SOURCE: Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., "Anaximander of Miletus," in Philosophy before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994, pp. 32-47.

[In the following excerpt, McKirahan describes Anaximander 's major contributions in the fields of astronomy, cartography, and natural philosophy.]

If Anaximander was sixty-four in 546, as our best source¹ says, he was twenty-five at the time of Thales' eclipse, which agrees with the tradition that he was Thales' successor in investigating nature. His picture of KOSMOS and his ways of thought can be gleaned from the surviving information (including one fragment) on his physical speculations.

Astronomy

5.1 He was the first to discover the gnomon and set one up on the sundials at Sparta … indicating the solstices and equinoxes, and he constructed hour-markers.

(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 2.1 = DK 12A1)

A gnomon (originally "carpenter's square") is the raised piece whose shadow indicates the sun's position. Most ancient sundials indicated not only the time of day by the direction of the shadow but also the season of the year as a function of the sun's height in the sky (higher in summer, lower in winter) marked by the length of the shadow. At the summer and winter solstices the shadow is respectively shortest and longest; on the equinoxes, the sun rises and sets due east and west, and the path of the shadow during the course of the day is a straight line. (On other days it traces a curved arc of a hyperbola.) With appropriate markings a sundial will show both time of day and distance from the solstices and equinoxes.

5.1 attributes all this to Anaximander, but the information must be treated with caution. Since Herodotus says that the Greeks learned the use of the gnomon and the twelve parts of the day from the Babylonians,² Anaximander may have introduced sundials to Greece (without inventing them), though some sources³ credit Thales with determining solstices, which may point to his knowing about the gnomon.

Anaximander is also said to have been the first to construct a sphere,⁴ i.e., a celestial globe or map of the heavens, but it is doubtful whether he did so.

Map

Anaximander was the first Greek mapmaker. He "was the first to draw the inhabited world on a tablet"⁵—an achievement that, though doubtless crude, will have drawn on knowledge gained from his own travels (we have already seen him in Sparta; he also led an expedition to found a colony on the Black Sea), and also from consultations with merchants and other travelers. Although his map was improved by a fellow Milesian, Hecataeus, who was active around 500, in the midfifth century their work was ridiculed by Herodotus, who gives us an idea of the design of such early maps.

5.2 I laugh when I consider that before now many have drawn maps of the world, but no one has set it out in a reasonable way. They draw Okeanos [the river Ocean] flowing round the earth, which is round as if made by a compass, and they make Asia equal to Europe.

(Herodotus, Histories 4.36, not in DK)

Earthquake

Cicero tells of Anaximander warning the Spartans of an impending earthquake and advising them to abandon the city and sleep in the fields.⁶ It is debated whether Anaximander knew some lore, such as the behavior of animals, on which to base a prediction, or whether the story was fabricated to enhance his reputation.

Physical Theories

The APEIRON as ARCHE

Anaximander's views on the ARCHÉ (starting point, basic principle, originating source) are preserved in three sources, each derived from Theophrastus.⁷ I combine them as follows.

5.3 Of those who declared that the ARCHE is one, moving and APEIRON, Anaximander … said that the APEIRON was the ARCHE and element of things that are, and he was the first to introduce this name for the ARCHE [i.e., he was the first to call the ARCHE APEIRON.⁸ (In addition he said that motion is eternal, in which it occurs that the heavens come to be.⁹) He says that the ARCHE is neither water nor any other of the things called elements, but some other nature which is APEIRON, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. This is eternal and ageless and surrounds all the worlds.

According to this account, for Anaximander the APEIRON is the stuff of which all things are composed. On this influential view, Anaximander's APEIRON replaces Thaïes' water as the Aristotelian "material cause" of all things. I have already called this interpretation of Thaïes into question; as we will see, for Anaximander it cannot stand. Theophrastus says Anaximander was the first to use the word APEIRON in this context, and that the APEIRON differs from water, fire, and other familiar materials identified by others as the basic stuff, but he does not describe it except to say that it is eternal, ageless, and in motion, and that a plurality of heavens and worlds arise or are born out of it and are surrounded by it.

