Anaximander

(born 610 BCE, Miletus [Turkey]—died

546 BCE)
• Greek philosopher who was the first to
develop a cosmology, or systematic
philosophical view of the world.

• Anaximander is said to have been a

pupil or associate of the Greek
philosopher Thales of Miletus and to
have written about
astronomy, geography, and the nature
of things.
• Anaximander set up a gnomon (a
shadow-casting rod) at Sparta and
used it to demonstrate
the equinoxes and solstices and
perhaps the hours of the day.
• He drew a map of the known world,
which was later corrected by his fellow
Milesian, the author Hecataeus, a
well-traveled man. He may also have
built a celestial globe.
 In his thinking about Earth, he
regarded the inhabited portion as flat,
consisting of the top face of a cylinder,
whose thickness is one-third its
diameter. Earth is poised aloft,
supported by nothing, and remains in
place because it is equidistant from all
other things and thus has no
disposition to fly off in any one
direction.
 He held that the Sun and
the Moon are hollow rings filled with
fire. Their disks are vents or holes in
the rings, through which the fire can
shine. The phases of the Moon, as well
as eclipses of the Sun and the Moon,
are due to the vents’ closing up.
Anaximander held an evolutionary view
of living things. The first creatures
originated from the moist element by
evaporation. Man originated from
some other kind of animal, such
as fish, since man needs a long period
of nurture and could not have survived
if he had always been what he is now.
Anaximander also discussed the
causes of meteorological phenomena,
such as wind, rain, and lightning.
Thales of Miletus

Thales of Miletus, who is recognized as

the first philosopher because of his
reliance upon logos, or reason, to
understand the world, articulated a
philosophical system the framework
of which came to be known as "The
Milesian Picture."
 In this system, the Universe has
order because there is one source,
one unity, which underlies and unites
the multiplicity of individual, transitory
things in the world. These transitory
things pass into and out of existence,
while the underlying source of
existence itself, known as
the arche, Being itself, endures,
infinitely, eternally, and unchanged.
According to Thales, the arche of all
transitory beings is water.

Anaximander disagreed with Thales

that water was the arche.
 According to Anaximander, water
cannot be the unalterable source
behind all beings, because it itself is a
definite substance, a being. No finite,
changeable substance can be the
unalterable, eternal Being.
 Instead, Anaximander argued
that apeiron or the limitless, an
infinite substance which, as such, is
beyond the perception and
descriptive abilities of finite human
minds, must be the source of all
beings.
• From the apeiron all things arise in
coming-to-be and return by necessity
in passing-away.

• The apeiron is the eternal originative

substance without limits in (1) Space
(2) Time (3) Quality (4) Quantity.
 While Thales had already dispensed
with divine explanations of the world
around him, he had not written a book
about his philosophy. Moreover,
Anaximander went much further in
trying to give a unified account of all of
nature. Although Anaximander’s
primitive astronomy was soon
superseded, his effort to provide a
rational explanation of the world had a
lasting influence.