Anaximander

He was born in Miletus in the year 610 BC He lived for a long time in the time of Polycrates, who was a great thrown in Samos during the years 538 to 522 BC He was a great Greek philosopher, geometrist and astronomer , disciple of Thales of Miletus, he was also part from the school and succeeded Thales when he could no longer represent her and was Anaximenes’ teacher. He was considered the first scientist since he was in charge of using experimentation through the demonstrative method. He discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic and also the plane of the celestial equator. It is considered that he was the one who managed to introduce the sundial in Greece and is considered to be the creator and founder of cartography.. His most important contribution has been his prose work related to the cosmos and the origins of life. He spoke of the sun, the moon and the stars, these being the innermost part.

Anaximander thought

He dedicated a large part of his life to looking for the primordial and basic element of all things, but he firmly believed that this element was not material, but was of indefinite origin and decided to call it apeiron and was characterized by an eternal movement that had no end. , which means that it is like nothing, that it never grows old and that it encloses and governs everything around it. His theories of thought were that the worlds were innumerable, that there was a cosmogony of its own, a single cosmologyand then the origin of man. He had the idea that worlds were infinite, that they never ended and that when one reached the end it was immediately succeeded by another and that from this place the heavens were born. He thought that the earth was always in a state of rest because it was unbalanced. He gave a mathematical basis to the world assuming it was ordered.

Contributions of Anaximander

Anaximander postulated that opposites unite through the apeiron and that they separate when they need to form things leveled by cycles of domination, in this way for him, it was how the world was formed, by separating the cold from the hot. He managed to observe empirically, a decrease in the waters in various geographical areas and took his own ideas saying that the earth was drying, as a struggle between hot and dry versus wet and cold. It is very interesting to observe the way in which Anaximander manages to anticipate current events, especially when we refer to theories of evolution. Today Anaximander is considered the person who discovered the obliquity of the elliptical. But without a doubt, his most important contribution was the elaboration of the prose work Related to the cosmos and the origins of life, in it, he spoke of the universe as concentric cylinders of which the outermost was the sun, the middle the moon and the innermost was full of stars.

Arjé of Anaximander

His Arjé or arché is the apeiron. He was referring to the indeterminate, what has no limit, which is precisely what we are looking for. The entire apeiron is eternal , it is always in continuous movement, and it was considered as something material, as the divine that gives rise to everything in the world. He also believed that the apeiron was the cause of the entire generation and was also responsible for all kinds of destruction. It was for this reason that Anaximander believed that the Arche must be indeterminate.

Phrases

Among the main phrases that we can rescue from Anaximander we mention the following: Immortal and indestructible, surrounds everything and destroys everything, water is the arché ( principle ) of the universe, the indefinite is divine , because it is immortal and imperishable, nature is eternal and it does not age, and one of the most important: The earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as its depth and only the upper part is inhabited. But the earth is isolated in space and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is, without any support, our cylinder, the earth, is located at the same distance from all points in the sky.

Works of Anaximander

Among the outstanding works of Anaximander we can mention the measurement of the solstices and equinoxes . The distance and size of the stars, the principle of determination of all reality and his book philosophy : his work was on Nature.