The word APEIRON is a compound of the prefix A-, meaning "not," and either the noun PEIRAR or PEIRAS, "limit, boundary," so that it means "unlimited, boundless, indefinite," or the root PER-, "through, beyond, forward," so that it means "unable to be got through," "what cannot be traversed from end to end." Although in Aristotle it can mean "infinite," in dealing with the presocratic period it is misleading to understand the word in this relatively technical sense.¹⁰

5.3 contains three hints about what APEIRON means for Anaximander. Since it surrounds the heavens and worlds, it is (1) indefinitely (though not necessarily infinitely) large, spatially unlimited. Since it is eternal and ageless, (2) it is temporally unlimited. Since it is no definite substance like water, it is (3) an indefinite kind of material. All three interpretations have ancient authority. The first two correspond to reasons Aristotle cites for believing that something exists which is APEIRON,¹¹ while the third results from an argument for making the original substance APEIRON that Aristotle cites and later writers attribute to Anaximander:

5.4 The infinite [APEIRON] body cannot be one and simple … if it is conceived, as some say, as that which is aside from the elements, and from which they generate the elements…. For some make the infinite this [i.e., something aside from the elements], rather than air or water, to keep the others from being destroyed by the one of them that is infinite. For they contain oppositions with regard to one another, for example, air is cold, water wet, fire hot. If any one of them were infinite, the rest would already have been destroyed. But as it is, they declare that the thing from which all come into being is different

(Aristotle, Physics 3.3 204b22-29 = DK 12A16)

If the Aristotelian ideas (especially the concept of elements and the identification of air, etc., as elements and the use of APEIRON in the sense of "infinite") are discounted, 5.4 may record Anaximander's own proof that the originative material differs from any definite substance. Water and other familiar materials possess definite properties, yet there are things that lack any given property and some with opposite properties. But if everything is made of or arose from water, everything must have the properties of water. Further, since, as Anaximander thinks, opposites conflict with one another, an unlimited amount of a material with definite characteristics would long since have destroyed things with opposite characteristics (even supposing that they existed in the first place), swamping them by the vastly larger quantity of their opposites. Thus Thaïes is refuted, whether he held that all things are composed of water or that all things have their ultimate origin in water.

This is a powerful argument for an originative substance with no definite characteristics. The APEIRON, then, is neither water nor fire, neither hot nor cold, nor heavy nor light, nor wet nor dry, nor light nor dark. As the ultimate source of all the things and all the characteristics in the world, it can be none of those things, can have none of those characteristics. It is thus difficult to describe. (Ancient complaints that he failed to specify what kind of material the APEIRON is are off the mark, as is Aristotle's belief that it is a substance of a definite kind, intermediate between fire and air, or between air and water.) When Anaximander says it is eternal, ageless, in motion, and that it surrounds and is the source of everything else, he may be describing it as fully as his language and concepts permitted.

Since it is eternal and in motion, the APEIRON possesses characteristics which, as we saw in discussing Thaïes, qualify it as divine.

5.5 This does not have an ARCHE, but this seems to be the ARCHE of the rest, and to contain all things and steer all things,¹² as all declare who do not fashion other causes aside from the infinite … and this is divine. For it is deathless and indestructible, as Anaximander says and most of the natural philosophers.

(Aristotle, Physics 3.4 203b 10-15 = DK 12A15)

Being divine, immortal, and in motion, it is alive, like Thaïes' water, and thus capable of generating a (living) world. What kind of motion does it have? Three answers given by modern scholars are that it has a vortex motion like a whirlpool, in which the heavier parts move to the center and the lighter to the edge, that it has a circular motion, and that its motion is "shaking and sifting as in a sieve."¹³ None of these interpretations has substantial support, and it is best not to press the question. If the APEIRON had a definite type of motion, an analogous argument to the one above would apply: how could all the different kinds of motion we observe have arisen out of a primordial substance endowed with only one specific kind of movement? It is best to suppose that Anaximander thought the APEIRON was in motion because otherwise no change could occur and the world could never have originated, but that he said nothing definite about the nature of the motion.

