And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought

to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today's episode, Mind Over Mixture, Anexagoras.

In a dialogue called the Fido, Plato shows us the last conversation of Socrates.

It will end when Socrates drinks the hemlock and bravely prepares to meet whatever the

afterlife may hold for him. But first, he indulges in a bit of autobiography, telling his

friends, soon to be his mourners, about his early philosophical explorations. In this story he gives

a central role to Anex Agaris.

Socrates says he came across Anex Agaris' book which could apparently be picked up cheap in Athens

toward the end of the 5th century BC.

At first he found the book promising.

Anexagoras offered an account of how the Cosmos is produced and ordered by mind,

which Socrates assumed meant that Anex Agarice would go on to explain why everything in the world is for the best.

Instead, the book turned out to consist largely of crude physical explanations, invoking things like the hot and the cold, the rarefied and the

dense. Disappointed, Socrates went off on his own way and, at least according to Plato, invented the theory of forms.

In a later episode we'll look at this dialogue in its own right,

but I wanted to start with it today because I think the passage captures so well a kind of duality in

Anaxagoras' philosophy. On the one hand there is his exalted mind, the

purest and most subtle of things which plays a central role in forming the Cosmos.

On the other hand, there is his fascination with physical processes,

and, above all, his startling theory of universal mixture. Everything is in everything, according

to Anex Agaris, except for mind. Anyone trying to come to grips with Anex Agaris should try to do

...