September 4, 2019 • 28 mins
Anaxagoras and his work in unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos crossed the boundaries between philosophy and astronomy.. And it was, in many ways WAY ahead of its time – ahead enough that he was criminally charged for it.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Before we get started, we have a live
show to announce. We will be at the National Gallery
of our Washington for their n g A Nights programming.
We'll be doing a live show there on September twelve.
The program itself is running from six pm to nine pm.
We're actually going to do our show twice that night.
You do have to register for it, but the good
(00:21):
news is registration is completely free. It's just a matter
of signing up. Yep. You can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com and you can
click on the page where it says live shows, or
you can go to miss in history dot com slash shows.
You will find a link for where you can register
for tickets ahead of time. Again, this is a whole
night of programming and we plan to do the same
(00:42):
show two times so that more folks have the chance
to see it. So we hope to see you in Washington,
d C. On September twelve. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How
Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
(01:03):
Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. Back when I was working
on our recent Thomas Harriet episode, I stumbled across the
Smithsonian magazine headline that read an ancient Greek philosopher was
exiled for claiming the moon was a rock, not a god. Uh. Naturally,
I was very excited about this. I know, I've been
doing a lot of cosmology and a lot of lunar things,
(01:23):
specifically our John Wilkins episode was also recent. I apologize,
I promise I'll back up off this pony after this. Well,
but then also this is a lot more in the
realm of philosophy than astronomy in a lot of ways. Yeah,
so we're talking about an astronomer to some degree, but
really he was a philosopher, and we'll talk about how
(01:44):
there's some some wiggliness in terms of of those terms
as related to this person. But naturally, when I read
that headline, I was like what, I was just completely
all in and that headline is not false, But telling
the story of Anaxagoras and his work in unraveling the
mysteries of the cosmos is a whole lot more involved
than that, as any headline would would naturally not be
(02:06):
able to include everything, and it was in many ways,
um this work that he was doing was quite ahead
of its time, and yes, it was ahead of its
time enough that he was criminally charged for it. But
there is a lot more nuanced to the story than that,
so as is the case with so many people from
the ancient world, the exact birth date for Anaxagoras is unknown.
(02:30):
It's estimated that he was born sometime around five b C.
He was born in klazomen A, Anatolia, and that sat
within the borders of what's modern day Turkey today along
its western coast. His father had a Sybilis, was a
wealthy man and he left Anexagoras significant landholdings, but Anaxagoras
(02:53):
divested himself of his wealth, apparently giving it to relatives,
and that was so that he could study philosophy with
out distraction. We don't really have any information on who
his early teachers may have been. There is some mention
of a potential teacher in some writing that that came
after and referenced back to alex Agrias, but the timeline
(03:13):
there is a little bit squirrely, so it's not really conclusive.
But one of the things that really marks his life
as a philosopher is his heavy interest in science, and
this was an ideology that was fairly common in Ionia,
which his birthplace of Klasmine had been apart. Sometime around
the age of twenty and ax Agaras moved to Athens.
(03:34):
The exact dates are debated quite a bit for this.
The reason is that historians have to work back from
mentions of him, and really this is a case with
a lot of philosophers have to work back from these
mentions and other texts to piece together what people's ages
and locations were at various times. Yeah, one explanation I
(03:55):
saw said, um, something to the effect of he's referenced
as a young man, and from that they extrapolate that
he was twenty because he would have been considered a
man but still very young at that point. So it
is that level of fluffy in terms of some of
the logic. Some of it is a little more sound,
but uh, that is why we're constantly throwing out these
(04:17):
caveats that we don't really know the dates. It is
probable that when he moved to Athens, Anaxagoras brought that
ideology of scientific study with him, although in the text
of Diogenes Laertius it says that Anaxagoras actually went to
Athens to study philosophy there, rather than arriving in the
city already educated on the topic. To some degree, we
(04:39):
know that Anaxagoras was not satisfied with the ideas of
his predecessors. They were grouped under the umbrella of the
ionic philosophers, so his work was really creating a new
path of thought, and that puts him in a category
often referred to as the pre Socratic philosophers. That term
comes with its own baggage, but for shorthand and the
(05:00):
purposes of this discussion, it delineates the philosophers who were
thinking of cosmology and the physical universe versus the ones
that followed, who were more interested in issues of morality.
There's even a case to be made that these men
were more like scientific theorists than philosophers, as the term
is more often used today, and an Exagoras's ideas about
(05:21):
that cosmos that he tried to unravel would eventually lead
to some serious problems for him. But to talk about
Anaxagoras and his philosophy, we first have to talk about
what came immediately before him. Leading up to an Exagoras,
there had certainly been other philosophers who were trying to
deduce how the universe worked and what it was made of.
(05:43):
I mean, that's something humanity has wondered about for as
long as we've existed. There had been a popular theory
in Greece that there was one primary and fundamental element
that made up all things. A new idea had been
put forth in the work of Parmenides, who s who
was estimated to be about fifteen years older than an
ex Agaris. And we should point out again it's another
(06:05):
caveat as we talk about this, that with any of
these philosophers that we're discussing, there is a lot of
interpretation in their work, and as a consequence, we are
never speaking in absolutes. In the case of Parmenides, he
wrote a metaphysical poem in which there is a substantial
section about cosmology, and this is, according to Diogenes Laertius,
(06:29):
the only work composed by Parmenides. We don't have any
other works of his for comparison to get a full
picture of his beliefs and ideas or how any of
those evolved. So interpretive analysis of this work and others
varies a good bit in terms of what it's believed
to be communicating, and there have also been debates about
(06:49):
the translation of the existing fragments of this poem, which
is called in the modern vernacular on Nature, although we
don't know that that was ever the actual title. In
terms of how Parmenides shifted cosmological thinking, he asserted that
the idea of one element was just a little too basic.