Cosmogony: The Origin of the World

For Anaximander the existence and the interaction of opposites stand in need of explanation. This outlook is intelligible as a reaction to Thaïes' problem of accounting for the existence of fire given the priority of water. Anaximander believes that the opposites hot and cold are equally important in the structure and operation of the world and accordingly gives them a prominent position in his cosmogony.

5.6 He declares that what arose from the eternal and is productive of [or, capable of giving birth to] hot and cold was separated off at the coming to be of this KOSMOS, and a kind of sphere of flame from this grew around the dark mist¹⁴ about the earth like bark about a tree. When it was broken off and enclosed in certain circles, the sun, moon and stars came to be.

(pseudo-Plutarch, Stromata 2 = DK 12A10) (continuation of 5.11)

Since APEIRON is neither hot nor cold, it does not favor either opposite over the other, but how can something neither hot nor cold generate both opposites? Anaximander's solution is to declare that hot and cold arose from something capable of giving birth to hot and cold, and this thing is "separated off from the APEIRON. Neither hot nor cold will overwhelm the other since they are created at the same time and with equal power.

Other problems arise regarding the thing that generates hot and cold. It arises from the undifferentiated, uniform mass of the APEIRON through "separating off," a process found elsewhere in Anaximander's system, in which apparently part of an existing thing is isolated so as to take on an identity separate from the original thing, and as such behave differently from the thing from which it arose. But (perhaps because Anaximander said little about these crucial issues) we have no clues about how "separating off takes place, what the thing is that produces hot and cold, or how it produces them.¹⁵

5.6 identifies several stages in the formation of the world. First there is the APEIRON, referred to here as "the eternal." From the APEIRON, through the process of "separating off," arises something capable of giving birth to hot and cold. The hot and cold which arise from this are described concretely as flame and dark mist. The flame is a spherical shell that tightly encloses the mist "as the bark encloses a tree" (a simile possibly due to Anaximander himself). Since at this stage there are only two things, fire and mist, corresponding to hot and cold, the mention of earth refers to a later stage of differentiation which may occur simultaneously with the breakup of the sphere of flame into circles to make the sun, moon, and stars (cf. 5.8).

Anaximander's approach to his fundamental problem, which can be rephrased as "How does the determinate diversity of the world come out of the indeterminate uniformity of the APEIRON?" is already clear. The APEIRON appears only at the beginning of the process; afterwards things take their own course. The world's diversity is due not to the intervention of Olympian gods but to a small number of processes such as differentiation of one thing into many and "separation off of one thing from another. The dark mist is differentiated into the air we breathe and the earth we stand on, which was originally moist. Its currently dry state is due to a further process of differentiation.

5.7 They claim that at first all the region about the earth is wet. When it is dried by the sun, that which evaporated causes winds and turnings of the sun and moon, and the remainder is sea. For this reason they believe that it is being dried and becoming smaller and finally it will some day be dry.

(Aristotle, Meteorologica 2.1 353b6-11 = DK 12A27)

"Separating off is invoked again to account for the breakup of the sphere of flame to form the heavenly bodies (5.8).

Despite Anaximander's unclarity on some important points, his overall picture is impressive, as is his understanding of the logical requirements of generating a complex world out of a simple originative material.

Cosmology: The Articulation of the World

5.8 The stars come to be as a circle of fire separated off from the fire in the KOSMOS and enclosed by dark mist. There are vents, certain tube-like passages at which the stars appear. For this reason, eclipses occur when the vents are blocked. The moon appears sometimes waxing sometimes waning as the passages are blocked or opened. The circle of the sun is twenty-seven times and that of the moon <18 times>, and the sun is highest, and the circles of the fixed stars are lowest.

(Hippolytus, Refutation 1.6.4-5 = DK 12A11) (continuation of 5.12)

5.9 Anaximander says that the sun is equal to the earth, and the circle where it has its vent and on which it is carried is twenty-seven times the size of the earth.

