 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Infinity and Beyond, the Philosophy of Anaximander and Anaximenes. In our first episode, we had a look at the very first pre-Socratic philosopher, Thales of Miletus. This episode, I'll be talking about two more philosophers from the city of Miletus, Anaximander and Anaximenes. We know a bit more about them than we do about Thales, but don't get your hopes up too high. Our evidence about them is pretty thin. I mentioned last time how amazing it is that information about these earliest Greek philosophers has reached us at all. Maybe it's worth dwelling on this just a bit longer. As I said last time, these guys lived in the 6th century BC. To give you some idea how long ago that is, let's take someone else who lived a long time ago, Charlemagne, the conqueror who founded the Holy Roman Empire. He was born in the mid-8th century AD, which is early in the medieval period, but that still puts him slightly closer to us in time than to the birth date of Thales. What I'm trying to say here is, this stuff is really, really old. Even for ancient philosophers like Aristotle, Thales and his immediate successors were far enough in the past that it was hard to know much about them. So, we should really marvel that we, more than two millennia after Aristotle, know anything about the earliest Greek philosophers at all. Even if Aristotle wasn't necessarily all that well-informed about the first pre-Socratics, he's still one of our most important sources of information about them. The other main source is Aristotle's student Theophrastus, who made it his business to collect and interpret bits of information about the history of philosophy up until his time. This is the sort of thing Aristotle and his followers loved to do. They were great collectors of information, and threw themselves into it pretty zealously, whether they were dissecting shellfish or trying to piece together the ideas of someone like Anaximander. But unfortunately, there are a couple of pitfalls for us here. First, Theophrastus's discussion of the pre-Socratics are themselves mostly lost. So, we're usually dependent on yet later Greek authors who are telling us their version of what Theophrastus said. Second, what Theophrastus said, and what Aristotle said, for that matter, was often put in terms of their own ideas and vocabulary. Like I said last time, it can be hard to disentangle ancient interpretations of pre-Socratic ideas from those ideas themselves. When you add the further layer of interpretation and distortion introduced by the authors who are repackaging Theophrastus's information, the task of reconstructing pre-Socratic thought begins to look pretty daunting. Despite all this, as I say, we do know more about Anaximander and Anaximenes than we do about Thales. They both lived in Miletus, the same town as Thales, and they presumably associated with one another. The tradition claims that Anaximander was actually Thales's student, and Anaximenes was then Anaximander's student. But we don't need to take this too seriously, because ancient authors loved to construct chains of teacher-student relationships, whether they existed or not. All you really need to know, if you can keep the name straight, is that Anaximander was just a bit younger than Thales, and that Anaximenes was the generation after that. So, let's tackle Anaximander first. Like Thales, he could claim some expertise in physical science. He's credited with setting up a device like a sundial in Sparta, back in mainland Greece. Remember that Miletus is on the western coast of what is nowadays Turkey, so it's notable that he would have traveled from there as far as Sparta. Another scientific achievement was his production of a map which showed, we are told, both the earth and the sea. This would have been an appropriate activity for someone from Miletus, which, as I said last time, was a vibrant economic center with trading connections all over the Mediterranean and up into the Black Sea area. Anaximander is best known for saying that the principle of all things is what he called the infinite. The Greek word here is aparon, which means literally, that which has no limit. Several different English words have been used to translate this, not only infinite, but also boundless, unlimited, or indefinite. These different translations bring out different connotations which really do apply to Anaximander's principle. He did apparently think that the aparon was infinitely big, in other words that it stretched out in space indefinitely far, and surrounds the cosmos in which we live. And we also know that he thought it was eternal, so infinite in time as well as space. On the other hand, Theophrastus thought it was important to contrast Anaximander through Thales by saying that whereas Thales' principle was water, Anaximander's principle was nothing in particular, it was, in other words, indefinite, having no one nature. Rather, Anaximander said, things with definite nature like air or fire were, as he put it, separated out from the aparon. This takes us to a rather exciting moment, which is the opportunity to quote the first substantial surviving fragment from pre-Socratic philosophy. It was reported by Theophrastus and then preserved by Simplicius, who was a 6th century AD commentator on Aristotle. Ready? Here it is. Things come to be and are destroyed, Anaximander said, quote, according