It didn't offer any kind of explanation for how the
(07:10):
universe or the world exhibited change or how things shifted
around in the heavens. He thought there had to be
more to it. One of the issues with interpretations of
Parmenides is that the section of his work proceeding his
thoughts on cosmology was a discussion of what is and
what isn't, including the possibility that all reality as we
(07:31):
perceive it is drastically inconsistent with what actually exists, and
that the physical world is single and unchanging. So it's
possible that his cosmological theories were not anything that he
was seriously putting forth as any kind of objective truth.
And to further complicate things, we only have one hundred
and sixty verses of parmenides work, which is estimated to
(07:54):
have included as many as eight hundred verses, So that
means that the analysis that exists of it in the
modern era is piecing together all of this ideology from
less than one quarter of the total writing. Following on
this idea, the work of another philosopher, Empedocles, took a
different and more concrete approach to the problems that were
(08:15):
presented by the idea of one singular elemental basis for
all of the physical universe. And Pedocles is unique among
the group of philosophers were talking about today because while
his work also only survives in fragments, we have a
lot more of it than we do for any of
the others. There are two partially surviving works by Empedocles.
(08:36):
One is also called on Nature, that's a different book
than the one we just referenced. The other is Purifications,
although there is also the possibility that these were actually
two parts of one larger work. That is again a
matter of debate. But the important thing is that in
order to reconcile the issue of one element not accounting
for all of the attributes of a physical universe, he
(08:57):
put forth the idea of four elements, those being earth, air, fire,
and water. Empedocles argued that it was these elements that
were unchanging, income and consistent, and not as Paramendes had argued,
the entire world being unchanging. This was the basis of
a cosmology that I addressed parmenides idea of the existing
(09:19):
belief in a static world, and then reconciled that with
the change that's always happening. The elements stayed static in
empedocles version, but they were able to express in different
and changeable ways. And so we are about to get
to Anaxagoras and his various ideas that would at least
theoretically solve some of these issues of philosophical conflict. But
(09:41):
first we are going to pause for a little sponsor break.
So we have been talking about all of these various
philosophers in their ideas of one element that made up
everything than uh, four elements that make up everything. And
(10:04):
then we get to Anaxagoras. Uh. He may have only
written one work, and we only know of that because
it was quoted by so many other philosophers that followed him.
The actual work is completely lost. He saw the possibilities
of elements in a much more vast way, as in
he wrote about the idea that there were infinite elements. Now,
(10:24):
obviously we are not talking about elements in terms of
the periodic table and the way we understand elements today.
At this point in history, the idea of elements was
much more about grappling with the physical universe, is building
blocks through the observable world around us. The microscope, for example,
was almost two thousand years away and would not happen
until like the fifty nineties. So in an Exagoras was
(10:48):
talking about infinite possibilities for elements. The examples he used
were things like bone, leaf, and flesh. He positive that
quote there is a portion of everything in everything. The
meaning there was that any given item, like a bone,
also contained some amount of every other element, which enabled
them to interact and change one another. Through that interaction,
(11:11):
it was whatever element any given thing possessed in the
greatest abundance that defined it as what it was. So
a bone could contain leaf and flesh, but it mostly
contained bone, And in this way everything in the physical
world was connected with a sort of oneness. But elevating
matter from being just some amalgam of assorted elements was
(11:33):
Anaxagoras idea of noos and Noos in his ideology, is
interpreted as the mind, intellect, or reason, which he held
up as the catalyst for creation of all things. In
the origin of the cosmos, according to Anaxagoras, all of
the elements were swirling together, not homogeneous, but also not
defined in any way. He wrote, quote, all things were together,
(11:56):
unlimited in both amount and smallness. And then Noose set
things in motion to first rotate around a point within
the swirl of elemental soup, eventually leading to the separation
and recombination of various things, to end up with the
development of the cosmos as it is known to humankind.
I think, all this is really cool. It is really cool.
(12:19):
It's one of those things. Where as I research it,
I'm like, at what point did this occur to him? Yeah,
because again we're talking about the fifth century BC. Uh.
He did not invent the idea of noose. That concept
had been germinating in some form or another in the
work of other thinkers preceding him, but he is believed
(12:40):
to be the first to actually define it. And to
be clear, this was not the idea of a higher
power or god entity. Noose is a part of the cosmos.
The quote finest and purest of elemental particles. This all
gets a little heavy, but here is a passage that
he wrote about noose. Quote, all other things part taken
a portion of everything, while Noos is infinite and self ruled,
(13:04):
and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.
For if it were not by itself, but we're mixed
with anything else, it would partake in all things, and
the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that
it would have power over nothing in the same way
that it has now. Being alone by itself, News has
power over all things. Noose set in order all things
(13:27):
that were to be and that were, and all things
that are now. But no thing is altogether separated off
or distinguished from anything except Noose. This idea of noose,
as defined by an Exagoras, can be tricky to wrap
your head around, and that was true at the time
he was sharing these ideas too. Overall, though noose as
(13:48):
a concept was pretty well received. Aristotle praised it, although
he wasn't in favor of a concept of consciousness that
acted without any sense of ethics or for the best
of the universe, but randomly. Another criticism from Aristotle was
that in trying to define noose, an Exagoras was incorrectly
lumping the ideas of the mind and the soul together.
(14:09):
And there is some analysis of perception and the idea
of mind as it relates to individual consciousness in the
work of Anixagaras, but little of his concepts on these
particular matters are known. In the writings of Theophrastis, writing
roughly two hundred years after Annixagoras, there is mention of
(14:29):
that earlier philosopher an Exagoras having a theory that like
is perceived by unlike, i e. We are conscious of
that which is different from ourselves, our norms, et cetera.