(Aetius 2.21.1 = DK 12A21)

5.10 Anaximander says that the stars are borne by the circles and spheres on which each one goes.

(Aetius 2.16.5 = DK 12A18)

5.11 He says that the earth is cylindrical in shape, and its depth is one-third its breadth.

(pseudo-Plutarch, Stromata 2 = DK 12A10)

5.12 The earth's shape is curved, round, like a stone column. We walk on one of the surfaces and the other one is set opposite.

(Hippolytus, Refutation 1.6.3 = DK 12A11)

There are many interesting points here. First, there is no appearance of mythology or mention of the traditional divinities. Second, the heavenly bodies are made of fire, a substance familiar from human experience. Third, Anaximander boldly measures the size of the universe and adopts a terrestrial standard to measure it. Fourth, he assumes that the sizes and distances of the earth and heavenly bodies are related by simple proportions, with emphasis on the number three. Fifth, he assumes that the KOSMOS has a simple geometrical structure. Sixth, different phenomena (eclipses, phases of the moon) are due to a single mechanism.

Anaximander's universe has a simple symmetric structure. At the center is the earth, a cylinder one-third as high as it is broad. We live on one of the flat surfaces. Around the cylinder are rings of fire surrounded by mist which makes them invisible except where a hole in the mist lets the fire shine through. The stars are closest to the earth, the sun is farthest, with the moon in between. (Anaximander may have reasoned that since fire rises upwards, the purest fire must be furthest from the earth; the sun's brightness and heat are greatest, so the sun is made of the purest fire and thus is furthest from the earth. By similar reasoning the feeble light of the stars places them closest.) The sun is the same size as the earth. (Quite possibly he held that the moon has this size too; sun and moon appear roughly the same size in the sky.) Approximately once a day each star is carried round its circular path: either the mist together with the hole moves round the ring of fire, or the mist, hole, and fire all rotate together. The diameter of the moon's circle is eighteen times the size of the earth, that of the sun's is twenty-seven times.¹⁶ These figures make it likely that the distance of the stars from the earth was put at nine times the earth's size. Anaximander declares that wind is the cause of the sun's and moon's oblique paths relative to the stars, which shows that he knew of the obliquity of the ecliptic. As the sun and moon are different distances from the earth, their orbits can be oblique without colliding with each other or with the stars. The circles of the stars do not intersect, so there is no possibility of collision.¹⁷ …

Anaximander might have explained how the sun and moon can be seen through the mist which surrounds the stars by pointing out that mist can render some things invisible and yet not others. It can hide a nearby object from view while permitting a bright light much farther away to be seen clearly.

Anaximander holds that the earth is immobile at the center of the universe, a view shared by most of his successors¹⁸ until Copernicus. Unusual is the sophisticated argument on which he bases this belief.

5.13 Some, like Anaximander … declare that the earth is at rest on account of its similarity. For it is no more fitting for what is established at the center and equally related to the extremes to move up rather than down or sideways. And it is impossible for it to make a move simultaneously in opposite directions. Therefore, it is at rest of necessity.

(Aristotle, On the Heaven 2.13 295bl 1-16 = DK 12A26)

This too is to be understood as a criticism of Thaïes, who had the earth resting on water…. What, then, did the water rest on? As long as one thing needs to be supported by another, there is no end. Anaximander cuts off this infinite regress at the start with the first known application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, according to which, in Leibniz' formulation, "no fact can be real or existent … unless it has a sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise."¹⁹ In the present case, Anaximander reasons that the earth is at rest since its "equal relation to the extremes" implies that there is no sufficient reason for it to move in one direction rather than any other.

Further, the presuppositions underlying this argument have great methodological interest. On the basis of the senses we believe that all things move downwards and also that the earth, on which we stand, is at rest. Anaximander accepts the latter of these conflicting judgments and rejects the former as applying to the earth, and does so on the basis of symmetry and geometrical structure. On this account of his reasoning, Anaximander is intolerant of contradiction, adopts a critical stance towards sensory information, is ready to reject some sense-based judgments in favor of others, and appeals to mathematical and logical considerations in constructing his theory.

