Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (ca. 500–428 B.C.)

If Empedocles is the last great Greek thinker in whom the Apollonian and Dionysian elements, the practical and the religious, the rational and the mystical, as yet remain unified, Anaxagoras is the first genuine representative of the scientific-philosophic spirit in today’s sense. To the question of why it is better to be born than not to be born, he would answer, “In order to study the heavens and the order of the entire universe”.^59A30 To this philosophic inclination, he would passionately devote himself, making it the aim of his life and freeing it of all social, political, practical and religious overtones.