Anaximander In Context

Promoting a new, broadly interdisciplinary horizon for future studies in early Greek philosophy, Dirk L. Couprie, Robert Hahn, and Gerard Naddaf establish the cultural context in which Anaximander's thought developed and in which the origins of Greek philosophy unfolded in its earliest stages. In order to better understand Anaximander's achievement, the authors call our attention to the historical, social, political, technological, cosmological, astronomical, and observational contexts of his thought. Anaximander in Context brings to the forefront of modern debates the importance of cultural context, and the indispensability of images to clarify ancient ideologies.

Anaximander and the Architects opens a previously unexplored avenue into Presocratic philosophy—the technology of monumental architecture. The evidence, coming directly from sixth century B.C.E. building sites and bypassing Aristotle, shows how the architects and their projects supplied their Ionian communities with a sprouting vision of natural order governed by structural laws. Their technological innovations and design techniques formed the core of an experimental science and promoted a rational, not mythopoetical, discourse central to our understanding of the context in which early Greek philosophy emerged. Anaximander's prose book and his rationalizing mentality are illuminated in surprising ways by appeal to the ongoing, extraordinary projects of the archaic architects and their practical techniques.

Anaximander, the sixth-century BCE philosopher of Miletus, is often credited as being the instigator of both science and philosophy. The first recorded philosopher to posit the idea of the boundless cosmos, he was also the first to attempt to explain the origins of the world and humankind in rational terms. Anaximander's philosophy encompasses theories of justice, cosmogony, geometry, cosmology, zoology and meteorology. Anaximander: A Re-assessment draws together these wide-ranging threads into a single, coherent picture of the man, his worldview and his legacy to the history of thought. Arguing that Anaximander's statements are both apodeictic and based on observation of the world around him, Andrew Gregory examines how Anaximander's theories can all be construed in such a way that they are consistent with and supportive of each other. This includes the tenet that the philosophical elements of Anaximander's thought (his account of the apeiron, the extant fragment) can be harmonised to support his views on the natural world. The work further explores how these theories relate to early Greek thought and in particular conceptions of theogony and meterology in Hesiod and Homer.

This book offers an innovative analysis of the Greek philosopher Anaximander’s work. In particular, it presents a completely new interpretation of the key word Apeiron, or boundless, offering readers a deeper understanding of his seminal cosmology and, with it, his unique conception of the origin of the universe. Anaximander traditionally applied Apeiron to designate the origin of everything. The authors’ investigation of the extant sources shows, however, that this common view misses the mark. They argue that instead of reading Apeiron as a noun, it should be considered an adjective, with reference to the term phusis (nature), and that the phrase phusis apeiros may express the boundless power of nature, responsible for all creation and growth. The authors also offer an interpretation of Anaximander's cosmogony from a biological perspective: each further step in the differentiation of the phenomenal world is a continuation of the original separation of a fertile seed. This new reading of the first written account of cosmology stresses the central role of the boundless power of nature. It provides philosophers, researchers, and students with a thought-provoking explanation of this early thinker's conception of generation and destruction in the universe.

Detailed study of how Anaximander’s cosmological and philosophical conceptions were affected by architectural technologies.

In The Greek Concept of Nature, Gerard Naddaf utilizes historical, mythological, and linguistic perspectives to reconstruct the origin and evolution of the Greek concept of phusis. Usually translated as nature, phusis has been decisive both for the early history of philosophy and for its subsequent development. However, there is a considerable amount of controversy on what the earliest philosophers—Anaximander, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus—actually had in mind when they spoke of phusis or nature. Naddaf demonstrates that the fundamental and etymological meaning of the word refers to the whole process of birth to maturity. He argues that the use of phusis in the famous expression Peri phuseos or historia peri phuseos refers to the origin and the growth of the universe from beginning to end. Naddaf's bold and original theory for the genesis of Greek philosophy demonstrates that archaic and mythological schemes were at the origin of the philosophical representations, but also that cosmogony, anthropogony, and politogony were never totally separated in early Greek philosophy.

This book examines the philosophies of nature of the early Greek thinkers and argues that a significant and thoroughgoing shift is required in our understanding of them. In contrast with the natural world of the earliest Greek literature, often the result of arbitrary divine causation, in the work of early Ionian philosophers we see the idea of a cosmos: ordered worlds where there is complete regularity. How was this order generated and maintained and what underpinned those regularities? What analogies or models were used for the order of the cosmos? What did they think about causation and explanatory structure? How did they frame natural laws? Andrew Gregory draws on recent work on mechanistic philosophy and its history, on the historiography of the relation of science to art, religion and magic, and on the fragments and doxography of the early Greek thinkers to argue that there has been a tendency to overestimate the extent to which these early Greek philosophies of nature can be described as 'mechanistic'. We have underestimated how far they were committed to other modes of explanation and ontologies, and we have underestimated, underappreciated and indeed underexplored how plausible and good these philosophies would have been in context.