1. Biography

Anaximander, son of Praxiades, was born and lived in the Ionian city of Miletus. It is said that he was a student, ‘successor’, even a relative¹ of the first Ionian philosopher, his fellow-citizen Thales. It is also reported that he led a colonizing expedition in Apollonia of the Black Sea,² while the report that he had travelled to Sparta indicates his contacts with other Greek cities.³

2. Scientific activities

From various fragmentary references to his scientific activities we can gather that Anaximander was a multi-faceted thinker, interested in theoretical reasoning as well as in practical technological applications. He is reported as the inventor of the gnomon (a simple device consisting of a rectangular triangle or rod, the shadow of which allows rudimentary calendar calculations).⁴ He also compiled a map of the then known world, which must have been rather simplistic and crude: the world is represented as a circle with the continents rendered as roughly equal in size (Herodotus⁵ had criticized the producers of the first Ionic maps for the naivety and sketchiness in which they depicted the world).

3. Sources

For Anaximander, as well as for most of the Presocratic thinkers, the written sources is one of the biggest problems in approaching and reconstructing his thought. Of Anaximander’s original written work only an extended fragment of few lines survives and very few other smaller phrases; for all the rest we are forced to rely on evidence of other writers and philosophers, mainly Aristotle, and especially the texts of ancient doxography.⁶ Anaximander probably composed a prose text where he expounded his philosophical views, but we cannot be certain about the nature, the extent and the title of this work. The Suda lexicon mentions several titles of his works, but modern scholarship has questioned their authenticity.⁷

4. Philosophical theories

4.1. Cosmology

4.1.1. The apeiron and the opposites

The central principle in Anaximander’s natural philosophy is the view that the entire material world arises from the prime element, the apeiron (=infinite, boundless, indefinite). The Infinite is an entity boundless in terms of space and time. It is also eternal, incorruptible and all-powerful, containing and controlling everything, and divine in nature. It is not to be identified with any of the other primordial substances through the interaction of which the world as perceived by the senses has resulted. This conception constitutes an important improvement on the first physiocratic (or naturalistic) theory of Thales, who held that the prime substance (arche) of the world is water. Anaximander had apparently realized that the prime matter, that from which the entire world originates, cannot be identical with any of its constituent parts, as that would lead to the absolute dominance of one of these, rendering impossible the existence and operation of the rest: in a world where the principle is water it would be hard to imagine how the element of fire has come about and is operative. According to Anaximander, these elements are somehow produced from the Infinite, but the latter is not defined by the characteristics of any of these. Out of the Infinite a ‘seed’ is separated from which the hot and the cold are produced. Further interaction between these two leads to the emergence of the humid and the dry, and, eventually, to the creation of the universe we inhabit.⁸ In the developed world these elements are in a state of constant conflict, for the nature of the hot e.g. is opposed to that of the wet element.

This clash is not erratic, for the Infinite does not allow any single element full ascendancy over its opposite; an inherent balance⁹ exists in the universe, which Anaximander describes in legalistic terms, borrowed from the reality of human societies: the predominance of one element constitutes an “injustice”, which is rectified “in accordance with the assessment of Time”, i.e. not within a specific time-frame but it is inevitable.¹⁰ Here we can clearly discern the influence of conclusions drawn by the observation of the natural world on the philosopher’s reasoning: the seasons can be viewed as opposites – the excessive dryness of a warm summer is balanced by an equally fierce winter with intense rainfall; the injustice of night to the day during the fall and winter months is rectified by the larger days of spring and summer and so on. In the process of this retribution, however, the victim becomes the aggressor, for, although on a macrocosmic level the dynamic balance is preserved, the act of retribution itself constitutes a new transgression on the former offender, which must be in turn dealt with: thus one can explain the eternal -yet orderly- change (e.g. the alteration of the seasons, possibly phenomena like high and low tide) which defines nature through and through.

4.1.2. Earth and heavenly bodies

The creation of Earth and the heavenly bodies is described as follows. After the phase of the separation of the hot and the cold elements, these two antithetic substances interact: fire forms a kind of fiery crust around the humid centre which becomes dry, forming the land. The tension between these two subsequently intensifies, and the whole system explodes. Rings are created out of the fiery crust around the centre which is made up of clouds and the Earth (which continues to dry up). Part of this fog covers the fiery rings, allowing one to glimpse the flaming inside only through few apertures: these are the heavenly bodies of the firmament, and the various astronomical phenomena, such as the eclipses and phases of the Moon, are to be explained in terms of the ongoing struggle between the warm and the humid elements in these rings. According to Anaximander, Earth is flat and circular, its shape resembling that of a column drum, its width equalling three time its depth. It remains in place, suspended, without being supported on something else, because it is equidistant to all other points around it, i.e. because of its central place.

At first this conception of the universe seems not impressive for its originality or rationality. Compared, however, to the cosmology of Thales (who argued that the Earth is floating on water) or the poetic-mythological accounts of the world’s structure (in Homer the firmament is a hemispherical dome without depth; the Earth remains stable in its place because its foundations reach into infinite depths),¹¹ the leap of Anaximander’s thought becomes evident: here we are dealing with a geometrically defined, three-dimensional space; the Earth requires no support to remain still, but is suspended in its place; the heavenly bodies circle around it and are arranged one behind the other. All these constitute the first mechanistic model of the universe.¹²

4.2. Zoogony - Anthropogony

Anaximander apparently formulated theories on the origin and evolution of the animals and humankind: he is the first philosopher who attempted to rationally explain the emergence of both the world and the humans that inhabit it. The first animals spontaneously grew out of the humid element on account of its interaction with the warm rays of the sun. Anaximander also relates that these creatures were surrounded by spiky husks, like sea urchins, which they shed as they adapted to life on dry land. An ingenious theory of his maintains that the first humans should have developed inside different organisms, for the human infant remains helpless and dependant on its parents for a long period after its birth.

We should first note that here we have the explanation of the appearance of life in accordance with the same basic principle of the interaction between the warm and the humid. The drying earth brings to life the first animals, which as they evolve start inhabiting dry land. The brilliant observation about human infants indicates his insightfulness and his philosophical acumen; Anaximander felt that the fact that humans, as opposed to other species, are born helpless and unable to survive independent of their parents for a long time, required an explanation and could have hindered the survival of our kind. He also realized the effect of climatic change on the forms of animals.

5. Assessment