أناكسيماندر

الموقف

Anaximander asked why any one element, such as water, should be the source of everything when the elements oppose one another. His answer was the apeiron – the boundless or indefinite – an inexhaustible, ageless source from which opposites like hot and cold separate out and to which they return. In his only surviving fragment, things “pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the ordering of time”: nature is governed by a kind of cosmic justice. He also pictured the earth resting unsupported at the centre of the cosmos and speculated that humans descended from fish-like creatures. His abstract principle marked a decisive step beyond observable stuffs.

الحياة والسياق

Anaximander, a younger fellow citizen and probably a pupil of Thales, worked in Miletus in the sixth century BCE. He is credited with the first Greek prose treatise on nature, with drawing an early map of the inhabited world and with introducing the gnomon, the pointer of the sundial, to Greece. Only a single fragment of his book survives.

الأعمال الرئيسة

• On Nature (c. 550 BCE, one fragment)

يرد في

• رحلة «من الميثوس إلى اللوغوس» · المحطة 2 من 8