The Seba library treats Anaxagoras in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Edinger, Edward F).
His great contribution is the central idea of nous, which is always translated as ‘mind.’ Probably nous meant a little more than the modern term ‘mind’ and should be translated as ‘consciousness.’
Edinger identifies Anaxagoras’ nous as the foundational philosophical precursor to the depth-psychological concept of consciousness, arguing the term exceeds its conventional translation.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
Nous is without limit, self-ruled and mixed with no thing, but alone and by itself… it is the finest and purest of all things, and has all judgement (gnome) concerning everything and is most powerful.
Sullivan presents Anaxagoras’ four fragments on nous as defining an intellective principle that is ontologically pure, unlimited in power, and epistemically sovereign over all things.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
Nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have life. And Nous had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the beginning.
The extended fragment from Anaxagoras establishes nous as the cosmogenic intelligence whose self-sufficiency and initiating power Edinger reads as an archetype of psychic ordering.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy thesis
Anaxag. taught: einai de kai psyches thanaton ton diachōrismon. Nothing else can be meant by the words — the death of the soul (as well as of the body) occurs with its separation (from the body).
Rohde documents Anaxagoras’ materialist claim that death of the soul is constituted by its separation from the body, a position that stands in tension with idealist appropriations of his nous doctrine.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Anaxagoras, 32, 41, 57, 66, 68, 109
Padel’s index registers Anaxagoras as a recurrent reference point across her analysis of Greek tragic selfhood and cosmological conceptions of the interior mind.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
Being thus limited by something other than itself that both supports and envelops it (in space and in time), the earth cannot be said to be autokrates like the nous of Anaxagoras.
Vernant invokes Anaxagoras’ autokratic nous as a conceptual benchmark for self-governance, contrasting it with cosmological models in which entities are bounded and supported by external principles.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Anaxagoras 183, 249, 287
Seaford’s index places Anaxagoras in a broadly Presocratic context relevant to the philosophical transformations of the early Greek mind, without extended treatment.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside