Philosopher, astronomer, and cartographer
Born: c. 610 b. c.e.; Miletus, Greek Asia Minor (now in Turkey)
Died: c. 547 b. c.e.; probably Miletus
Category: Philosophy; science and technology; geography; astronomy and cosmology
Life Anaximander (uh-nak-suh-MAN-duhr) was a fellow citizen and student of Thales, the Milesian usually credited with having inaugurated Western philosophy. Thales, some forty years older than his protege, put none of his philosophical thought in writing and maintained no formal pedagogical associations with pupils. However, Thales’ cosmological views (as reconstructed by historians) doubtless inspired Anaximander, and Anaximander finally expanded on Thales’ ideas with innovative leaps in conceptual abstraction.
Anaximander was known in his day for his practical achievements and his astronomical discoveries. He is said to have been chosen by the Milesians as the leader for a new colony in Apollonia on the Black Sea. He traveled widely and was the first Greek to publish a “geographical tablet,” a map of the world. The map was circular, and it was centered on the city of Delphi, because Delphi was the location of the omphalos, or “navel” stone, that was thought to be the center of Earth. Anaximander is also said to have designed a celestial map and to have specified the proportions of stellar orbits.
In addition, he built a spherical model of the stars and planets, with Earth located at the center and represented as a disk or cylinder whose height was one third its diameter. The heavenly bodies were rings of hollow pipe of different sizes that were placed on circling wheels in ratios of three to six to nine, in proportion to the magnitude of Earth. This model was dynamic; the wheels could be moved at different speeds, making it possible to visualize patterns of planetary motion. Anaximander is also credited with inventing the gnomon (part of a sundial) and with having discovered the zodiac.
All these eclectic interests and discoveries illustrate Anaximander’s rational view of the world. This approach received its fullest and most innovative expression in his philosophy of nature. It arose in part as a response to Thales’ ideas on nature. Thales held that water was the nature of everything. This meant, in the light of the ancient idea ofphysis (a thing’s origin or source, from which it is constantly renewed), that water was the origin of everything, a notion without any allegorical or mythical connotations. Anaximander agreed with Thales that the origin of the things of the world was some common stuff, but he thought that the stuff could not be some ordinary element. He rejected Thales’ conception on purely logical grounds. How could any manifestly singular stuff ever give rise to qualities that pertained to things differently constituted, such as earth and fire? What is more, if water were the source of things, would not drying destroy them? Thus, reasoned Anaximander, the thing with which the world begins cannot be identical with any of the ordinary stuff with which humans are acquainted, but it must be capable of giving rise to the wide multiplicity of things and their pairs of contrary qualities. What therefore distinguishes the source from the world is that the source itself is “unbounded”: It can have no definite shape or quality of its own but must be a reservoir from which every sort or characteristic in the world may be spawned.
Anaximander called the source of things this very name: apeiron, Boundlessness or the Boundless. The Boundless can have no beginning, nor can it pass away, for it can have no bounds, including temporal ones. This eternal source functions as a storehouse of the world’s qualities. The qualities that constitute some present state of the world have been separated out of the stock, and when their contrary qualities become manifest, they will, in turn, be reabsorbed into the reservoir. When Earth is hot, heat will come forth from the Boundless; when Earth cools, cold will come forth and heat will go back. For Anaximander, this process continued in never-ending cycles. The cause of the alternating manifestations of contrary qualities is the subject of the single existing fragment of Anaximander’s own words, the only remains of the first philosophy ever written. Out of the Boundless, Anaximander explains, the worlds arise, but from whatever things is the genesis of the things that are, into these they must pass away according to necessity; for they must pay the penalty and make atonement to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of Time.
History has produced no consensus of interpretation for this passage and its picturesque philosophical metaphor for the rationale of the world.
Anaximander was probably thinking of a courtroom image. Each existing thing is in a state of “having-too-much,” so that during the time it exists it “commits injustice” against its opposite by preventing it from existing. In retribution, the existing thing must cede its overt existence for its opposite to enjoy and pay the penalty of returning to the submerged place in the great Boundless reservoir. This cycling, he added, is how time is ordered or measured. Time is the change, the alternating manifestation of opposites.
Influence Anaximander, with his scientific curiosity and his genius for abstract insight, poised philosophical inquiry for new vistas of exploration; his new philosophical approach inaugurated penetrating, objective analysis. His principle of the eternal Boundless as the source of the world’s multifarious qualities and change forms the conceptual backdrop against which twenty-five centuries of science and natural philosophy have developed.
Two particular innovations of Anaximander have never been abandoned. First, his extension of the concept of law from human society to the physical world continues to dictate the scientific worldview. The received view in Anaximander’s time—that nature was capricious and anarchic— has never again taken hold. Second, Anaximander’s invention of the use of models and maps revolutionized science and navigation and continues to be indispensable, even in people’s daily lives.
Further Reading
Brumbaugh, Robert S. The Philosophers of Greece. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981.
Burnet, John. Early Greek Philosophy. 4th ed. New York: Meridian Books/ World, 1961.
Couprie, Dirk L., Robert Hahn, and Gerard Naddaf. Anaximander in Context: New Studies in the Origins of Greek Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Guthrie, W. K. C. The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans. Vol. 1 in A History of Greek Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978-1990.
Hahn, Robert. Anaximander and the Architects: The Contributions of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
Kahn, Charles H. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994.
Kirk, Geoffrey S., and John E. Raven. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Wheelwright, Philip, ed. The Presocratics. New York: Odyssey Press,
1966.
Patricia Cook
See also: Cosmology; Philosophy; Pre-Socratic Philosophers; Science; Thales of Miletus.
World History