Anaximander is interested in meteorological as well as astronomical phenomena and sees no distinction between the two, but accounts for both by the same processes:

5.14 Winds occur when the finest vapors of dark mist are separated off and, while in motion, are gathered together. Rain occurs from the vapor arising from the things beneath the sun. Lighting occurs whenever wind escapes and parts the clouds.

(Hippolytus, Refutation 1.6.7 = DK 12A11)

5.15 [Concerning thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, waterspouts and hurricanes] Anaximander says that all these result from wind. For whenever it [wind] is enclosed in a thick cloud and forcibly escapes by its fineness and lightness, then the breaking creates the noise and the splitting creates the flash, in contrast with the blackness of the cloud.

(Aetius 3.3.1 = DK 12A23)

Once again "separating off is responsible for generation. The finest vapors become wind, leaving the thicker remains to become cloud. This time "separating off originates change not only in what is separated off but also in the remainder. The resemblance between this process and that which generates the sea and winds at the beginning of the world (5.7) makes it likely that that process, too, occurs through "separating off."

Anaximander's belief that thunder and lightning result from wind being enclosed in cloud and then breaking out is reminiscent of his account of the origin of the heavenly bodies. (If, as seems likely, lightning is fire bursting out from the cloud, it resembles the celestial bodies, which are fire surrounded by dark mist.)

The passages above make it clear that for Anaximander the world arose from the same processes that maintain it. He therefore deserves the title of the first uniformitarian, as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geologists were called who held that processes found today, such as erosion and volcanic activity, are responsible for the geological features of the earth.

Anaximander used his understanding of present-day phenomena to project future events (5.7). His belief that the earth is drying up could well have been based on the silting up of the harbor of Miletus.²⁰

Anaximander also has an account of the origin of living creatures, including humans.

5.16 Anaximander says that the first animals were produced in moisture, enclosed in thorny barks. When their age increased they came out onto the drier part, their bark broke off, and they lived a different mode of life for a short time.

(Aetius 5.19.4 = DK 12A30)

5.17 He also declares that in the beginning humans were born from other kinds of animals, since other animals quickly manage on their own, and humans alone require lengthy nursing. For this reason, in the beginning they would not have been preserved if they had been like this.

(pseudo-Plutarch, Stromata 2 = DK 12A10) (continuation of 5.6)

5.18 Anaximander … believed that there arose from heated water and earth either fish or animals very like fish. In these humans grew and were kept inside as embryos up to puberty. Then finally they burst and men and women came forth already able to nourish themselves.

(Censorinus, On the Day of Birth 4.7 = DK 12A30)

The origin of animals is explained similarly to the origin of the universe and meteorological events; more complex things arise out of simpler things, and new things come into existence after being enclosed tightly in something else and breaking out of the container.

The distinction we feel between living animals and inanimate matter (such as heated water) is inappropriately applied to Anaximander, whose originative material is in some sense alive…, so that all its products, including earth and water, inherit its vital force. Animals and humans, with a greater concentration of vitality, differ in degree, not in kind, from the rest of theKOSMOS.

Particularly striking is Anaximander's recognition and solution of a problem arising from the helplessness of human infants. If the first humans came into this world as babies, they could not have lasted long enough to propagate the race. How, then, did they come into being? This "first generation problem" can be answered by positing a god who creates adult humans or by asserting that the world and the human race have always been in existence. However, both these solutions conflict with basic features of Anaximander's system. Accordingly, he takes an original and ingenious approach, having the first humans nurtured in other animals until self-sustaining.

For his claims that animals arose in the sea before they emerged to live on dry land and that humans developed from fish, and for recognizing the need for a different original form for humans and the difficulties of adapting to different habitats (perhaps implicit in the short lives of the animals who first moved onto dry land), Anaximander is sometimes called the father of evolution. This interpretation is wrong, however, since he says nothing about the evolution of species. His problem of how to account for the first generation of each kind of animal, to get each kind of animal established once and for all, is different from Darwin's. Moreover, he makes no mention of such Darwinian mechanisms as natural selection.

