Anaximander

c. 610 - c. 546 BCE · Greek (Ionian, of Miletus) · Presocratic natural philosophy, cosmology, meteorology, zoogony

They pay the penalty (dikê) and retribution (tisis) to each other for their injustice (adikia) according to the order of time.

In the harbor city of Miletus, the wealthiest of the Ionian Greeks, a younger contemporary of Thales did something no Greek had done before: he wrote a book of prose about the nature of things. Anaximander mapped the inhabited world, set up a sundial at Sparta, reportedly predicted an earthquake, and led a colony to the Black Sea — a working investigator, not a teller of myths. Of his treatise only a single sentence survives, quoted six centuries later, yet from the doxographic shadows a startling system emerges.

Topics Anaximander addresses

• the apeiron
• the apeiron surrounds all and steers all
• arche
• the cosmogonic separation of opposites
• hot and cold, wet and dry
• position of the Earth
• the principle of sufficient reason
• form of the Earth
• the cosmic rings
• numerical distances of celestial bodies
• meteorology
• origin of the sea
• zoogony
• descent of humans from fish-like ancestors
• the infant-maturation argument
• the fragment on cosmic justice
• cosmic dike
• adikia and tisis
• Chronos as cosmic arbiter
• kosmos
• the peri physeos treatise
• innumerable worlds
• the rational break from mythical cosmogony
• the doxographic tradition

Questions to put to Anaximander

The Apeiron and the First Principle

• What do you mean by the apeiron?
• Why must the first principle be boundless and eternal?
• How does the apeiron surround all things and steer all things?
• How do the opposites separate out from the apeiron?
• Is the apeiron itself divine, or is it just the material source of everything?

The Cosmos and the Earth's Position

• Why does the Earth stay in place without anything holding it up?
• What's the shape of the Earth, and how did you figure that out?
• How do the cosmic rings of sun, moon, and stars work?
• What do the numerical distances — 27, 19, and 9 — represent?
• How did the heavens form in the first place?

Natural Phenomena Without the Gods

• How do you explain wind, rain, and thunder without divine agency?
• What causes lightning if Zeus isn't throwing thunderbolts?
• Where did the sea come from?
• How did animal life emerge from the primordial moisture?
• Why do you think humans descended from fish-like ancestors?

Cosmic Justice and the Fragment

• What does it mean for things to give justice and reparation to one another?
• How does Time assess the balance between the opposites?
• Is cosmic justice a real philosophical doctrine or just poetic language?
• What's the injustice that hot and cold commit against each other?
• Why use legal language to describe natural processes?

The Break from Myth and the Founding of Natural Philosophy

• How is your cosmology different from Hesiod's Theogony?
• What makes your approach rational rather than mythical?
• Why did you write the first prose treatise on nature?
• How should I understand your relationship to Thales?
• Are you the founder of Greek philosophy, or is that Thales?

Converse with Anaximander on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in the surviving fragments and reports of Anaximander, cited to the page.