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He proposed the theory of the apeiron in direct response to the earlier theory of his teacher, Thales, who had claimed that the primary substance was water. The notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious concept of immortality, and Anaximander's description was in terms appropriate to this ...
Air as the arche is a limitless concept, which resembled Anaximander's theory that the arche was the abstract infinite that he called apeiron (Ancient Greek: ἄπειρον, lit. 'unlimited, 'boundless'). At the same time, air as the arche was a defined substance, which resembled the theory of Thales that the arche was water. [35]
The apeiron is central to the cosmological theory created by Anaximander, a 6th-century BC pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose work is mostly lost. From the few existing fragments, we learn that he believed the beginning or ultimate reality is eternal and infinite, or boundless (apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything we ...
Anaximenes took for his principle aēr (air), conceiving it as being modified, via thickening and thinning, into the other classical elements: fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth. While his theory resembled that of Anaximander, as they both claimed a single source of the universe, Anaximenes suggested sophisticated mechanisms in which air is ...
Thales's most famous idea was his philosophical and cosmological thesis that all is water, which comes down to us through a passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics. [45] In the work, Aristotle reported Thales's theory that the arche or originating principle of nature was a single material substance: water. Aristotle then proceeded to proffer a ...
Thales's theory was refuted by his pupil and successor, Anaximander. Anaximander noted that water could not be the arche because it could not give rise to its opposite, fire. Anaximander claimed that none of the elements (earth, fire, air, water) could be arche for the same reason. Instead, he proposed the existence of the apeiron, an ...
Anaximander posited that every element had an opposite, or was connected to an opposite (water is cold, fire is hot). Thus, the material world was said to be composed of an infinite, boundless apeiron from which arose the elements (earth, air, fire, water) and pairs of opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry). There was, according to Anaximander, a ...
Anaximander (Greek: Ἀναξίμανδρος, Anaximandros) (c. 610 – c. 546 BCE) wrote a cosmological work, little of which remains.From the few extant fragments, we learn that he believed the beginning or first principle (arche, a word first found in Anaximander's writings, and which he probably invented) is an endless, unlimited mass (), subject to neither old age nor decay, which ...