Anaximander's Fragment

How the World Works

Aside from a few words in the testimonia that have an early ring, all that survives of Anaximander's writings is one fragment which seems to have been quoted out of its correct context.

5.19 The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time, as he says in rather poetical language.

(Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24.18-21 = DK 12B1 + A9)

The last words of 5.19 show that some of the preceding is in Anaximander's own words, but the extent of the fragment is uncertain.²¹ I find it likely that the words from "according to necessity" to the end are Anaximander's and that the preceding words paraphrase his thought. We have a picture of a world full of change—things coming to be and in turn being destroyed. These changes are ordered in two ways: (1) when a thing (A) is destroyed A turns into something definite—the same sort of thing that perished when A came to be; (2) each thing has a determinate time span. In addition, comingsto-be and destructions are acts of injustice that one thing (A) commits against another (B) and for which A is compelled to make restitution to B.

The process here described seems to have nothing to do with the APEIRON but can easily apply to the opposites hot and cold, which we have seen are important in the beginning of the world and which are also important in the present state of things. The alternation of the seasons is an obvious case in point. In the region of Miletus it is reasonable to say that hot prevails in summer, cold prevails in winter, and spring and fall mark an even balance between hot and cold. When summer comes, hot commits injustice by driving out cold and occupying some of its territory. In due time hot must pay a penalty in which cold is recompensed for this injustice first by a return to an even balance (in the fall) and then by a period in which cold drives out hot (winter). But now cold has committed injustice against hot, and so must make recompense in turn. Hence there occurs an endless cycle of regular alternation between states where first one and then the other opposite dominates.

Deployment of other pairs of opposites such as wet and dry, light and dark, rare and dense, either singly or in combination, can account for many features of the world. The change of the seasons is also marked by orderly alternation between wet and dry, and between light and dark (reflecting the longer period of daylight in summer). Day and night can be analyzed in terms of light and dark; a more detailed account will also bring in hot and cold. The alternation of rare and dense can perhaps be seen in successive periods of wind ("the finest vapors") and cloudy or stormy weather ("thick cloud"). There is also a broad contrast between the sun as hot, dry, light, rare, and at the edge of the universe, and the earth (together with the sea) which is cold, wet, dark, dense, and at the center. Moreover weather can be seen as the interplay of these two groups of opposites.

If the argument in 5.7 that the world is drying up implies that when it is completely dry it will stay that way forever or cease to exist, it cannot agree with the fragment. Anaximander should hold instead that corresponding to the present period of increasing dryness there have been and will again be periods of becoming wetter,²² and he could have found mythological evidence that the world is inundated from time to time.²³

This account of the fragment focuses on the opposites, which have special importance for Anaximander, but the fragment may be meant to describe other "things that are" as well, for example, animals and humans (along the general lines of "ashes to ashes and dust to dust"). However, Anaximander recognized that there are difficulties in extending it to some entities….

The fragment occupies an important place in the history of philosophy and science. It contains a general account that applies to a wide variety of phenomena. It contains the germs of the ideas of the conservation of matter and of a dynamic equilibrium in which opposed principles alternately preponderate over one another in such regularly repeated cycles as we find, for example, in a swinging pendulum and in a spring with a weight attached to it moving indefinitely up and down. Although the prevalence of hot over cold or of cold over hot changes from time to time, the system has an overall stability that continues without external interference. The fragment also contains the beginning of the idea of a law of nature which holds inevitably ("according to necessity") and operates uniformly and impersonally.

