Marmodoro, Anna. Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras's Metaphysics.

Graham, Daniel W.

MARMODORO, Anna. Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras's Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. x + 214 pp. Cloth, $74.00--While Anaxagoras of Clazomenae is best known as the thinker who introduced a teleological orientation to philosophy but failed to exploit his own insight, he is a formidable thinker who deserves to be better appreciated. In her book Everything in Everything, Anna Marmodoro brings a study of Anaxagoras into contact with twenty-first-century metaphysics to produce a stimulating reconsideration of his contributions.

In a compact, well-researched, and tightly argued study, Marmodoro offers a revisionary reading of the Presocratic's ontology and metaphysics. According to her, the building-blocks of Anaxagoras's world are opposites such as wet and dry, hot and cold; these entities combine to produce stuffs such as water, air, bone, and gold; there are also seeds that serve as "physical 'frames'" for structured objects. Each of these three theses is highly controversial, but none is particularly original. What is new and original is the way Marmodoro interprets the ontology. The opposites, she argues, are best understood as tropes, and the stuffs that result from them as bundles of tropes. Further, the opposites are to be understood as powers.

Marmodoro goes on to apply the ontology to account for the paradoxical-sounding principles he enunciates. In order to prohibit the emergence of substances and qualities that Parmenides had ruled out while allowing for some sort of change, Anaxagoras holds any opposite or stuff can arise from any other. From this it follows that everything is in everything, which requires further that there be no least or greatest amount of any opposite. Whatever opposite or set of opposites is present in the largest quantity will impart its character to the whole body in question. For instance, if there is more water than anything else is a certain place, we will perceive the whole as a body of water--though it will have all other opposites (and hence stuffs made up them) in it. Anaxagoras thus allows for the phenomenal but not real emergence of entities.

In order to allow for infinite divisibility, Anaxagoras makes the opposites homoeomerous, or composed of parts like the whole (for example, hot is composed of portions of hot). "The resulting picture," Marmodoro explains, "is of a universe whose building blocks, the opposites, each divide into unlimitedly many, unlimitedly small parts or instances." This gives us an ancient version of a theory of, to use David Lewis's term, "gunk." Anaxagoras's cosmos is gunky, allowing for no atomic stopping-point of analysis. Anaxagoras is thus "the first gunk lover in the history of metaphysics." But how can we make sense of a world in which a plurality of opposites/powers is present in the same place? Marmodoro offers the "Wave Field model" in which a plurality of electromagnetic waves can coexist without interacting.

Marmodoro goes on to defend her view against other versions of the Everything in Everything thesis (chapter 4), to examine the role of mind or intelligence in the cosmos (chapter 5), and to compare Anaxagoras's ontology of gunk with a similar ancient theory, that of the Stoics (chapter 6).

The author provides an attractive reconstruction of Anaxagoras's metaphysics. Her account is strong on the structure and logic of the theory, but rather cursory in its handling of the historical context. She traces the priority of opposites back to the Milesians, but without argument and without considering evident counterexamples. Marmodoro establishes the priority of opposites for Anaxagoras in a single page by citing B15: "The flense and the wet and the cold and the dark come together here, where <the> earth is now" (her translation). "Taking earth as an example of stuff for Anaxagoras," she infers, "B15 indicates that for Anaxagoras stuffs are (metaphysically) reducible to opposites." But this seems hasty: earth is surely not "wet," nor do we know whether Anaxagoras means by talking about the wet, cold, and dark to refer to the powers themselves, or wet, cold, and dark stuff. Even Aristotle with his complex ontology describes Parmenides' "elements" indifferently as the hot and the cold on the one hand, and fire and earth on the other (Metaphysics 986b33-34); his terminology does not decide the issue.

As to the philosophical reconstruction: the identification of Anaxagorean qualities and powers with tropes is a fascinating move. But Anaxagoras's ontology is strange enough that the identification raises some problems of its own. How are the alleged Anaxagorean tropes individuated? How is hotness here distinct from hotness there, since in some important sense powers are continuous throughout space? Could it not be that there is only one hotness in the cosmos, being manifest in some places and latent in others?

Marmodoro's book offers a major new interpretation of Anaxagoras's metaphysics. It brings the Presocratic philosopher into contemporary debates and challenges readers to re-envision his philosophy and reconsider his contemporary relevance.--Daniel W. Graham, Brigham Young University