Anaksymenes

Stanowisko

Like Anaximander, Anaximenes looked for one source of all things, but he chose something definite rather than the boundless: air (aēr), which he took to be infinite in extent, always in motion and the stuff of life and soul. What made the choice powerful was the mechanism. Air rarefied becomes fire; condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, water, earth and finally stone. Differences in quality thus come from differences in density, a single process that runs in both directions. He pointed to everyday experience: breath blown through pressed lips feels cold, breath from an open mouth feels warm. His cosmology had the earth flat and riding on air like a leaf, with the heavenly bodies also flat and turning around the earth. The report that he compared the soul holding us together to air holding together the cosmos may preserve his own words, though scholars disagree. Later thinkers took up his scheme: Anaxagoras kept the flat earth supported by air, and in the fifth century Diogenes of Apollonia made air the principle of a whole natural philosophy.

Życie i kontekst

Anaximenes, son of Eurystratus, lived in Miletus in the sixth century BCE; his exact dates are uncertain. Theophrastus called him an associate of Anaximander, and later tradition made him Anaximander’s pupil, which makes him the third of the Milesian natural philosophers after Thales. According to Diogenes Laertius he wrote a book “in simple and unaffected Ionic”. Nothing of it survives except perhaps a single sentence; his views are known from Aristotle, Theophrastus and later reports in Simplicius, Hippolytus and Aetius.

Główne dzieła

• On Nature (6th century BCE, lost; one possible fragment)