School of thought

Pluralists

Intellectual current

Classification

The Pluralists, Empedocles and Anaxagoras, were fifth-century thinkers who answered Parmenides' challenge to the reality of change and plurality.

Four Elements: Empedocles' earth, water, air, and fire are eternal and unchanging; all change is mixture and separation driven by the cosmic forces of Love (attraction) and Strife (repulsion).
Nous (Mind): Anaxagoras introduced Mind as an ordering principle — infinite, self-ruling, and unmixed — that initiated cosmic rotation and continues to govern the arrangement of matter.

Empedocles · Anaxagoras

How Many Fundamental Substances?
Empedocles answered Parmenides with four permanent roots, earth, water, air, and fire, mixed and parted by Love and Strife, and Anaxagoras with unlimited seeds of every kind ordered by Mind: many basic substances, none of which comes to be or perishes.

Atomism Influenced by this tradition
Extended the pluralist response to Parmenides — Empedocles' roots and Anaxagoras' seeds — replacing qualitatively distinct principles with uniform atoms moving in the void.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Empedocles
Anaxagoras, On Nature (c. 467–450 BCE), the earliest pluralist response to Parmenides and the start date used here
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Anaxagoras, §1 — Formation: the date and place of Anaxagoras's first book, which anchors this entity, are disputed among Athens, Clazomenae and Lampsacus, so the origin is not established.
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1983)
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1983), chs. 10 and 12 (Empedocles, Anaxagoras)
Empedocles: The Extant Fragments — M. R. Wright
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae — Patricia Curd