This seems to be more of an issue of sensation
rather than any sort of personal or identity idea. Though
i e. We are used to a certain volume of
noise in our lives, a louder than normal noise will
(14:50):
be noticed. But Anaxagoras also thought that senses were rather feeble,
and thus we really couldn't use them to determine truth.
An Exagaras all so spoke at length of the constant
shifting that occurred as a result of the ongoing rotation
of the cosmos. He threw out ideas of coming to
be and passing away, which his predecessor Parmenides had written about,
(15:14):
and instead he suggested that things are quote mixed together
and dissociated from the things that are, the idea being
that nothing has a true beginning or end, but is
then part of an ongoing series of shifts. Some things
are simply arranging and rearranging themselves. Yeah, this even applied
to the ideas of like birth and death, which is
kind of a really beautiful and poetic way to look
(15:36):
at it. And this idea leads into Alexagoras's description of
the universe, which builds on his elemental and noose concepts.
So the rotation that new set in motion is central
to the whole thing, and working from that, he asserts
that certain elements have been sorted and separated by this
force of this spin, and uh they created the various
(15:59):
select steel bodies visible in the heavens. He also put
forth the idea that the sun is composed of fiery metal.
His sense of scale with us was way off. He
estimated the sun to be about the size of Peloponessus.
The moon, on the other hand, he thought was an
earthly clump, and he was correct about the nature of
(16:20):
the moon's appearance. He stated that it produced no light
of its own, but instead reflected the light of the Sun.
He also came to the conclusion that the moon wasn't smooth,
but had mountainous regions. Yeah. If you recall our recent
episode on John Wilkins, by the time we are into
the six people are back to thinking the whole thing
is smooth. But this guy hadn't figured out almost two
(16:41):
thousand years earlier. Like, no, it's got some gots of topography. Uh.
Anaxagoras also positive that ongoing cosmic rotation would sometimes lift
objects into the atmosphere in away from Earth, and that
these objects could form obstructions that would prevent humans from
seeing things in space on a key a shan, and
that same force of the spin in certain circumstances could
(17:04):
also fling objects to Earth i e. He was describing meteors.
That discussion of obstruction is related to another more specific
idea that Anaxagoras is credited with, and that's being the
first to figure out what caused eclipses. Although he wasn't
a d accurate, he understood that lunar eclipses were the
effect of the Earth cutting off the light of the
(17:26):
Sun that normally reflects off the moon, but he thought
that solar eclipses and new moons were also linked. Even
though he didn't have the mechanics all worked out, the
fact that he spoke of these events as things that
happened when heavenly bodies moved around and got in each
other's ways, rather than being the work of a deity
was actually a really important thing, and Anaxagoras may have
(17:48):
been the original flat earther though. Uh. His idea was
that the planet's weight was supported by a cushion of air,
and the Earth, he believed was stationary and was not spinning. Uh.
Just a little unclear how that works in the spinning
cosmos theory. So while that's a bit of a disappointment
because he was kind of an outlier in terms of
people who really did seem to believe that the Earth
(18:10):
was flat, they also put forth the idea that there
could be other worlds inhabited by other people who were
also creating civilizations. This is a little unclear, though he
may have been suggesting a vastness of the cosmos that
could contain other conditions that could create life similar to
that on our planet, or he could have just been
riffing on the idea that we mentioned earlier that everything
(18:33):
contains something of everything else, so potentially right here on
Earth there are smaller iterations of our own cosmos playing out.
He believed in the infinite subdivision of matter and its components,
so that the idea of worlds contained within worlds is
a possible interpretation of his writing in this area. Yeah,
his idea of things being infinitely subdividable made me think
(18:55):
a lot of fractal geometry, and it it's again I'm like,
I continue to be boggled that he was kind of
onto the early idea of these concepts, so far ahead
of it pretty much everybody else. Uh So, coming up,
we are going to talk about the friendship that may
have led to the trial and exile that we mentioned
at the top of the show. But first we are
(19:16):
going to have a quick word from one of the
sponsors that keeps stuff he missed in history class. Going.
So now we are jumping to talking for a moment
about Pericles, who was born and estimated five years after Anaxagoras,
and he was an Athenian born Greek statesman. He has
(19:38):
known for the construction of the Acropolis and the Parthenon,
which were both built under his leadership. As ruler of Athens.
He was a big fan of the arts, and he
and Anaxagoras, who was well known among the prominent men
of Athens, became quite good friends. The Rule of Paracles,
which was so significant that it's referred to as the
Age of Paracles and his and histories at the time,
(20:01):
was the results of a significant overhaul of the Athenian government.
Pericles had catalyzed a vote in the Athenian Assembly and
for sixty two b c E, and that caused a
huge shake up. The existing aristocratic council called the Areopagus,
was disbanded after this vote, and one of its most
prominent and conservative members, Kieman, was exiled. Kieman's removal from
(20:25):
Athens represented a very serious change in policy. While he
had remained on the council, he had prioritized an ongoing
relationship with the Spartans, one that was friendly, But once
he was gone, it opened up the door for Athens
to retake Delphi from Sparta, which happened under perocles leadership
in four forty eight b C. In Plutarch's lives. He
(20:47):
wrote a number of things about the friendship between Anaxagoras
and Peracles, but they're very complementary of the philosopher. So
here's a quote. But the one who most associated with Peracles,
and whom bestowed on him that dignity and wisdom more
weighty than demagoguery, and on the whole raised up and
exalted the worthiness of his character, was Anaxagoras of class
(21:11):
amen A. Men used to call him Mind, either because
of their amazement at his great and prodigious understanding of
natural philosophy, or because he was the first to institute
neither chance nor necessity as the principal order of the universe,
but rather mind, pure and unmixed among all the other
mixed things. And the reason that we are giving you
(21:33):
all of this background on Pericles and his friendship with
Anlexagoras is to set the stage that while Pericles was
definitely a powerful ruler who ushered Athens into what what
we would consider its modern democracy, his leadership did represent
a very big shift in Athenian politics, and big shifts
in politics are never universally applauded, so he had plenty
(21:57):
of critics at all levels of government and the aristocracy,
and that meant that in being closely associated with Pericles,
Anaxagoras had the same enemies. There was also the matter
of Anaxagoras and his writings, which were praised by some
of the aristocracy, but not really welcomed universally. So again,
in the words of Plutarch, quote, these are not the
(22:19):
only advantages that Peracles enjoyed because of his connection with Anixagoras.
