Anaximander

Anaximander:

The Classical Mind 2nd Edition
W.T. Jones
1980

- A younger contemporary of Thales
- One remaining sentence from his book: "From what source things arise, to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed; for they suffer punishment and make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the order of the time" (Jones, 11).
             - There is one stuff (monism)
             - There is a process by which the one becomes many stuffs
             - The process is necessary
- For Anaximander, the one stuff was not an element, but something called the 'boundless'
- Anaximander argued that the one stuff couldn't be an element from a logical standpoint. Water can't really become fire because that would be the thing becoming the opposite of itself. Since all the elements would have this problem, his one stuff had to be something entirely different in essence.
- For Anaximander the process was important. The boundless would become something, would return to the boundless and then become the opposite thing. It was cyclical.
-For Anaximander, "The world was still basically disorderly, and that what required explanation was its orderliness" (Jones, 12).
-Anaximander had an interesting theory of evolution that anticipated some basic Darwinian features.

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972

-Born around 610 B.C.
- Second of the third Milesian philosophers
- His first substance was infinite, eternal and ageless. It encompasses all the world
- Thought our world was one of many
- His process of the boundless becoming other things and then back to being the boundless has an underpinning of cosmic justice.
- He believed "there should be a certain proportion of fire, of earth, and of water in the world, but each element (conceived as a god) is perpetually attempting to enlarge its empire. But there is a kind of necessity or natural law which perpetually redresses the balance; where there has been fire, for example, there are ashes, which are earth" (Russell, 27).
-The worlds that existed evolved, and were not created
-Believed that man descended from fish
-First man to make a map
-Earth is shaped like a cylinder

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

-Produced a star map and a map of the world
-The boundless contains all the world
-The boundless is also time
-Eternal motion exists and that brings the heavens into existence
-Earth is rounded like a stone pillar
-The number of worlds is limitless in number
-All things are constantly renewed after destruction (return to the boundless and then processed again)
-At the generation of earth something broke off from the eternal and formed a flame around the earth, like bark on a tree. Then the ball burst and the sun, moon and stars came into being.
- Censorinus - "Anaximander of Miletus says he thinks that from water and earth when they were heated, there arose fish, or animals very like fish, that humans grew in them, and that the embryos were retained inside up to puberty, whereupon the fish-like animals burst and men and women emerged already able to look after themselves" (Barnes, 20). That could be an interesting invasion story for Future Modern Ancient Greeks.
-The boundless is divine, because it is immortal and indestructible

Anaximander might be the best one to model the Future Modern Greek's new planet