A notable feature of the fragment is its legal language: "pay penalty and retribution," "injustice," and "the ordering of time" (as if time plays the role of a judge assessing penalties in criminal trials). The legal language may strike us as no more than a colorful metaphor, but that response reveals our distance from Anaximander. To assume that it is a metaphor presupposes a radical difference between the world of nature (where injustice and the like are not really found) and the world of humans (where they are): humankind is somehow distinct from nature, and the two realms operate according to different principles. This interpretation, though congenial to those who hold that social, moral, and evaluative language applies only in the human sphere, is inappropriate for Anaximander and other presocratics, who place humans squarely in the natural world. The injustice which hot commits on cold is the same kind as that which a robber commits on a victim—taking something which is by right not its own—and the penalty assessed by a judge according to the law is of the same sort as that assessed by time according to necessity—restoration of what was taken and payment of an additional amount as a fine. In Greek, DIKE ("justice") and its opposite have descrip tive as well as evaluative force. Descriptively, injustice is taking something not one's own; evaluatively it is bad. This evaluation applies to all acts that, descriptively, are unjust, regardless of the nature of the agent. Further, the idea that justice or retribution comes inevitably accords with a view of justice expressed by other authors of the Archaic period,²⁴ and the notion that the cosmic principle of justice is fair to the rival contenders is doubtless due to the ideal of justice on which the legal system known to Anaximander was based.

All Greek philosophers assume that the world we perceive is a world of change and motion. Anaximander expresses this idea in describing the world as the scene of opposites in a continuous conflict, which is governed by necessity and justice. Although hot and cold are the only opposites the sources mention, the fragment equally well accounts for the interaction of others. As other pairs of opposites are prominent in Pythagoras and Heraclitus, it would be excessively cautious to hold that Anaximander had only the one pair in mind.

We tend to think of opposites like hot and cold as qualities which belong to substances. There is something that is hot or cold—food, for example. Since "hot" sounds odd as a grammatical subject or object, let alone as an agent, we feel that the assertion "hot commits injustice against cold" requires explanation. In thinking this way, we are unconsciously following Aristotle, who was the first to distinguish clearly between qualities and substances and to say that (except in special contexts) substances are the only proper subjects of discourse. As he points out,²⁵ one quality can be opposite to another quality, but substances do not have opposites. Hot is the opposite of cold, but fire is not the opposite of water. Calling them opposites is just shorthand for saying that they have opposite qualities. Again, to apply this analysis to Anaximander would distort his thought. Before Aristotle, hot food might have been conceived in various ways. For example, the hot might have been thought a part of the food, or something in the food.²⁶ Since fire is preeminently hot, it might have been thought to have a special relation to the hot. Anaximander may simply have identified fire as the hot and (in the early stage of his cosmogony) identified dark mist as the cold, or he may not have spoken of the hot and the cold at all, only of their concrete embodiments fire and mist. Similarly, he may have conceived of the war between opposites not primarily in terms of qualities, but in terms of their manifestations: summer and winter, day and night, drought and flood, etc.

Finally, the fragment apparently describes the world around us as a stable, ongoing system that maintains itself without any limit in time. Summer and winter, it suggests, will alternate forever. The APEIRON may have acted only once, at the beginning of the world; once generated, the world went on without further depen dence on it. Alternatively, the APEIRON may play an ongoing role in the world, if the governing or "steering" function 5.5 refers to is correctly assigned to it. In that case, there will be some link between the APEIRON and the necessity mentioned in the fragment. In any case, Anaximander focuses on the world around him. He describes its origin (perhaps because Thaïes had given such an account, or because Hesiod had done so, or because of a more widespread Greek concern with origins and parentage) but not its destruction. Rather, on the present interpretation, the fragment suggests that the world will never be destroyed.

This interpretation of the fragment leaves some problems. A created but indestructible KOSMOS requires a sharp distinction between the one-time cosmogonie process and the ever-repeating processes of the developed world, a distinction which sits uneasily with the uniformities Anaximander posits between these two stages of the history of the universe. It thus requires a conspicuous exception to the symmetry which is so prominent in his accounts of cosmic phenom ena. It also requires that the fragment's account of "things that are" fail to apply to such notable things as the earth, sun, and other members of the KOSMOS that form the setting in which the regular changes take place.

Some of these problems can be solved by interpreting the fragment to cover the origin and destruction of the world as well as of things in the world, but at the price of abandoning the long-term stability the fragment favors and of leaving it unclear why the world will be destroyed. This dissatisfying situation may be due to gaps in the source material or to Anaximander himself, who probably did not ask the same questions modern interpreters do and whose demands for coherence and standards of what counts as a satisfactory account were surely different from ours.

