Anaximander

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

Things give justice and reparation to one another according to the assessment 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

Converse with Anaximander on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Anaximander's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.