Anaximander

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Anaximander

astronomy, natural philosophy.

There were at least two Anaximanders, both citizens of Miletus: the elder, who was born about 610 b.c. and who is said to have died shortly after 547/546 b.c. (i.e., in 546/545 B. C., the year of the fall of Sardis), and the younger, who is said to have been a historian, the author of Interpretation of Pythagorean Symbols, who lived toward the end of the fifth century b.c. We are concerned here with the older Anaximander. Of him we possess only one verbatim quotation, which is difficult to interpret with certainty, and several reports by later authors. Most of this indirect evidence, however, 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 abvious 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, expecially 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, ?ò????????, 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 constitutd of fair 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 impersonal 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The ancient sources are collected in H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragrnente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., I (Berlin, 1951). 81–90.

Modern works dealing with Anaximander are J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (London, 1930). pp. 50–71; H. Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore, 1935). Passim: and “The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), 319–345; D. R. Dicks, “Solsytices, Equinoxes, and the Presocratics,” in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 86 (1966), 26–40; F. Dirlmeier, “Der Satz des Anaximandros von Milet,” in Rheinisches Museum. 87 (1938), 376–382; W.A. Heidel, “The ?INH in Anaximenes and Anaximander,” in Classical Philology, 1 (1906), 279–282; “On Anaximander,” ibid., 7 (1912), 212–234; “On Certain Fragments of the Pre-Socraties,” in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 48 (1913), 681–734, esp. 682–691; and “Anaximander’s Book, the Earliest Known Geographical Treatise,” ibid., 56 (1921), 237–288; C.H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York, 1960); G.S. Kirk and J.E., Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 99–142; A. Maddalena, Ionici, lestimonianze e frammenti (Florence, 1963), pp. 76–157; J. B. McDiarmid,” Theophrastus on the Presocratic Causes,” in Harvard Studies in Classical philology, 61 (1953), 85–156; R. Mondolfo. L’infinito nel pensiero dell’antichità classica (Florence, 1956), pp. 188 ff.; and in his edition of E. Zeller’s Philosophic der Griechen, La filosofia dei greci nel suo sviluppo storico, II (Florence, 1938), 135–205; and E. Zeller, Die Philosophic der Griechen, W. Nestle, ed., I (Leipzig, 1923), 270–315.