Notes

¹ Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 2.2 (= [H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., Berlin, 1951; hereafter DK] 12A1).

² Herodotus, Histories 2.109 (= DK 12A4).

³ Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 1.23 (= DK 11A1) and Dercyllides, cited in Theon of Smyrna, p. 198, 14 (Hiller) (= DK 12A26).

⁴ Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 2.2 (= DK 12A1).

⁵ Agathemerus 1.1 (= DK 12A6).

⁶ Cicero, On Divination 1.50.112 (= DK 12A5a).

⁷ Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24.13-18 (= DK 12A9); Hippolytus, Refutation 1.6.1-2 (= DK 12A11); pseudo-Plutarch, Stromata 2 (= DK 12A10).

⁸ This phrase is also translated "he was the first to introduce this very term of ARCHE," i.e., the first to use the term "ARCHE" itself. Simplicius makes this point at Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 150.22-25 (not in DK), and he may have meant to make it in the current passage (ibid., 24.13-18) too, but the translation given in the text best suits the Greek of the current passage.

⁹ This obscure sentence probably means that the heavens come to be in the APEIRON by means of its eternal movement.

¹⁰ In this [article] I usually translate APEIRON as "unlimited," except for passages from Aristotle and later sources (such as 5.4) in which "infinite" seems appropriate.

¹¹ Aristotle, Physics 3.4 203b23-26, b16-17.

¹² It is tempting to add "governing" or "steering" all things to the list of the APEIRON'S attributes given above, but it is not certain from 5.5 that Aristotle has Anaximander in mind when he uses this word, which he may have taken from other early philosophers, such as Heraclitus…, Parmenides…, Diogenes of Apollonia….

¹³ J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (London, 1930), p. 61.

¹⁴ AER, the Greek word translated here as "dark mist," is discussed below….

¹⁵ The alternate translation in 5.6, "capable of giving birth," has led some to think that hot and cold were produced through some sort of biological process; but biological processes are inexplicable at this primitive stage of the world. At any rate, the word (which in any case was not Anaximander's) can mean "productive" without any biological overtones.

¹⁶ In fact the value of eighteen times for the moon is not attested. Aetius gives the value of twenty-eight times for the sun (2.20.1 = DK 12A21) and nineteen times for the moon (2.25.1 = DK 12A22), figures which may be due to an attempt to refine the system to take into account the thickness of the sun and moon.

¹⁷ Whether Anaximander had anything to say about the motions of the planets (which were well known to the Babylonians) is unknown. Planetary motions could have raised problems for his simple model.

¹⁸ Notable exceptions for our purposes are some Pythagoreans and the Atomists.

¹⁹ Leibniz, Monadology, sec. 32. Aristotle criticizes Anaximander's argument from the standpoint of Aristotelian physics at On the Heaven 2.13 295b16-296a22 (not in DK), comparing it to "a hair, which, it is said, however great the tension, will not break under it, if it is evenly distributed, or the man who, being extremely hungry and thirsty, and both equally, is equidistant from food and drink, and therefore bound to stay where he is" (b30-33).

²⁰ This process, which is due to alluvial deposits of the river Meander at whose mouth the city was situated, has continued to the present, advancing the shoreline so far that the Aegean cannot now be seen from the site of ancient Miletus.

²¹ For discussion, see C. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York, 1960), pp. 168-78, 193-96; and … G. Kirk, "Some Problems in Anaximander," Classical Quarterly 5 (1955):22-38; reprinted in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. D. Furley and R. Allen (London, 1960), pp. 323-49.

²² Xenophanes held a similar belief….

²³ The myth of Deucalion's flood (in ways comparable to Noah's flood), which Aristotle accepted as based on fact (Meteorologica 1.14 352a32-35), is the most obvious source.

²⁴ For example, Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 213-73, 280-85, 320-34….

²⁵ Aristotle, Categories 5 3b24-25, 8 10b12-15.

²⁶ Plato develops these ideas in connection with his theory of Ideas (Phaedo 96-107). They form an important part of the background of his treatment of the differences between statements like "the food is hot" and those like "the food is [identical with the] hot" (Sophist 250-57).