It seems that Paracles rose above superstition, that attitude of
astonishment about celestial occurrences that is produced by those who
are ignorant about the causes of things, and who are
crazed by divinity and divine intervention because of their inexperience
in these areas. Natural philosophy substitutes for festering superstition the
(22:44):
unshaken piety that is attended by good hopes. So all
of this move to a more scientific explanation of the
physical world that Anaxagoras was working on was at odds
with a large part of the population, which remained very
superstitious and very much you know, in a long term
cultural tendency to you know, attribute happenings to the gods, Uh,
(23:08):
the heavens and their movements were explained through fables and
revered stories that credited gods with various phenomena that weren't
scientifically understood. So when an Exagara's just started explaining it all,
taking away all of that mystery, it really did not
make him a particularly popular man. Eventually, in the mid
fifth century b C. This led to a charge of
(23:30):
impiety towards the gods leveled against Anexagoras because, to once
again quote Plutarch quote, at the time people did not
tolerate the natural philosophers and the so called stargazers because
they reduced the divine to unreasoning causes, non providential forces,
and necessary happenings. Because of the close association with Pericles,
(23:52):
when this impiety charge arose, it was at least partially
motivated as an attack on the ruler of Athens. Yeah,
they couldn't directly go after Pericles, but they could go
after his friends and kind of weaken his support base.
And we know that Anaxagoras was imprisoned for a time,
but his trial is largely lost. There are mentions of
it here and there throughout the historical record, but any
(24:14):
record of the actual proceedings is long gone, and it
appears that there were actually two different charges. There was
one for impiety and another for medism, which was being
politically sympathetic to Persia. And that's because two different outcomes
to a trial of Anaxagoras appear in various writings, and
we do know that Pericles interceded on the philosopher's behalf
(24:35):
regarding the impiety toward the god's charge. The end result
was that Anaxagoras had to pay a fine, and he
also had to leave the city. So sometime around four
fifty b c. An Exagaras did leave Athens. He moved
to Lampsacus, where he lived out the rest of his life.
There was another trial, probably held without him present because
(24:55):
he had already left, that led to a death sentence.
An Exagaras reportedly smiled when he heard about the second outcome. Yeah,
he was already safe and Lampsacus and Anaxagoras lived until
the age of seventy two. In that city. He spent
more than two decades living there, apparently quite happy. He
was very revered by the citizens of Lampsacus. Uh They
(25:16):
are said to have celebrated him when he died, and
today there is a crater on the moon named for him. Yeah. Uh,
he's fascinating, fascinating creature. I think it is near the
North Pole and you can actually see it with the
naked eye on a good clear night where there's a
full moon, because it has a pretty unique level of
(25:37):
of height to it that leads into the crater, like
its lip is high. If I am understanding it properly,
that is Anaxagoras, the impious philosopher who dared to think
that things were physical happenings and not deities floating through
the celestial sky. Uh. Do you have listener mail to
(25:59):
close us out? I do? This is uh a listener mail,
that is uh. It even in its title mentions that
it is referring to an episode from four years ago.
But it made me love it. It's his appreciation for
narcilepsy episodes despite being four years late. And this is
from our listener, Christina, who writes high Holly and Tracy.
I'm a fairly new listener but a long time history enthusiast.
(26:19):
I've been going back through the archive and I just
listened to your live program on Safety Coffins dated October,
in which you mentioned a past an oarcilepsy episode, and
this led me to immediately go and listen to the
two ecailepsy episodes from I was recently diagnosed with arcilepsy
with cataplexy last fall. I really appreciate that you discussed
(26:40):
how very often o ecilepsy is misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. In
many cases, it took more than twenty years of complaints
before a doctor took my complaints seriously, and my symptoms
were previously misdiagnosed as depression despite no symptoms other than tiredness.
In my experience, many people have no idea what in
ourcalepsy is, and those that do have a very limited
(27:00):
concept of its symptoms. I really appreciate that you both
highlighted some of the rather surprising to most symptoms and
brought people's attentions to them. As someone who has been
trying to understand a diagnosis of our ecolepsy and struggling
to explain it to friends and family, I appreciate having
the perfect podcast to point them to for an explanation.
I love all your podcasts. Keep it up. Thank you
so much, Christina. That's so lovely. I know part of
(27:23):
the reason that I wanted to do those, and I
think I mentioned it in the episode, is that I
have a couple of friends in my life who have
been diagnosed in o ecalepsy, and they so often were
mischaracterized as just being like lazy or in some cases
even stupid, which is ridiculous if you know these people.
Uh So, that's why it's kind of important to me
to talk about stuff like that. And it's a good reminder.
(27:44):
Four years seems like a good gestation period for another
reminder brought about by your emails. So thank you so
much for writing us. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. You can also find us
everywhere on social media as missed in History, and you
can find us at missed in History dot com, where
all of the episodes of the show that have ever
(28:05):
existed more than a thousand all live. Uh. In any
of the shows that Tracy and I have been working
on just the past six and a half years or so,
we'll have show notes. The ones that preceded probably don't,
but you never know. There are some good blog posts
back there. We suggest that you subscribe to this podcast
that helps us and makes your life easier because you
(28:25):
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in history Class is a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts For my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(28:46):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey everybody. Before we get started, we have a live
show to announce. We will be at the National Gallery
of our Washington for their n g A Nights programming.
