Anaximander (Anaximandro) of Miletus

Source: Philosophy Before Socrates

Richard McKirahan

Born: 610 AC
Died: 530 AC (approximately)

Three Inventions

• The Gnomon (Sundials)

• Celestial Sphere
• Map
• Predicted an earthquake

Cosmogony

• Origin of the world

• Its structure
• Process that occur in the universe

Apeiron as the Arkhé

Arkhé (Arché): starting point; basic principle; originating source.

Apeiron is the Arkhé: Eternal and ageless.

Apeiron is the stuff all things are composed.

“it is eternal, ageless, and in motion, and that a plurality of heavens and worlds
arise or are born out of it and are surrounded by it.”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“The word apeiron is a compound of the prefix a-, meaning “not” and either the
noun peirar or peiras, “limit, boundary,” so that it means “unlimited, boundless,
indefinite,” ”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“Passage 5.3 contains three hints about what apeiron means for Anaximander.
Since it surrounds the heavens and worlds, it is (1) indefinitely (though not
necessarily infinitely) large, spatially unlimited. Since it is eternal and ageless, it
is “(2) temporally unlimited. Since it is no definite substance like water, it is (3)
an indefinite kind of material. ”
Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.”

Why Apeiron is not one of the elements

“5.4
The infinite [apeiron] body cannot be one and simple, nor can it be as some say it
is: that which is apart from the elements, and from which they generate the
elements.… For some make the infinite [apeiron] this [namely, something aside
from the elements], rather than air or water, so that the others are not destroyed
by the one of them that is infinite. For they contain oppositions with regard to
one another, for example, air is cold, water wet, fire hot. If any one of them were
infinite, the rest would already have been destroyed. But as it is, they declare
that the thing from which all come to be is different.
(Aristotle, Physics 3.3 204b22–29 = DK 12A16)

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

Apeiron is Propertyless

“The apeiron, then, is neither water nor fire, neither hot nor cold, nor heavy nor
light, nor wet nor dry, nor light nor dark. As the ultimate source of all the things
and all the characteristics in the world, it can be none of those things, can have
none of those characteristics. This makes it difficult to describe. ”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“Since the apeiron is neither hot nor cold, it does not favor either opposite over
the other, but how can something neither hot nor cold generate both opposites? ”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“Anaximander’s solution is to declare that hot and cold arose from something
capable of giving birth to hot and cold, and this thing is “separated off” from the
apeiron. We have no evidence on how he understood “arising” and “giving birth”
to occur or the nature of those events, but it is likely that he considered the
generation of the kosmos to be a kind of birth. Neither hot nor cold will
overwhelm the other since they are created at the same time and have equal
power.”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.”

“5.6 identifies several stages in the formation of the world. First there is the
apeiron, referred to here as “the eternal.” From the apeiron, through the process
of “separating off,” arises something capable of giving birth to hot and cold.16
The hot and cold which arise from this are described concretely as flame and
dark mist. The flame is a spherical shell that tightly encloses the mist “like bark
about a tree” (a simile possibly due to Anaximander himself). Since at this stage
there are only two things, fire and mist, corresponding to hot and cold, the
mention of earth refers to a later stage of differentiation which may occur
simultaneously with the breakup of the sphere of flame into circles to make the
sun, moon, and stars (see 5.8).

Anaximander’s approach to his fundamental problem, which can be rephrased as

“How does the determinate diversity of the world come out of the indeterminate
uniformity of the apeiron?”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

Diversity from the uniform apeiron

“The apeiron appears only at the beginning of the process; afterwards things
take their own course.”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“Despite Anaximander’s unclarity on some important points, his overall picture

is impressive, as is his understanding of the logical requirements of generating a
complex world out of a simple originative material”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“Cosmology: The Articulation of the World”

“There are many interesting points here. First, there is no appearance of

mythology or mention of the traditional divinities; eclipses, traditionally held to
indicate impending disaster, become mere facts of astronomy. Second, the
heavenly bodies are made of fire, a substance familiar from human experience.
Third, Anaximander boldly decrees the size of the universe and adopts a
terrestrial standard as its measure. Fourth, he assumes that the sizes and
distances of the earth and heavenly bodies are related by simple proportions,
based on the number 3. Fifth, he assumes that the kosmos has a geometrical
structure. Sixth, he uses a single mechanism to account for different phenomena
(eclipses, phases of the moon).”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

Anaximander: The Darwinist

“Anaximander also has an account of the origin of living creatures, including

humans.”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“5.17
Anaximander says that the first animals were produced in moisture, enclosed in
thorny barks. When their age advanced they came out onto the drier part, their
bark broke off, and they lived a different mode of life for a short time.
”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“5.18
He also declares that in the beginning humans were born from animals of a
different kind, since other animals quickly manage on their own and humans
alone require lengthy nursing. For this reason they would not have survived if
they had been like this at “the beginning.
(pseudo-Plutarch, Stromata 2 = DK 12A10) (continuation of 5.6)”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.”

“5.19
Anaximander … believed that there arose from heated water and earth either
fish or animals very like fish. In these, humans grew and were kept inside as
embryos up to puberty. Then finally they burst, and men and women came forth
already able to nourish themselves.
(Censorinus, On the Day of Birth 4.7 = DK 12A30)
”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

Anaximander does nor differentiate from animated and inanimated

beings

For him, we are all sons of the Apeiron and as such we share a common nature.

“The origin of animals is explained similarly to the origin of the universe and to
meteorological events: more complex things arise out of simpler things, and new
things come into existence after being enclosed tightly in something else and
breaking out of the container.”

“The distinction we feel between living animals and inanimate matter (such as
heated water) is inappropriately applied to Anaximander, whose originative
material is in some sense alive (see above page 36), so that all its products,
including earth and water, inherit its vital force. Animals and humans, with a
greater concentration of vitality, differ in degree, not in kind, from the rest of the
kosmos.”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.”

“Accordingly he takes an original and ingenious approach, having the first

humans nurtured in other animals until self-sustaining.”
Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“For his claims that animals arose in the sea before they emerged to live on dry
land and that they developed from fish, and for recognizing the need for a
different original form for humans and the difficulties of adapting to different
habitats (perhaps implicit in the short lives of the animals who first moved onto
dry land), Anaximander is sometimes called the father of evolution. ”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.”

The weight of existence

“5.20
The things that are perish into the things from which they come to be, according
to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice
in accordance with the ordering of time, as he says in rather poetical language.
(Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 24.18–21 = DK 12B1 + 12A9)”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.

“We have a picture of a world full of change—things coming to be and in turn

perishing. These changes are ordered in two ways: (1) when a thing (a) perishes
a turns into something definite—the same sort of thing that perished when a
came to be; (2) each thing has a determinate time span. In addition, comings-to-
be and perishings are acts of injustice which one thing (a) commits against
another (b) and for which a is compelled to make restitution to b.”

Excerpt From: McKirahan, Richard D. “Philosophy Before Socrates.” iBooks.”

Popper Return to Pre-Socratics Lecture

Back to the Pre-Socratics: The Presidential Address
Author(s):
Karl R. Popper
Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
New Series, Vol. 59 (1958 - 1959), pp. 1-24 Published by:
Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Aristotelian Society
Stable
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544602

Anaximander Position of the Earth

Anaximander's theory, 'The earth... is held up by nothing, but remains

stationary owing to the fact that it is equally distant from all other things.
Its shape is . .. like that of a drum. .. We walk on one of its flat surfaces,
while the other is on the opposite side'.