The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Anaximander

c. 610 – c. 546 BCE

Also known as Anaximander of Miletus

Milesian thinker who wrote the first Greek book of prose about nature, deriving all things from "the Boundless" and picturing an earth that floats unsupported in space.

Mosaic roundel of a balding, bearded man seated on a chair, holding a sundial
Roman mosaic from Trier, early third century CE, showing Anaximander with a sundial. It was made some 750 years after his death.Roman mosaic · Public domain · See the original

… they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time.

On Nature, DK 12B1, translated by John Burnet

Anaximander came from Miletus, Thales’ city, and ancient writers call him Thales’ pupil and successor, although that tradition may not be reliable. He is said to have been the first to write a treatise in prose, later known as On Nature. It is lost apart from a single sentence, which the sixth-century commentator Simplicius preserved from Theophrastus; the rest of what we know comes from Aristotle, Theophrastus and the writers who drew on them. Reports also credit him with bringing the gnomon, the upright of a sundial, to Greece, and with leading the founding of a colony on the Black Sea.

Where Thales made water the source of things, Anaximander chose something with no boundaries and no fixed character, and he seems to have given arguments for it rather than simply stating it. Out of the Boundless came hot and cold, and from them the heavens and the earth. His picture of an earth hanging free, with the sun, moon and stars circling all the way round it, replaced the older image of the sky as a dome resting on the world.

Key ideas

Apeiron, the Boundless
The origin of everything is neither water nor any other element, but something without limits, the apeiron. Ancient readers already complained that he never said what it was, and scholars still debate whether it is limitless in size, in time or in character.
Justice among opposites
In his one surviving sentence, things pay one another penalty for their wrongdoing, in the order set by time. On one reading, this describes opposites such as hot and cold taking turns to dominate, a regular order within nature itself rather than the whim of gods.
The earth floats free
The earth is a flat-topped cylinder, like a drum of a column, and rests unsupported at the centre of everything. Being equally far from every side, it has no reason to move in one direction rather than another, so it stays where it is.
The first map and the first animals
He is credited with the first map of the inhabited world. He also held that life began in the moisture that once covered the earth, and that the first humans came from fish-like creatures, since a human baby needs protection for too long to have survived alone.
Tradition
Western
Region
Miletus, Ionia

Influences

Influenced by

Anaximanderc. 610 – c. 546 BCE

Influenced

Influenced by

Anaximanderc. 610 – c. 546 BCE

Influenced

Where these links come from
  • Anaximander drew on Thales. Source: Patricia Curd, Presocratic Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Xenophanes drew on Anaximander. Source: James Lesher, Xenophanes, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

  • On Nature

Sources

  1. Dirk L. Couprie, Anaximander, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. Patricia Curd, Presocratic Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy