{"id":1403,"date":"2026-06-15T11:40:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T11:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.in2greece.com\/english\/historymyth\/history\/ancient\/?page_id=1403"},"modified":"2026-06-15T11:43:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T11:43:55","slug":"anaximander-htm","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.in2greece.com\/english\/historymyth\/history\/ancient\/anaximander.htm","title":{"rendered":"Anaximander"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anaximander of Miletus (610-547 BC)<\/h2>\n\n\n

Anaximander (610-547 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus. Along with Thales and Anaximenes, he is one of the most important representatives of that philosophical awakening that is referred to with collective terms such as \u201cIonian Enlightenment\u201d and \u201cIonian natural philosophy\u201d.<\/p>\n

According to Apollodorus of Athens, Anaximander lived around 10-4 BC. BC in Miletus. It is likely that he knew Thales of Miletus and lived in close communion with him. In any case, he is considered a successor and student of Thales.<\/p>\n

\"anaximander\"He was concerned with the same basic problem as Thales, namely the question of the origin of all existence, of Arch\u00e9 (begining). However, he did not consider water to be this, but rather the materially indeterminate \u00c1peiron (\u1f04\u03c0\u03b5\u03b9\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd): the \u201cunlimited\u201d or \u201cimmeasurable\u201d in terms of its size. Only a single fragment of Anaximander’s philosophy survives in the original; It represents the first surviving Greek text in prose form. The majority of Anaximander’s philosophical views are derived from Aristotle’s tradition two centuries later and are subject to some uncertainties.<\/p>\n

As an important astronomer and astrophysicist, he was the first to develop a purely physical theory of the creation of the world (cosmogony). He based his thoughts on the creation of the world as a whole exclusively on observation and rational thinking. The modern term cosmos (\u03ba\u03cc\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2) and the understanding of the world as a systematically comprehensible, ordered whole go back to Anaximander.<\/p>\n

He was also the first to not only draw a geographical map with the then known distribution of land and sea, but also to construct a sphere, a celestial globe. The map is now lost, but was later evaluated by Hecataeus of Miletus, from whose work a reasonably concrete representation of the world view of the time has come down to us.
The lunar crater Anaximander is named after him.<\/p>\n

Bertrand Russell interprets Anaximander’s theories in the history of Western philosophy as asserting the need for an appropriate balance between earth, fire and water, each of which can independently strive to increase its proportions in relation to the others. Anaximander seems to express his belief that a natural order ensures the balance between these elements, that where there was fire there is now ash (earth).<\/p>\n

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks that Anaximander was a pessimist who claimed that the original nature of the world was a state of indeterminacy. Accordingly, everything definite must eventually pass back into indeterminacy. In other words, Anaximander viewed \u201c all becoming as an unlawful emancipation from eternal being, an injustice for which destruction is the only penance.\u201d In this way of thinking, the world of individual objects has no value and should perish. Nietzsche refers to Anaxagoras and the other pre-Socratics as pre-Platonists.<\/p>\n

Origin and organizing principle of the world as a whole<\/h3>\n

According to Anaximander, the basic substance of everything that has come into being, the Apeiron (the limitless), is interpreted in different ways: as a spatially and temporally unlimited primal substance, as infinite in terms of mass or divisibility, as indeterminate or limitless, etc. m. The concept of the immeasurable reflects the openness of the possibilities of interpreting the Apeiron, but also the unpredictability of what emerges from or is generated by the Apeiron. According to Aristotle, Anaximander viewed what the term refers to as an immortal and indestructible being comparable to the gods of popular religion.<\/p>\n

The only surviving Anaximander fragment is the first written and transmitted sentence in Greek philosophy. However, research in this regard is divided as to the extent to which the tradition actually goes back authentically to Anaximander. The reproduction by Simplikius of Cilicia in the th century AD is based on a lost work by Aristotle’s student Theophrastus of Eresus.
The core statement relating to the Apeiron, which means that beings mean the multitude of things and phenomena, is: “(But from which beings come into being, this is where their passing also comes from) according to necessity; for these compensate each other and pay penance for their injustice according to the order of time.” With this, Anaximander was the first to define something imperceptible and indeterminate as existing in order to explain perceptible phenomena.
The quasi-lawful mutual replacement of opposing forces or substances in a continuous and balanced process is likely to represent the constant order of the cosmos: a system that is exposed to change and change and yet is inherently stable. Research is divided as to whether the Apeiron is also involved in this event or whether it is a purely internal balancing process, so that the effect of the Apeiron was limited solely to the phase of the creation of the world. In the first case, a purely internal balancing process would be assumed. In the second case, ideas about a plurality of worlds existing side by side or one after the other would also come into consideration.<\/p>\n

The Canadian historian of philosophy and renowned expert on ancient Greek philosophy, Thomas M. Robinson, considers that Anaximander may have conceived of the universe as an eternal process in which an infinite number of galactic systems are born from and reabsorbed into the Apeiron. This would have brilliantly anticipated the worldview of the atomists Democritus and Leucippus, which is usually viewed as their own achievement<\/p>\n

Theory of the Incarnation and the Soul<\/h3>\n

Anaximander attributed the origin of humanity to other living beings. He noticed that compared to other species, humans need a very long time in the early stages of their development before they can ensure self-sufficiency and survival on their own. Therefore he assumed that the first humans emerged from animals, namely fish or fish-like creatures. For he sought the origin of living things in water.<\/p>\n

For him, life was a spontaneous emergence from the damp environment: “Anaximander says that the first living creatures arose in the damp and were surrounded by spiny bark. As their lives progressed, they moved to dry land and, after the bark surrounding them burst open, spent their lives in a different way for a short time.”<\/p>\n

The soul considered Anaximander to be air-like. The idea of \u200b\u200bthe soul as A\u00ebr may have been based on the connection with life or with breathing in and out. It is unclear whether he differentiated between the breathing soul of humans and that of other living beings.<\/p>\n

How Anaximander’s conception of Apeiron and Kosmos related to his conception of the soul, and whether there was any relationship between them at all, is uncertain. Since Anaximander considered the soul to be air-like, some assume that he attributed immortality to the soul. It remains to be seen whether he was thinking about an ensoulment of the cosmos, and also about an ensoulment of all, similar to what Thales had probably imagined, and beyond that, about the immortality of individual souls.<\/p>\n

Cosmos and Earth<\/h3>\n

Anaximander believed that during the creation of today’s orderly universe, something that produced heat and cold was separated from the eternal, and from this a ball of fire grew around the air surrounding the earth, like the bark around a tree.<\/p>\n

According to Anaximander, the stars are created by the burst fireball, in which the split-off fire is enclosed by air. There are certain tube-like passages on them as blow-out points; they are visible there as stars. The eclipses also arise in the same way, namely by locking the blow-out points.<\/p>\n

The sea is a remnant of what was originally moist. “Originally, the entire surface of the earth was moist. But as it was then dried out by the sun, one part gradually evaporated. This gave rise to the winds and the turnings of the sun and moon, while the remaining part became the sea. Therefore, as it dried out, it would have less and less water, and finally it would gradually become completely dry” (Aristotle on Anaximander).<\/p>\n

The winds arise from part of this moisture, which evaporates through the sun, as the finest vapors in the air separate out and, when they collect, begin to move. The solstices and lunar solstices also happen because, because of these vapors and vapors, they complete their turning times by turning to places where the supply of these vapors is guaranteed.<\/p>\n

The earth is what is left of what was originally moist in the hollow places on the earth. Anaximander thought that the earth was floating, overwhelmed by nothing and standing still because of its equal distance from all the heavenly circles. Its shape is round, arched and resembles a cylinder in the manner of a stone column segment. We would be standing on one of their bases; the other is opposite to this. Downpours are formed from the evaporation caused by solar radiation from the earth. Lightning occurs when the wind rushes into the clouds and breaks them apart.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anaximander of Miletus (610-547 BC) Anaximander (610-547 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus. Along with Thales and Anaximenes, he is one of the most important representatives of that philosophical awakening that is referred to with collective terms such as \u201cIonian Enlightenment\u201d and \u201cIonian natural philosophy\u201d. According to Apollodorus of Athens, Anaximander lived around
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