Anaximander
With his discoveries, Anaxamander of
Miletus attempted to bring the realm of the
unreal to the world where common
man could conceive it. As successor and pupil
of Thales of Miletus,
Anaxamander worked on the fields of geometry, natural
science, and astrology.
The culmination of his life attempted to define the
indefinite or
undetermined. He was the first to discover and apply the theory of
the
unlimited. For a philosopher of this time period, he had many radical
ideas.
Anaxamander believed many different things about the position of
the Earth. He
also published a book, On Nature, which revealed his theories
about the
evolution of Earth and man. Under the tutelage of Thales,
Anaxamander studied
numerous things about earth and life. While he did make
some contributions to
the world of mathematics, his greatest achievements
were probably in science and
astrology. His most notable accomplishment,
however, was the gnomon. The gnomon
is the large rod that is erected from the
base of the sundial. This led him to
other things, such as the prediction of
solstices and equinoxes. His attempts at
prediction carried over and allowed
him to create maps of both the real and
celestial worlds. In addition to his
celestial interests, Anaxamander believed
that the Earth hung in the middle
of the sky and was held there by the pull of
objects at either side. Along
this line he also believed that the world
possessed a cylindrical form. He
believed that the Earth was encompassed by a
flame, that was broken into
pieces in order to generate the sun, moon, and
stars. The heavenly bodies,
Anaxamander thought, were each a wheel of fire. When
holes in the wheel were
clogged then an eclipse occurred. The seas upon the
earth were the result of
leftover primal moisture. Strong winds came through and
dried some places,
which are now land; what was left became the seas and
oceans.
Anaxamander’s attempt to bring the world of the unknown to
reality was the
most difficult task that one could encounter. Well-known for
his theory of
Apeiron, or the unlimited, Anaxamander pursued the changes
of the Earth. He
basically thought that apeiron compensated for the many
changes the Earth
undergoes. As a fragment from Anaxamander says, "the
unlimited is the first
principle of things that are. It is that from which
the coming-to-be takes
place, and it is that to which they return when they
perish, by moral necessity,
giving satisfaction to one another and making
reparation for their injustice,
according to the order of time." Coming to be
is the separation of opposites
and does not involve any change in the natural
being of a substance. Anaxamander
thought that it was neither water nor any
other substance, but it is of entirely
different nature than that in which
the unlimited exists. He believed that all
things existed in some place.
Whether they were absent or conspicuous was
irrelevant; they still existed.
He believed that qualities came into existence,
vanished away, only to return
again. Anaxamnder took into consideration that"there was a storehouse or
reservoir from which the qualities that now
confront us have ‘separated off’
and into which, when their contraries come
forth in time, they will go back;
the process being repeated in reverse, and so
on in never-ending cycles."
Anaxamander, unlike most philosophers of this
time, assessed that the world
was created from air, not water. He assumed that
everything was created from
nothing. This nothing, however, was actually the
unknown. The unknown, as
Anaxamander defines it, can best be described as the
other half of what is.
The undetermined is what is not and cannot be seen.
Equally as important
are water, land, and fire that were created by the density
in the air. Each
of these three things, as seen from Anaxamander’s point of
view, were the
origin of all the rest of what exists. Water, of course, was the
origin of
life. From this water, first came fish that would evolve into what is
now
man.
Bibliography
Kirk,G.S. and Raven, J.E.
The_Presocratic_Philosophers. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1957
Wheelwright, Philip. The Presocratics. New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1966 15
Oct. 1999. http://viator.ucs.indiana.edu/~ancmed./foundations.htm
15 Oct.
1999. http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch5143/help/pre-socratic.html 13
Oct.
1999.
http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/instruct/div.sci/sci122/Greek/Greek.html