Introduction

Anaxagoras, in a dialogue called the fido, plato shows us the last conversation of socrates. Socrates says he came across anaxagoras book which could apparently be picked up cheap in athens towards the end of the fifth century b c. Anaxagoras offered an account of how the cosmos is produced and ordered by mind - but it turned out to consist largely of crude physical explanations invoking things like the hot and the cold. Disappointed, socrates went off on his own way, and, at least according to plato, invented the theory of forms in a later episode.