to necessity, for they mete out penalty and retribution to one another for injustice according to the ordering of time, unquote. After citing this, Simplicius adds that Anaximander was expressing himself rather poetically, even though he did write in prose and not verse. The fragment isn't a lot to work with, and in fact, it's not even certain how it is supposed to relate to the principle called the infinite or indefinite. But taking up the idea of separating off, what interpreters tend to think is that the different substances separated out of the aparon generate and destroy each other, and that over the long haul, this process balances out so as to restore what Anaximander calls justice. The idea about the ordering of time might suggest that this all happens according to some kind of cycle, which is a popular idea in early Greek thought and found also in Hesiod. We can make this a bit more concrete by looking at further evidence about Anaximander, which again comes ultimately from Theophrastus. This evidence bears on the way Anaximander thought the world around us was formed, and in particular how the sky and heavenly bodies come about. He said that through a process, which is unfortunately rather obscure, a ball of fire came to exist around the air surrounding the earth. This ball of fire surrounded the air, Anaximander said, like bark surrounding a tree. The flame then burst apart into rings or circles, which were again enveloped in some kind of air or mist. Round holes in the mist allow us to see the circles of fire, but only partially. And these circular glimpses of the fire are the heavenly bodies. The moon waxes and wanes, because the holes in the mist are opening and closing. Now this, I think you'll agree, is all pretty cool. To convey it properly, I'd need a bigger special effects budget, but how does it relate to the business about the infinite and things being separated, paying retribution to one another, and all that? Well, the report I've just been describing starts by saying that in Anaximander's scheme, something separates hot and cold out from the eternal. The eternal is presumably his first principle, the aperon. The cold part is probably the air or mist, and the hot part is obviously going to be the fire. Notice how they then interact with each other, the mist first being hugged tight by the fire like the bark of a tree, and then shrouding the rings of flame out in the heavens. All of this suggests that Anaximander was fascinated by the opposed forces we see in nature around us. These countervailing forces, which are things like mist and flame, with opposing characteristics, are what pay retribution to one another. The infinite is indefinite, it has no characteristics that could be opposed, but it is somehow the source of what enters into opposition. And because it is infinite, in the sense of being inexhaustible, the process of mutual opposition will never cease. This theme of constant and dynamic opposition, which takes place against the background of an underlying unity, is one of the most enduring features of pre-Socratic philosophy. We'll find it most strikingly later on in Heraclitus, but the same idea will appear too in Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Even Aristotle will try to explain nature in terms of opposition and unity. Also typically pre-Socratic is the attempt to explain something huge and complicated, in fact the whole cosmos, by invoking fundamental constituents and forces. Actually, the ambitions of the theory may go even further. Some evidence suggests that Anaximander had in mind more than just our cosmos. Theophrastus tells us that, in Anaximander's theory, it wasn't just stuffs like air and fire that are separated out from the infinite, but also whole worlds. If this is not entirely misleading, and something it is, then this could mean either an infinite number of worlds like our own, scattered out through the infinity, or it could mean an unending series of cycles for our own cosmos, one after the other. Both ideas would, again, have resonances with later pre-Socratic thought. The notion that at least our own cosmos does operate in cycles is supported by a bit of testimony which says that Anaximander believed our world is drying out, the seas gradually retreating as the sun heats them and turns the moisture into wind. Maybe the idea here is that we live within a part of the cosmic cycle where heat is gradually overwhelming what is cold and moist, a 6th century BC version of global warming. The idea that things were wetter in the distant past would go well with another scrap of information which preserves what is probably Anaximander's most memorable idea, apart from the infinite principle. He claimed that the first animals were gestated inside moisture and then broke out of it as if through the bark of a tree. He seems to have had a thing about bark one can't help noticing. He also suggested that man couldn't originally have been the way he is now, since the first generation of children would not have survived. Way too helpless. Rather, they were formed inside of fish and full-grown adults burst out of them. This shouldn't be taken as some kind of proto-theory of evolution, because there's no idea here that fish gradually become more and more human over many generations. Rather, it looks more like an attempt to take the idea of Thales that all things come from water or moisture and