We'll be doing a live show there on September twelve.
The program itself is running from six pm to nine pm.
We're actually going to do our show twice that night.
You do have to register for it, but the good
(00:21):
news is registration is completely free. It's just a matter
of signing up. Yep. You can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com and you can
click on the page where it says live shows, or
you can go to miss in history dot com slash shows.
You will find a link for where you can register
for tickets ahead of time. Again, this is a whole
night of programming and we plan to do the same
(00:42):
show two times so that more folks have the chance
to see it. So we hope to see you in Washington,
d C. On September twelve. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How
Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
(01:03):
Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. Back when I was working
on our recent Thomas Harriet episode, I stumbled across the
Smithsonian magazine headline that read an ancient Greek philosopher was
exiled for claiming the moon was a rock, not a god. Uh. Naturally,
I was very excited about this. I know, I've been
doing a lot of cosmology and a lot of lunar things,
(01:23):
specifically our John Wilkins episode was also recent. I apologize,
I promise I'll back up off this pony after this. Well,
but then also this is a lot more in the
realm of philosophy than astronomy in a lot of ways. Yeah,
so we're talking about an astronomer to some degree, but
really he was a philosopher, and we'll talk about how
(01:44):
there's some some wiggliness in terms of of those terms
as related to this person. But naturally, when I read
that headline, I was like what, I was just completely
all in and that headline is not false, But telling
the story of Anaxagoras and his work in unraveling the
mysteries of the cosmos is a whole lot more involved
than that, as any headline would would naturally not be
(02:06):
able to include everything, and it was in many ways,
um this work that he was doing was quite ahead
of its time, and yes, it was ahead of its
time enough that he was criminally charged for it. But
there is a lot more nuanced to the story than that,
so as is the case with so many people from
the ancient world, the exact birth date for Anaxagoras is unknown.
(02:30):
It's estimated that he was born sometime around five b C.
He was born in klazomen A, Anatolia, and that sat
within the borders of what's modern day Turkey today along
its western coast. His father had a Sybilis, was a
wealthy man and he left Anexagoras significant landholdings, but Anaxagoras
(02:53):
divested himself of his wealth, apparently giving it to relatives,
and that was so that he could study philosophy with
out distraction. We don't really have any information on who
his early teachers may have been. There is some mention
of a potential teacher in some writing that that came
after and referenced back to alex Agrias, but the timeline
(03:13):
there is a little bit squirrely, so it's not really conclusive.
But one of the things that really marks his life
as a philosopher is his heavy interest in science, and
this was an ideology that was fairly common in Ionia,
which his birthplace of Klasmine had been apart. Sometime around
the age of twenty and ax Agaras moved to Athens.
(03:34):
The exact dates are debated quite a bit for this.
The reason is that historians have to work back from
mentions of him, and really this is a case with
a lot of philosophers have to work back from these
mentions and other texts to piece together what people's ages
and locations were at various times. Yeah, one explanation I
(03:55):
saw said, um, something to the effect of he's referenced
as a young man, and from that they extrapolate that
he was twenty because he would have been considered a
man but still very young at that point. So it
is that level of fluffy in terms of some of
the logic. Some of it is a little more sound,
but uh, that is why we're constantly throwing out these
(04:17):
caveats that we don't really know the dates. It is
probable that when he moved to Athens, Anaxagoras brought that
ideology of scientific study with him, although in the text
of Diogenes Laertius it says that Anaxagoras actually went to
Athens to study philosophy there, rather than arriving in the
city already educated on the topic. To some degree, we
(04:39):
know that Anaxagoras was not satisfied with the ideas of
his predecessors. They were grouped under the umbrella of the
ionic philosophers, so his work was really creating a new
path of thought, and that puts him in a category
often referred to as the pre Socratic philosophers. That term
comes with its own baggage, but for shorthand and the
(05:00):
purposes of this discussion, it delineates the philosophers who were
thinking of cosmology and the physical universe versus the ones
that followed, who were more interested in issues of morality.
There's even a case to be made that these men
were more like scientific theorists than philosophers, as the term
is more often used today, and an Exagoras's ideas about
(05:21):
that cosmos that he tried to unravel would eventually lead
to some serious problems for him. But to talk about
Anaxagoras and his philosophy, we first have to talk about
what came immediately before him. Leading up to an Exagoras,
there had certainly been other philosophers who were trying to
deduce how the universe worked and what it was made of.
(05:43):
I mean, that's something humanity has wondered about for as
long as we've existed. There had been a popular theory
in Greece that there was one primary and fundamental element
that made up all things. A new idea had been
put forth in the work of Parmenides, who s who
was estimated to be about fifteen years older than an
ex Agaris. And we should point out again it's another
(06:05):
caveat as we talk about this, that with any of
these philosophers that we're discussing, there is a lot of
interpretation in their work, and as a consequence, we are
never speaking in absolutes. In the case of Parmenides, he
wrote a metaphysical poem in which there is a substantial
section about cosmology, and this is, according to Diogenes Laertius,
(06:29):
the only work composed by Parmenides. We don't have any
other works of his for comparison to get a full
picture of his beliefs and ideas or how any of
those evolved. So interpretive analysis of this work and others
varies a good bit in terms of what it's believed
to be communicating, and there have also been debates about
(06:49):
the translation of the existing fragments of this poem, which
is called in the modern vernacular on Nature, although we
don't know that that was ever the actual title. In
terms of how Parmenides shifted cosmological thinking, he asserted that
the idea of one element was just a little too basic.
