He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements but some other apeiron nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them.
It is clear that he, seeing the changing of the four elements into each other, thought it right to make none of these the substratum, but something else besides these; and he produces coming-to-be not through the alteration of the element, but by the separation off of the opposites through the eternal motion.
Physics , This statement by Anaximander regarding elements paying penalty to each other according to the assessment of time is considered the oldest known piece of written Western philosophy. Thales claimed that the First Cause of all things was water but Anaximander, recognizing that water was another of the earthly elements, believed that the First Cause had to come from something beyond such an element. Some make this First Cause namely, that which is additional to the elements the Boundless, but not air or water, lest the others should be destroyed by one of them, being boundless; for they are opposite to one another the air, for instance, is cold, the water wet, and the fire hot.
If any of them should be boundless, it would long since have destroyed the others; but now there is, they say, something other from which they are all generated. In other words, none of the observable elements could be the First Cause because all observable elements are changeable and, were one to be more powerful than the others, it would have long since eradicated them.
As observed, however, the elements of the earth seem to be in balance with each other, none of them holding the upper hand and, therefore, some other source must be looked to for a First Cause. And soon after he died, having flourished much about the same time as Polycrates, the tyrant, of Samos. Parmenides c. He is known as the founder of the Eleatic School of philosophy, which taught a strict Monistic view of reality.
Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world is of one, basic substance and being, un-created and indestructible. Plato devoted a dialogue to the man, the Parmenides, in which Parmenides and his student, Zeno, come to Athens and instruct a young Socrates in philosophical wisdom. This is quite an homage to the thought of Parmenides in that, in most dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as the wise questioner who needs no instruction from anyone.
While Parmenides was an older contemporary of Socrates, it is doubtful the two men ever met. This world we perceive, then, is of one substance — that same substance from which it came — and we who inhabit it share in this same unity of substance. In this, Parmenides may be developing ideas from the earlier philosopher Pythagoras c.
If so, however, Parmenides very radically departed from Pythagorean thought which allows that there is plurality present in our reality. To Parmenides, and his disciples of the Eleatic School, such a claim would be evidence of belief in the senses which, they insisted, could never be trusted to reveal the truth. The Eleatic principle that all is one, and unchanging, exerted considerable influence on later philosophers and schools of thought. Besides Plato who, in addition to the dialogue, Parmenides also addressed Eleatic concepts in his dialogues of the Sophist and the Statesman the famous Sophist Gorgias employed Eleatic reasoning and principles in his work as Aristotle would also do later, principally in his Metaphysics.
I will argue that there is at least one place where Plato takes a positive and generous view of early speculations on nature. But before Aristotle we see little effort to understand early thinkers critically and to reconstruct their thought. Indeed, the first statement of a need to appreciate thinkers in their own terms comes from Plato, in a famous passage of the Theaetetus a-b where Socrates puts into his own mouth the words of Protagoras complaining that his thought has been misrepresented in the argument: the interpreter must make an effort to present the theory the thinker actually held in its philosophical context.
And what we get in earlier treatments is either abuse, as in Xenophanes and Heraclitus; criticism, as in Parmenides, Empedocles and Melissus; or sometimes praise or agreement, as in Anaxagoras and Empedocles in reference to Parmenides.
Sometimes one thinker will diagnose the errors of another, as does Parmenides, but one does not find a careful and charitable treatment of an opponent. The opinions appeared in a list, apparently without any explication or commentary. Sometimes Hippias quoted the original authors. What he provided was not a history of philosophy as we would understand that notion today. It was only a list of opinions of important figures organized by topic.
His book appears to be a forerunner of a genre Diels dubbed doxography. It appears that like later doxographies, the opinions Hippias gathered on a given topic were organized schematically.
For instance, some thinkers held that there were many principles, some that there was one, and some said there was none. Of those who held to many principles, some said there were two, some three, some four, some infinitely many.
That is, whereas later doxographies tended to survey only natural philosophers, Hippias surveyed poets and logographers, as well as those we would designate as philosophers. For instance, Homer is taken as a flux theorist alongside Heraclitus.
Homer accepts two principles, earth and water, or the dry and the wet, along with Xenophanes. A scholar with a sense of history would have scruples about combining such disparate sources without at least some attempt to verify a common aim.
But the notion of an evolving historical consciousness is the product of the age of Hegel, and is not much in evidence in the fifth or fourth centuries BC. In the latter dialogue he characterizes the theories of early thinkers as like fairy tales told to children c : there are three things, or two things, or only one.
Plato does present this account in a quasi-chronological manner, adding a final version of reality in which there is an interaction of one and many, either a continuous opposition or a temporal alternation d-e. Here Plato, or rather the Eleatic Visitor, seems to accept a previous account and to speak patronizingly of the Presocratic philosophers and their conceptions of nature. His account is crudely historical, but at the same time schematic.
And so dismissive is he of his subjects that he does not name a single thinker, though a number of his allusions are easily discernible. Although he professes respect for his distinguished predecessors, the Visitor does not deign to address their concerns directly, but simply complains that we do not understand what they are talking about a-b.
In the Phaedo the character Socrates digresses to provide an intellectual biography of sorts: as a young man, he was enamored of natural explanations, until he became confused by them 96ad. To his disappointment, he found that Anaxagoras failed to exploit his insight, but continued to use mechanical explanations for all natural events.
The Socrates of the Phaedo settles for a second-best account, one which tells why things have the properties they have without revealing why it is best for things to be as they are. He achieves a formal account of the world without achieving a teleological justification for it. He accomplishes this by positing a Demiurge, a cosmic craftsman or architect or engineer, who designs the world to embody a preexisting paradigm. Cosmology consists of a series of engineering problems of how to make the world as good as it can be while working with recalcitrant materials.
