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Pre-Socratic Cosmology
Anaximander
610 BC – 546 BC
“The origin of things is the Boundless — from which all things arise and to which all return.”
The first philosopher to theorise a non-material origin of the cosmos. Anaximander posited the apeiron — the infinite, boundless — as the primordial source from which all opposites and things emerge and to which they return.
Biography
Anaximander (c. 610–546 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher of Miletus and a student of Thales. He was perhaps the first thinker to produce a written philosophical treatise, of which only a single tantalising fragment survives.
Where Thales proposed water as the arche (first principle), Anaximander argued that no ordinary material could play that role. The source of all things must itself be indefinite and boundless — the apeiron — from which the warring opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry) separate out to form the cosmos.
He also produced an early cosmological model placing Earth at the centre of the universe, suspended freely in space with no support — a striking departure from mythological accounts.
Important Works
On Nature (fragment)
560 BCThe lone surviving fragment proposing the apeiron as the origin of all things and the necessity of return.
Key Takeaways
- The first principle (arche) is the apeiron — boundless and indefinite, not any ordinary substance.
- All existing things emerge from the apeiron and must return to it as punishment for their separation.
- He pioneered the idea of the Earth as a free body suspended in space.
- Introduced a naturalistic cosmology independent of myth.
- First known thinker to write philosophical prose rather than epic verse.