It didn't offer any kind of explanation for how the
(07:10):
universe or the world exhibited change or how things shifted
around in the heavens. He thought there had to be
more to it. One of the issues with interpretations of
Parmenides is that the section of his work proceeding his
thoughts on cosmology was a discussion of what is and
what isn't, including the possibility that all reality as we
(07:31):
perceive it is drastically inconsistent with what actually exists, and
that the physical world is single and unchanging. So it's
possible that his cosmological theories were not anything that he
was seriously putting forth as any kind of objective truth.
And to further complicate things, we only have one hundred
and sixty verses of parmenides work, which is estimated to
(07:54):
have included as many as eight hundred verses, So that
means that the analysis that exists of it in the
modern era is piecing together all of this ideology from
less than one quarter of the total writing. Following on
this idea, the work of another philosopher, Empedocles, took a
different and more concrete approach to the problems that were
(08:15):
presented by the idea of one singular elemental basis for
all of the physical universe. And Pedocles is unique among
the group of philosophers were talking about today because while
his work also only survives in fragments, we have a
lot more of it than we do for any of
the others. There are two partially surviving works by Empedocles.
(08:36):
One is also called on Nature, that's a different book
than the one we just referenced. The other is Purifications,
although there is also the possibility that these were actually
two parts of one larger work. That is again a
matter of debate. But the important thing is that in
order to reconcile the issue of one element not accounting
for all of the attributes of a physical universe, he
(08:57):
put forth the idea of four elements, those being earth, air, fire,
and water. Empedocles argued that it was these elements that
were unchanging, income and consistent, and not as Paramendes had argued,
the entire world being unchanging. This was the basis of
a cosmology that I addressed parmenides idea of the existing
(09:19):
belief in a static world, and then reconciled that with
the change that's always happening. The elements stayed static in
empedocles version, but they were able to express in different
and changeable ways. And so we are about to get
to Anaxagoras and his various ideas that would at least
theoretically solve some of these issues of philosophical conflict. But
(09:41):
first we are going to pause for a little sponsor break.
So we have been talking about all of these various
philosophers in their ideas of one element that made up
everything than uh, four elements that make up everything. And
(10:04):
then we get to Anaxagoras. Uh. He may have only
written one work, and we only know of that because
it was quoted by so many other philosophers that followed him.
The actual work is completely lost. He saw the possibilities
of elements in a much more vast way, as in
he wrote about the idea that there were infinite elements. Now,
(10:24):
obviously we are not talking about elements in terms of
the periodic table and the way we understand elements today.
At this point in history, the idea of elements was
much more about grappling with the physical universe, is building
blocks through the observable world around us. The microscope, for example,
was almost two thousand years away and would not happen
until like the fifty nineties. So in an Exagoras was
(10:48):
talking about infinite possibilities for elements. The examples he used
were things like bone, leaf, and flesh. He positive that
quote there is a portion of everything in everything. The
meaning there was that any given item, like a bone,
also contained some amount of every other element, which enabled
them to interact and change one another. Through that interaction,
(11:11):
it was whatever element any given thing possessed in the
greatest abundance that defined it as what it was. So
a bone could contain leaf and flesh, but it mostly
contained bone, And in this way everything in the physical
world was connected with a sort of oneness. But elevating
matter from being just some amalgam of assorted elements was
(11:33):
Anaxagoras idea of noos and Noos in his ideology, is
interpreted as the mind, intellect, or reason, which he held
up as the catalyst for creation of all things. In
the origin of the cosmos, according to Anaxagoras, all of
the elements were swirling together, not homogeneous, but also not
defined in any way. He wrote, quote, all things were together,
(11:56):
unlimited in both amount and smallness. And then Noose set
things in motion to first rotate around a point within
the swirl of elemental soup, eventually leading to the separation
and recombination of various things, to end up with the
development of the cosmos as it is known to humankind.
I think, all this is really cool. It is really cool.
(12:19):
It's one of those things. Where as I research it,
I'm like, at what point did this occur to him? Yeah,
because again we're talking about the fifth century BC. Uh.
He did not invent the idea of noose. That concept
had been germinating in some form or another in the
work of other thinkers preceding him, but he is believed
(12:40):
to be the first to actually define it. And to
be clear, this was not the idea of a higher
power or god entity. Noose is a part of the cosmos.
The quote finest and purest of elemental particles. This all
gets a little heavy, but here is a passage that
he wrote about noose. Quote, all other things part taken
a portion of everything, while Noos is infinite and self ruled,
(13:04):
and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.
For if it were not by itself, but we're mixed
with anything else, it would partake in all things, and
the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that
it would have power over nothing in the same way
that it has now. Being alone by itself, News has
power over all things. Noose set in order all things
(13:27):
that were to be and that were, and all things
that are now. But no thing is altogether separated off
or distinguished from anything except Noose. This idea of noose,
as defined by an Exagoras, can be tricky to wrap
your head around, and that was true at the time
he was sharing these ideas too. Overall, though noose as
(13:48):
a concept was pretty well received. Aristotle praised it, although
he wasn't in favor of a concept of consciousness that
acted without any sense of ethics or for the best
of the universe, but randomly. Another criticism from Aristotle was
that in trying to define noose, an Exagoras was incorrectly
lumping the ideas of the mind and the soul together.
(14:09):
And there is some analysis of perception and the idea
of mind as it relates to individual consciousness in the
work of Anixagaras, but little of his concepts on these
particular matters are known. In the writings of Theophrastis, writing
roughly two hundred years after Annixagoras, there is mention of
(14:29):
that earlier philosopher an Exagoras having a theory that like
is perceived by unlike, i e. We are conscious of
that which is different from ourselves, our norms, et cetera.
This seems to be more of an issue of sensation
rather than any sort of personal or identity idea. Though
i e. We are used to a certain volume of
noise in our lives, a louder than normal noise will
(14:50):
be noticed. But Anaxagoras also thought that senses were rather feeble,
and thus we really couldn't use them to determine truth.
