[lit-ideas] "Water Is Black"

>>Anaxagoras, water is black;

Geary: 
    
>Water is black?  OOOOK, excuse me while I  scratch Greece from my itinerary. 
 
I'm surprised you don't remember your A+ in Philosophy 4 -- snipped below. 
 
"Anaxagoras [whose real name was "Democritus"] was a native of Clazomenae"  
Κλαζομεναί/ Klazomenai, modern-day Kilizman near İzmir in Turkey)  was an 
ancient Greek city of Ionia and a member of the Ionian Dodecapolis  
(Confederation of Twelve Cities), it was one of the first cities to issue 
silver  
coinage. Located on the western coast of Anatolia, on the Gulf of İzmir,Turkey, 
 
about 20 miles west of that city. The city was originally located on the  
mainland, but probably during the early fifth-century Ionian Revolt from the  
Persians 
it was moved to an island just off the coast, which Alexander the Great  
eventually connected to the mainland with a causeway.  


     
 
----


More from Diog. Laert.:

"Anaxagoras declared the sun to be a mass of  red-hot metal and to be larger 
than the Peloponnesus. He declared that there  were dwellings on the moon. He 
held the Milky War to be a reflection of the  light of stars which are not 
shone upon by the sun."
 
"He held that winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun's heat". 
 
"An earthquake is a subsidence of air into the earth"
 
"Speces were propagated by generation from one another, males from the  right 
side, females from the left."

"When someone asked him if the hills at Lampascus would ever become the  sea, 
he replied, 'Yes, it only needs time.'"
 
"Being to what end he had been born, he replied, 'To study sun and moon and  
heavens.'"
 
"Anaxagoras was the first to publish a book with diagrams."
 
He went on trial, and was later acquitted, "He was released, but he could  
not brook the indignity he had suffered and committed suicide."
 
As a will, "he said that "he would like the town hall to grant an annual  
holiday to the boys in the month in which he died, and the custom is kept up to 
 
this day."
 
"There have been three other men who bore the name of Anaxagoras. The first  
was a rhetorician, the second a sculptor, the third a grammarian."
 
1. Thales, Zeno, Parmenides, Heracleitos, Anaxagoras. State briefly  the  
doctrine of each.

"Anaxagoras was a WYSIWYG philosopher, that is, he believed there was no  gap 
between appearance and reality; everything we perceive is real.   Reality is 
just a bunch of elemental stuff, he professed.  He held  there was an 
indeterminate number of stuffs as opposed to the unimaginative  Empedocles 
who 
could only imagine 4 such stuffs.  Better than poor  Thales though who never 
got 
beyond being the water boy of Greek philosophy.  Mind, Ana also had a thing 
called mind, actually he called it "nous" -- I  prefer the spelling 'noose' 
-- 
which, he taught, is found in all living  things and is finer than the stuffs 
and does not mix with them and which was  responsible for organizing the 
stuffs 
into the things we see.  Plato  called him "sober".  I guess they didn't have 
Guinness in  Greece."



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