Anaximander

End of Section 2 Section 3 of Early Greek Philosophy by Alfred William Benn This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Pamela Nagami Chapter 1 The School of Miletus Part 3 6.

Anaximander I have said that Thales probably learned what astronomy he knew from Babylon, and that his view of the relation between earth and water was Semitic.

Now it is certain that the philosopher was not of pure Greek race, and one rather doubtful pedigree even makes him belong to a Phoenician, that is to say a Semitic family.

There seems to be very insufficient grounds for the belief, but were it true, philosophy would remain a product of European, not of Asiatic culture, while the fertilizing stimulus that first started Greek thought seems to have come not from any Semitic source, but from Egypt.

At any rate the beginnings of speculation at Miletus coincide with the permanent establishment of a Milesian colony at Nucratis in the Delta, a concession due to the liberality of the very enlightened Pharaoh Amasis.

With Anaximander the pupil of Thales, and like him a Milesian, born 610 BC, we already stand on more solid ground.

This marvelous thinker may be called the second founder of philosophy, for he first gave it literary expression in a book of which some fragments still survive.

According to him the primary substance whence all things arise is not water, nor indeed any form of matter known to us, but an infinite something without limit in space or time.

But basically, he was the one, though, that started the hi- he was the one that actually-

... thank you.

He theorized that the Earth was a cylinder whose diameter was three times the height.

I do think Christianity, they try to downplay this dark age, but it really did cause a dark age.

They were grasping toward things in Rome, even though it wasn't as scientifically accurate as you see now about evolution or what we know now through the DNA testing in the human genome, like the atomism, Anaximander, even though he thought the world was a cylinder.

He started to intuit evolution that we used to be sea creatures or what have you.

But they were moving in that direction.

that they may benefit us by their example as well as learning

the sacred memory of Salomo, Thales, Anaximander, Xenophanes, Melissus, Ossolus, Democritus, Parmenides, Dicurcus, Confucius, Cleobulina, Theano, Pamphila, Cerelia, Hypatia.

May it tend to our advantage.

Let us praise all other philosophical companies and commemorate the male and female votaries of truth.

so too in north africa and among the islands of the gean sea the greeks colonized throughout the sixth and fifth centuries b c and in almost every case communication was kept up between the colonies and the mother country now the one quality which has made the greeks so distinguished in the world's history was their curiosity and it was natural that they should desire to know and to put on record the large amount of information brought to the mainland of greece from the innumerable greek colonies but to record geographical knowledge the first thing that is necessary is a map and accordingly it is a greek philosopher named anaximander of miletus of the sixth century b c to whom we owe the invention of map drawing now in order to make a map of one's own country little astronomical knowledge is required as we have seen savages are able to draw such maps but when it comes to describing the relative positions of countries divided from one another by seas the problem is not so easy an athenian would know roughly that byzantium now called constantinople was something to the east and to the north of him because in sailing thither he would have had to sail toward the rising sun and would find the climate getting colder as he approached byzantium so too he might roughly guess that marseilles was somewhere to the west and north of him but how was he to fix the relative position of marseilles and byzantium to one another Was Marseilles more northerly than Byzantium? Was it very far away from that city? For though it took longer to get to Marseilles, the voyage was winding and might possibly bring the vessel comparatively near to Byzantium, though there might be no direct road between the two cities.

There was one rough way of determining how far north the place stood.

the very slightest observation of the starry heavens would show a traveller that as he moved towards the north the pole star rose higher up in the heavens how much higher could be determined by the angle formed by a stick pointing to the pole star in relation to one held horizontally if instead of two sticks we cut out a piece of metal or wood to fill up the enclosed angle we get the earliest form of the sundial known as the gnomon and according to the shape of the gnomon the latitude of a place is determined Accordingly, it is not surprising to find that the invention of the gnomon is also attributed to Anaximander, for without some such instrument it would have been impossible for him to have made any map worthy of the name.

But it is probable that Anaximander did not so much invent as introduce the gnomon, and indeed Herodotus expressly states that this instrument was derived from the Babylonians, who were the earliest astronomers so far as we know.

a curious point confirms this for the measurement of angles is by degrees and degrees are divided into sixty seconds just as minutes are now this division into sixty is certainly derived from babylonia in the case of time measurements and is therefore of the same origin as regards the measurement of angles we have no longer any copy of this first map of the world drawn up by anaximander but there is little doubt that it formed the foundation of a similar map drawn by a fellow-townsman of anaximander hecatus of miletus who seems to have written the first formal geography only fragments of this are extant but from them we are able to see that it was of the nature of a periplus or seaman's guide telling how many days sail it was from one point to another and in what direction we know also that he arranged his whole subject into two books dealing respectively with europe and asia under which latter terms he included part of what we now know as africa From the fragments, scholars have been able to reproduce the rough outlines of the map of the world as it presented itself to Hecatus.

From this, it can be seen that the Homeric conception of the surrounding ocean formed a chief determining feature in Hecatus's map.

Each term first becomes intelligible as the antithesis and contradiction of the other.

we have better grounds for crediting anaximenes with what would now be called a mechanical theory of nature as distinguished from what by another modernism may be described as the specific energies or occult qualities of his predecessor Anaximander taught that such antithetical pairs as wet and dry, hot and cold, etc., were separated out or differentiated from the homogeneous infinite where they had previously existed in a latent state.

To Anaximenes, on the other hand, heat and cold, like the solid liquid and gaseous states of matter, were all merely so many products of rarefication and condensation.

air squeezed together becomes cloudy vapour under additional pressure vapour turn to rain and rain by the same process to vegetable and animal substances which ultimately pass into air again observing with perfect accuracy that heat and cold are somehow connected with dilatation and compression this early precursor of bacon unfortunately reversed the real relation by supposing that air is chilled by being condensed and warmed by being expanded and that is why says anaximenes we press our lips together when we want to blow cold and open them when we want to blow hot in studying the errors of such a man we must remember that to ask questions and answer them wrongly helps progress incomparably more than not to ask them at all good care is taken says a german proverb that the trees shall not grow into the sky milesian philosophy with its splendid promise of positive knowledge perished after the third generation first choked by rank undergrowths of superstition then uprooted by earthquake and storm but the same causes that put an end to speculation in one part of hellas favoured its rise and propagation from new centres of intelligence elsewhere It was just this multiplication of intellectual centres leading to the cross-fertilisation of mental growths that gave the Greek genius such an extraordinary productivity, a productivity of which the world's history affords no second example.

The Thracians give theirs fair hair and blue eyes.

If oxen or lions had hands and could paint, they too would make gods in their own image.

so much for the aristocratic olympian religion of the poets as to the popular chthonian religion of the mysteries with its suffering and dying gods he is reported to have dismissed it with even briefer and more cutting sarcasm asked by the eleates should they sacrifice to loicothea and mourn for her or not he advised them not to mourn if they believed her to be a goddess not to sacrifice if they believed her to be a woman For himself, Xenophanes, like Anaximander, believed in an infinite source of existence, but unlike his Milesian predecessor, he identified this one and eternal element with the visible earth, which he supposed to stretch downward beneath our feet without end.

This infinite and eternal reality is God and the only God, resembling mortals neither in form nor thought, but perceiving and thinking through its whole extent.

It's in modern day Turkey.

Anaximander is philosophizing in Miletus.

He's one of the priests of classics.

Anaximander.

Anaximander.

So the opposite of Axamander.

Yes, we'll be doing lots of opposites.

Above.