An Exagaras all so spoke at length of the constant
shifting that occurred as a result of the ongoing rotation
of the cosmos. He threw out ideas of coming to
be and passing away, which his predecessor Parmenides had written about,
(15:14):
and instead he suggested that things are quote mixed together
and dissociated from the things that are, the idea being
that nothing has a true beginning or end, but is
then part of an ongoing series of shifts. Some things
are simply arranging and rearranging themselves. Yeah, this even applied
to the ideas of like birth and death, which is
kind of a really beautiful and poetic way to look
(15:36):
at it. And this idea leads into Alexagoras's description of
the universe, which builds on his elemental and noose concepts.
So the rotation that new set in motion is central
to the whole thing, and working from that, he asserts
that certain elements have been sorted and separated by this
force of this spin, and uh they created the various
(15:59):
select steel bodies visible in the heavens. He also put
forth the idea that the sun is composed of fiery metal.
His sense of scale with us was way off. He
estimated the sun to be about the size of Peloponessus.
The moon, on the other hand, he thought was an
earthly clump, and he was correct about the nature of
(16:20):
the moon's appearance. He stated that it produced no light
of its own, but instead reflected the light of the Sun.
He also came to the conclusion that the moon wasn't smooth,
but had mountainous regions. Yeah. If you recall our recent
episode on John Wilkins, by the time we are into
the six people are back to thinking the whole thing
is smooth. But this guy hadn't figured out almost two
(16:41):
thousand years earlier. Like, no, it's got some gots of topography. Uh.
Anaxagoras also positive that ongoing cosmic rotation would sometimes lift
objects into the atmosphere in away from Earth, and that
these objects could form obstructions that would prevent humans from
seeing things in space on a key a shan, and
that same force of the spin in certain circumstances could
(17:04):
also fling objects to Earth i e. He was describing meteors.
That discussion of obstruction is related to another more specific
idea that Anaxagoras is credited with, and that's being the
first to figure out what caused eclipses. Although he wasn't
a d accurate, he understood that lunar eclipses were the
effect of the Earth cutting off the light of the
(17:26):
Sun that normally reflects off the moon, but he thought
that solar eclipses and new moons were also linked. Even
though he didn't have the mechanics all worked out, the
fact that he spoke of these events as things that
happened when heavenly bodies moved around and got in each
other's ways, rather than being the work of a deity
was actually a really important thing, and Anaxagoras may have
(17:48):
been the original flat earther though. Uh. His idea was
that the planet's weight was supported by a cushion of air,
and the Earth, he believed was stationary and was not spinning. Uh.
Just a little unclear how that works in the spinning
cosmos theory. So while that's a bit of a disappointment
because he was kind of an outlier in terms of
people who really did seem to believe that the Earth
(18:10):
was flat, they also put forth the idea that there
could be other worlds inhabited by other people who were
also creating civilizations. This is a little unclear, though he
may have been suggesting a vastness of the cosmos that
could contain other conditions that could create life similar to
that on our planet, or he could have just been
riffing on the idea that we mentioned earlier that everything
(18:33):
contains something of everything else, so potentially right here on
Earth there are smaller iterations of our own cosmos playing out.
He believed in the infinite subdivision of matter and its components,
so that the idea of worlds contained within worlds is
a possible interpretation of his writing in this area. Yeah,
his idea of things being infinitely subdividable made me think
(18:55):
a lot of fractal geometry, and it it's again I'm like,
I continue to be boggled that he was kind of
onto the early idea of these concepts, so far ahead
of it pretty much everybody else. Uh So, coming up,
we are going to talk about the friendship that may
have led to the trial and exile that we mentioned
at the top of the show. But first we are
(19:16):
going to have a quick word from one of the
sponsors that keeps stuff he missed in history class. Going.
So now we are jumping to talking for a moment
about Pericles, who was born and estimated five years after Anaxagoras,
and he was an Athenian born Greek statesman. He has
(19:38):
known for the construction of the Acropolis and the Parthenon,
which were both built under his leadership. As ruler of Athens.
He was a big fan of the arts, and he
and Anaxagoras, who was well known among the prominent men
of Athens, became quite good friends. The Rule of Paracles,
which was so significant that it's referred to as the
Age of Paracles and his and histories at the time,
(20:01):
was the results of a significant overhaul of the Athenian government.
Pericles had catalyzed a vote in the Athenian Assembly and
for sixty two b c E, and that caused a
huge shake up. The existing aristocratic council called the Areopagus,
was disbanded after this vote, and one of its most
prominent and conservative members, Kieman, was exiled. Kieman's removal from
(20:25):
Athens represented a very serious change in policy. While he
had remained on the council, he had prioritized an ongoing
relationship with the Spartans, one that was friendly, But once
he was gone, it opened up the door for Athens
to retake Delphi from Sparta, which happened under perocles leadership
in four forty eight b C. In Plutarch's lives. He
(20:47):
wrote a number of things about the friendship between Anaxagoras
and Peracles, but they're very complementary of the philosopher. So
here's a quote. But the one who most associated with Peracles,
and whom bestowed on him that dignity and wisdom more
weighty than demagoguery, and on the whole raised up and
exalted the worthiness of his character, was Anaxagoras of class
(21:11):
amen A. Men used to call him Mind, either because
of their amazement at his great and prodigious understanding of
natural philosophy, or because he was the first to institute
neither chance nor necessity as the principal order of the universe,
but rather mind, pure and unmixed among all the other
mixed things. And the reason that we are giving you
(21:33):
all of this background on Pericles and his friendship with
Anlexagoras is to set the stage that while Pericles was
definitely a powerful ruler who ushered Athens into what what
we would consider its modern democracy, his leadership did represent
a very big shift in Athenian politics, and big shifts
in politics are never universally applauded, so he had plenty
(21:57):
of critics at all levels of government and the aristocracy,
and that meant that in being closely associated with Pericles,
Anaxagoras had the same enemies. There was also the matter
of Anaxagoras and his writings, which were praised by some
of the aristocracy, but not really welcomed universally. So again,
in the words of Plutarch, quote, these are not the
(22:19):
only advantages that Peracles enjoyed because of his connection with Anixagoras.
It seems that Paracles rose above superstition, that attitude of
astonishment about celestial occurrences that is produced by those who
are ignorant about the causes of things, and who are
crazed by divinity and divine intervention because of their inexperience
in these areas. Natural philosophy substitutes for festering superstition the
(22:44):
unshaken piety that is attended by good hopes. So all
of this move to a more scientific explanation of the
physical world that Anaxagoras was working on was at odds
with a large part of the population, which remained very
superstitious and very much you know, in a long term
cultural tendency to you know, attribute happenings to the gods, Uh,
(23:08):
the heavens and their movements were explained through fables and
revered stories that credited gods with various phenomena that weren't
scientifically understood. So when an Exagara's just started explaining it all,
taking away all of that mystery, it really did not
make him a particularly popular man. Eventually, in the mid
fifth century b C. This led to a charge of
(23:30):
impiety towards the gods leveled against Anexagoras because, to once
again quote Plutarch quote, at the time people did not
tolerate the natural philosophers and the so called stargazers because
they reduced the divine to unreasoning causes, non providential forces,
and necessary happenings. Because of the close association with Pericles,
(23:52):
when this impiety charge arose, it was at least partially
motivated as an attack on the ruler of Athens. Yeah,
they couldn't directly go after Pericles, but they could go
after his friends and kind of weaken his support base.
And we know that Anaxagoras was imprisoned for a time,
but his trial is largely lost. There are mentions of
it here and there throughout the historical record, but any
(24:14):
record of the actual proceedings is long gone, and it
appears that there were actually two different charges. There was
one for impiety and another for medism, which was being
politically sympathetic to Persia. And that's because two different outcomes
to a trial of Anaxagoras appear in various writings, and
we do know that Pericles interceded on the philosopher's behalf
(24:35):
regarding the impiety toward the god's charge. The end result
was that Anaxagoras had to pay a fine, and he
also had to leave the city. So sometime around four
fifty b c. An Exagaras did leave Athens. He moved
to Lampsacus, where he lived out the rest of his life.
There was another trial, probably held without him present because
(24:55):
he had already left, that led to a death sentence.
An Exagaras reportedly smiled when he heard about the second outcome. Yeah,
he was already safe and Lampsacus and Anaxagoras lived until
the age of seventy two. In that city. He spent
more than two decades living there, apparently quite happy. He
was very revered by the citizens of Lampsacus. Uh They
(25:16):
are said to have celebrated him when he died, and
today there is a crater on the moon named for him. Yeah. Uh,
he's fascinating, fascinating creature. I think it is near the
North Pole and you can actually see it with the
naked eye on a good clear night where there's a
full moon, because it has a pretty unique level of
(25:37):
of height to it that leads into the crater, like
its lip is high. If I am understanding it properly,
that is Anaxagoras, the impious philosopher who dared to think
that things were physical happenings and not deities floating through
the celestial sky. Uh. Do you have listener mail to
(25:59):
close us out? I do? This is uh a listener mail,
that is uh. It even in its title mentions that
it is referring to an episode from four years ago.
But it made me love it. It's his appreciation for
narcilepsy episodes despite being four years late. And this is
from our listener, Christina, who writes high Holly and Tracy.
I'm a fairly new listener but a long time history enthusiast.
(26:19):
I've been going back through the archive and I just
listened to your live program on Safety Coffins dated October,
in which you mentioned a past an oarcilepsy episode, and
this led me to immediately go and listen to the
two ecailepsy episodes from I was recently diagnosed with arcilepsy
with cataplexy last fall. I really appreciate that you discussed
(26:40):
how very often o ecilepsy is misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. In
many cases, it took more than twenty years of complaints
before a doctor took my complaints seriously, and my symptoms
were previously misdiagnosed as depression despite no symptoms other than tiredness.
In my experience, many people have no idea what in
ourcalepsy is, and those that do have a very limited
(27:00):
concept of its symptoms. I really appreciate that you both
highlighted some of the rather surprising to most symptoms and
brought people's attentions to them. As someone who has been
trying to understand a diagnosis of our ecolepsy and struggling
to explain it to friends and family, I appreciate having
the perfect podcast to point them to for an explanation.
I love all your podcasts. Keep it up. Thank you
so much, Christina. That's so lovely. I know part of
(27:23):
the reason that I wanted to do those, and I
think I mentioned it in the episode, is that I
have a couple of friends in my life who have
been diagnosed in o ecalepsy, and they so often were
mischaracterized as just being like lazy or in some cases
even stupid, which is ridiculous if you know these people.
Uh So, that's why it's kind of important to me
to talk about stuff like that. And it's a good reminder.
(27:44):
Four years seems like a good gestation period for another
reminder brought about by your emails. So thank you so
much for writing us. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. You can also find us
everywhere on social media as missed in History, and you
can find us at missed in History dot com, where
all of the episodes of the show that have ever
(28:05):
existed more than a thousand all live. Uh. In any
of the shows that Tracy and I have been working
on just the past six and a half years or so,
we'll have show notes. The ones that preceded probably don't,
but you never know. There are some good blog posts
back there. We suggest that you subscribe to this podcast
that helps us and makes your life easier because you
(28:25):
don't have to hunt for downloads and you can do
that on Apple podcasts, Uh, the I Heart Radio app
or wherever it is that you listen. Stuff you missed
in history Class is a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts For my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(28:46):
you listen to your favorite shows.
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