In the Sophist c-e the Visitor argues briefly that we should take the world to be the product of divine craftsmanship rather than of unthinking nature. There is an unspoken rejection of the whole project of the natural philosophers. This rejection is made explicit in Laws X, where the error of taking soul to be posterior to the natural elements is argued to be the root of impiety and wickedness c ff. Plato rejects the notion of an autonomous realm of nature in favor of a world created by divine providence.
Plato is the first Western creationist, as David Sedley has recently argued, and the sworn enemy of Ionian naturalism. Thus while he is willing to borrow a theory from one Ionian for a limited purpose, to account for the changeable processes of the sensible world, he does not for that reason endorse Heraclitean theory as a whole or the project of Ionian naturalism in general.
The passage I have in mind is found in Timaeus First, what we have now called water we observe, as we believe, turning into stones and earth as it is compacted; but then as it dissolves and disperses, this same thing becoming wind and air; and as it is ignited, air becoming fire; and as it is compressed and quenched in turn, fire departing and turning back into the form of air; and again air, as it comes together and is condensed, becoming cloud and mist; and from these as they are felted still more, coming flowing water; and from water earth and stones again; and these things thus imparting to each other in a cycle, as it appears, their generation.
For the purposes of this presentation I would like to focus on three features of the passage. A Timaeus identifies seven states of matter: 1 fire, 2 air, 3 wind, 4 cloud, 5 water, 6 earth, 7 stones. He, and only he, posits the seven states of matter ranging from fire to stones. Anaximander has hot and cold, wet and dry, and in his cosmogony earth, air, and fire; Xenophanes has earth and water in one passage; Heraclitus has fire, water, and earth; Parmenides has light and night; Anaxagoras has his homoeomeries; Empedocles has his four elements, and so on.
But only Anaximenes has precisely this set of elemental bodies. Only he explicitly identifies rarefaction and condensation as the twofold mechanism for elemental change. The features of his theory are as unique as a fingerprint. The identification of Anaximenes as the source of this theory may seem fairly obvious, but apparently it is not for many scholars. One scholar has even gone so far as to say that the works of Anaximander and Anaximenes were virtually unknown before Aristotle, for lack of explicit references to them.
Did Plato derive his knowledge of Anaximenes from Hippias? It seems unlikely. In the first place, he does not provide a name for the author of the theory—an important feature of this proto-doxography. Of course he could have suppressed it, as he did in reviewing theories of nature in the Sophist. Yet Hippias also reduced theories to their simplest terms.
Presumably he would have classified Anaximenes as positing a single ultimate reality, namely air. Furthermore, unlike Hippias with his simplified accounts, Plato goes into some detail as to the sequence of changes, rehearsing them in both directions. We boil water in a pot: steam rises off the surface, convection currents rise wind , the steam disappears into air; we blow air on the fire to make it burn hotter. Water in rivers deposits silt or earth in the deltas; clay is baked into bricks, which can crumble back into earth.
At every stage we can cite some empirical evidence some of it ultimately valid, some not for the transformation. Now this theory of matter is not the theory Timaeus will finally advance; he will claim that there are four elements, three of which change into one another, and one of which, earth, can exist in different configurations but cannot change into the other elements. If that is right, there is no particular reason why there should be just seven states of matter in the initial theory, or that condensation and rarefaction rather than, say, heating and cooling should be the primary engine of change.
These features are best explained as being part of a preexisting theory that is close enough to the correct theory to allow Plato to use it as a starting point for theory construction. This seems to be a case in which Presocratic natural philosophy has something to teach us—perhaps as in the case of Heraclitean theory and the problem of sense perception.
He has taken his theory of matter and elemental change and used it as a starting point for his own theory of matter. He is not particularly interested in giving Anaximenes credit for the theory he does not mention his name , but he probably expects informed readers to recognize the allusion to his theory.
But at this point we must worry about the theory that Plato presents us with. It is enough like that of Anaximenes that we may identify the Milesian as the author of the theory. But Anaximenes in Plato looks a good deal different from Anaximenes in Aristotle. He holds that all things are air; air is the only reality, and all other states of matter are really just appearances of air. Fire is rarified air; wind is condensed air; cloud is more condensed air; water is still more condensed air, and so on.
As for coming to be and perishing, there is no such thing: all changes in matter are just cases of alteration in which one set of phenomenal attributes is replaced by another, without changing the essential nature of the underlying reality, namely air Met. For Plato, on the other hand, we have a set of seven states of matter which can be ordered from most rare to most dense.
By changing the density of the matter we change its essential properties to make it something essentially different. Air perishes and wind comes to be; wind perishes and cloud comes to be, and so on. Diogenes of Apollonia makes air the basis of his explicitly monistic theory.
The Hippocratic treatise On Breaths uses air as the central concept in a theory of diseases. By providing cosmological accounts with a theory of change, Anaximenes separated them from the realm of mere speculation and made them, at least in conception, scientific theories capable of testing. There are no monographs on Anaximenes in English.
Articles on him are sometimes rather specialized in nature. A number of chapters in books on the Presocratics are helpful. Daniel W. Anaximenes d. Doctrine of Air Anaximenes seems to have held that at one time everything was air. Doctrine of Change Given his doctrine that all things are composed of air, Anaximenes suggested an interesting qualitative account of natural change: [Air] differs in essence in accordance with its rarity or density.
DK13A5 Using two contrary processes of rarefaction and condensation, Anaximenes explains how air is part of a series of changes. Origin of the Cosmos Anaximenes, like Anaximander, gives an account of how our world came to be out of previously existing matter. Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers.
Gives a philosophically rich defense of the standard interpretation of Anaximenes. Bicknell, P. Classen, C. Guthrie, W. A History of Greek Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Kirk, G.
Raven and M.
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