Making things up

Abstract

In Anaxagoras’s ontology, the Opposites are primitively numerically and qualitatively the same, and exist extremely mixed with each other, according to his ‘Everything in Everything Principle’. Their extreme mixture is facilitated by their being gunky, that is, divided into (proper) parts that have (proper parts) ad infinitum. The chapter examines how objects ‘emerge’ out of gunk, in this system, and how they are qualitatively differentiated in their extreme mixture. Anaxagoras’s ontology is built on a mathematical principle—the unlimited division of the Opposites—whereby Anaxagoras implicitly endorses what we might call the normativity of mathematics on the physical world, which we will encounter again in Plato’s theory of Forms. The chapter examines in more detail the constitution of objects as bundles of properties, which Plato will also adopt, and the reification of structure as seeds, a stance from which Plato will depart.