Background
Anaximander was born around 610 in the Greek city of Miletus in Ionia (modern-day Turkey). He was the son of Praxiades, but little else is known of his life.
Anaximander of Miletus is often credited to be history's first known writer in history.
Thales of Miletus (c. 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer from Miletus in Asia Minor (present-day Milet in Turkey).
Caption on a Relief Representing Anaximander.
Italian, Rome, 17th century After the Antique BUST OF ANAXIMANDER.
Illustration of Anaximander's models of the universe. On the left, daytime in summer; on the right, nighttime in winter. However, Anaximander pictured the earth as a truncated cylinder, not as a sphere as shown.
Ancient Roman mosaic from Johannisstraße, Trier, dating to the early third century AD, showing Anaximander holding a sundia.
Map of Anaximander's universe.
Thales of Miletus (c. 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer from Miletus in Asia Minor (present-day Milet in Turkey).
Greek: Ἀναξίμανδρος Anaximandros
Astronomer cosmologist philosopher scholars
Anaximander was born around 610 in the Greek city of Miletus in Ionia (modern-day Turkey). He was the son of Praxiades, but little else is known of his life.
According to Diogenes Laërtius (a biographer of the Greek philosophers, who lived in the 2nd or 3rd Century A.D.), he was a pupil of Thales (founder of the Milesian School of philosophy, and possibly also Anaximander's uncle), and succeeded him as master of the school, where his work influenced Anaximenes and Pythagoras.
Most of indirect evidence about Anaximander`s life cannot be taken at its face value because it ultimately goes back to Theophrastus, who, like his teacher Aristotle, had the tendency to see and interpret the doctrines of pre Aristotelian philosophers in the light of the problems, the terminology, and the positive doctrines of Aristotle’s philosophy. Needless to say, the later doxographical reports also contain mistakes of their own making; and, in the case of the astronomical and mathematical data, later authors transferred the knowledge of what to them were obvious notions to the heroes of early Greek thought. Thus, for example, Anaximander is credited with the discovery of the equinoxes and of the obliquity of the ecliptic, attributions that are anachronistic and that contradict other notions that he is said to have held.
Fortunately, for Anaximander we possess information from a different tradition, the geographical. Thus, we know that he drew a map of the inhabited world and that he wrote a book in which he tried to explain the present state of the earth and of its inhabitants, especially the human race. For this purpose he advanced a cosmogony. According to Anaximander, at any given time there are an infinite number of worlds that have been separated off from the infinite, TO ’cmtipov, which is the source and reservoir of all things. These worlds come into being, and when they perish, they are reabsorbed into the infinite, which surrounds them and is eternal and ageless. Our world came into being when a mass of material was separated off from the infinite; a rotatory motion in a vortex caused the heavy materials to concentrate at the center, while masses of fire surrounded by air went to the periphery and later constituted the heavenly bodies. The sun and the moon are annular bodies constituted of fire surrounded by a mass of air. This mass of air has pipelike passages through which the light produced by the fire inside escapes, and this is the light the earth receives. In this way Anaximander perhaps accounted for the different shapes of the moon’s face and also for eclipses. The earth, at the center of this world, has the shape of a rather flat cylinder. Animals originated from inanimate matter, by the action of the sun on water, and men originated from fish.
What is significant in all this is that Anaximander tried to explain all these different phenomena as the result of one law that rules everything; and it is this law that is preserved in the only verbatim quotation from Anaximander that we possess (here paraphrased): All things pass away into that from which they took their origin, the infinite, as it is necessary; for they make reparation to one another for their injustice in the fixed order of time. The extent and exact meaning of this quotation are controversial, but there can be no question that here we have an imper sonal law according to which all occurrences in the universe are explained. This all-inclusive, immanent law of nature is Anaximander’s lasting contribution to human thought.
Anaximander is sometimes called the "Father of Cosmology" and the founder of astronomy for his bold use of non-mythological explanations of physical processes. He was the first to conceive a mechanical model of the world, in which the Earth floats very still in the center of the infinite, not supported by anything. He envisioned the Earth as a cylinder with a height one-third of its diameter, the flat top forming the inhabited world, surrounded by a circular oceanic mass.
Anaximander was the first astronomer to consider the Sun as a huge mass (and therefore to realize how far from Earth it might be), and the first to present a system where the celestial bodies turned at different distances. He built a celestial sphere, and his work on astronomy shows that he must have observed the inclination of the celestial sphere in relation to the plane of the Earth to explain the seasons.
Some consider Anaximander the earliest proponent of evolution (even though he had no theory of natural selection). Noting the existence of fossils, he claimed that animals sprang out of the sea long ago, and he put forward the idea that humans had to spend part of this transition inside the mouths of big fish to protect themselves from the Earth's climate, until they had time to adapt to the emergence of dry land.
His other interests were in mathematics (he explained some basic notions of geometry and introduced the sundial gnomon to Greece), meteorology (he attributed some phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, to the intervention of elements, rather than to divine causes, and he explained rain as a product of the humidity pumped up from Earth by the sun) and geography (he was probably the first to publish a map of the world, i.e. the entire inhabited land known to the ancient Greeks, rather than the local maps which had been produced in ancient times).
Anaximander was an early proponent of science, and is sometimes considered to be the first true scientist, and to have conducted the earliest recorded scientific experiment. He is often considered the founder of astronomy, and he tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe and its origins, and to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. He made important contributions to cosmology, physics, geometry, meteorology and geography as well as to Metaphysics.
At a time when the Pre-Socratics were pursuing various forms of Monism and searching for the one element that constitutes all things (each had a different solution to the identity of this element: water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, fire for Heraclitus), Anaximander argued that neither water nor any of the other candidates can embrace all of the opposites found in nature (e.g. water can only be wet, never dry) and therefore cannot be the one primary substance or first principle of the universe.
He judged that, although not directly perceptible to us, the only substance which could explain all the opposites he saw around him, is what he called "apeiron" (variously translated as "the infinite", "the boundless", etc), an endless, unlimited primordial mass, subject to neither old age nor decay, that perpetually yielded fresh materials from which everything we perceive is derived. The Universe originates in the separation of opposites in this primordial matter, and dying things are merely returning to the boundless element from which they came. He saw the universe as a kind of organism, supported by "pneuma" (cosmic breath).
Quotations:
The one surviving fragment of Anaximander's writing deals with this matter. Simplicius transmitted it as a quotation, which describes the balanced and mutual changes of the elements:
"Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time."
Quotes from others about the person
The 3rd century Roman writer Censorinus reports:
"Anaximander of Miletus considered that from warmed up water and earth emerged either fish or entirely fishlike animals. Inside these animals, men took form and embryos were held prisoners until puberty; only then, after these animals burst open, could men and women come out, now able to feed themselves."
