxagoras’s life are these: He grew up in Clazomenae in Ionia; he spent thirty years in Athens, where he became renowned as a philosopher and a friend of the leading intellectuals of the city, most notably the great statesman Pericles. He then fled from an indictment and spent the remainder of his life in Lampsacus in northern Greece. There is a controversy over whether Anaxagoras was in Athens from about 480 to 450 B.C., or from about 460 to 430 B.C.1 As my story about the eclipse indicates, I think it had to be the former, which agrees better with the reports we have of his life. His name is also firmly associated with a meteor that fell in northern Greece in 467, and his theories were known to the playwright Aeschylus, who mentioned them in plays written before 460. So without getting into the minutiae of his biography, I will assume that he spent the early years of his career in Athens. 1. Diogenes Laertius 2.7 = DK 59A1. For the earlier dates, Taylor, “On the Date of the Trial of Anaxagoras”; O’Brien, “The Relation of Anaxagoras and Empedocles”; Woodbury, “Anaxagoras and Athens”; for versions of the latter view, Mansfeld, “Chronology,” who gives dates of 456/5–437/6 B.C., cf. Curd, Anaxagoras, 131; Sider, The Fragments of Anaxagoras, 6, gives the dates 464–434 B.C. Science and Speculation in the Golden Age   141 II...