flesh it out, if you'll pardon a pun. But overall, it looks like Anaximander had a more abstract approach, one is tempted to say a more philosophical approach, than Thales did. His infinite is a conceptual leap and seems to be derived from pure argument rather than empirical observation. Some have seen another impressively philosophical approach in his explanation of why the earth stays where it does. He thought the earth is like a squat cylinder, shaped like a drum, and we live on the flat upper surface. Aristotle tells us that Anaximander then wondered why this cylindrical earth doesn't move around. The reason, he decided, is that the earth is right in the middle of the cosmos, so no direction would be a more appropriate way for it to move than any other. This is interesting because it shows Anaximander demanding that there be a good reason for the earth to move in a particular direction, if it is going to move. The mere equivalence of all the directions it could move is enough to keep it in place. We might have expected things to develop further in this way, getting more abstract and more conceptual. Indeed, they will when we get to Heraclitus in a few weeks. However, the very next thinker on our itinerary is Anaximenes, who seems to go in the other direction. He agreed with Anaximander that the principle of everything is infinite, but he was happy to go ahead and identify it with a particular substance, not water this time, but air. It would, however, be wrong to think that Anaximenes was just ignoring his similarly named predecessor, and retrenching to a view like that of Thales. His philosophy actually builds on Anaximander's in at least one important way, by explaining how the different stuffs that make up the cosmos are generated one out of another. Now, why does he start with air and not fire, the thinnest stuff, or, for that matter, rocks, the densest stuff? Three reasons, I'd guess. First, the sources suggest that Anaximenes was impressed by the fluidity of air. So, perhaps he selected air as his principle because he wanted to emphasize the dynamism of the natural world, like Anaximander with his constantly opposed forces. Second, a related point, just like Anaximander's Epiron, Anaximenes' air is that from which other things are separated out. The nice thing about air, at least on his theory, is that you can either thin it out and make fire, or thicken it and make cold things, like water and earth. It is an in-between kind of stuff, and so can be the principle for both hot and cold things. Third, there's the fact that air is invisible, unlike fire, clouds, seas, and rocks. So, if there is some infinite unbounded substance surrounding us in all directions, it must be air. Otherwise, we'd be able to see it. Like Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes wanted to explain the whole cosmos in terms of these basic constituents. He said that the earth we live on is shaped like a disk. It forms by the aforementioned process of thickening air, and then rides on the air that is still in its original state. The obvious comparison is to a Frisbee, even though none of the books I've read about pre-Socratic philosophy are frivolous enough to draw that particular analogy. Anyway, his earth is held up by the air the way Thales' earth floats in water like a piece of wood. That similarity is not likely to be a coincidence. Certainly here, Anaximenes was closer to Thales than to Anaximander, since he agreed with the earlier thinker both about the disk-like shape of the earth and the need for it to be borne up by something. He furthermore said that the stars, planets, sun, and moon are made of fire. In a lovely image, Anaximenes apparently compared them to fiery leaves which are floating up in the airy, boundless heaven. In a more amusing image, he said that they rotate around the disk of the earth like a felt hat being spun around on somebody's head. Anaximenes also had something to say about the soul. Unsurprisingly, he said that the soul is made of his favourite stuff, air, which in this case is breath. This idea of the soul as breath, or in Greek pneuma, that's where we get the word pneumatic, is going to have a long career in later ancient philosophy. It makes a certain amount of sense, given that if an animal stops breathing, it stops living. This also allows Anaximenes to make a comparison between the human body and the body of the cosmos. Both are sustained by the most fundamental substance, namely air. Again, this is an idea with a long afterlife. Right down through the medieval period, it will be popular to say that the human is a little version of the physical cosmos, literally a microcosm. Though some doubt that Anaximander was making this point, I find it plausible to believe that he already has something like the idea of man as a microcosm. Before too long, Heraclitus will set out a very similar theory, according to which both the soul of man and the principle of the universe are made of the same stuff, in his case fire. Remember that Thales too said that magnets have a soul, possibly because he wanted to argue that the whole physical cosmos is permeated by soul, just like we are. So, during the early generations of presocratic philosophy, this parallel between man and the cosmos seems to have been, if you'll pardon another pun, in the air. I want to conclude this podcast by mentioning a feature shared by both Anaximander's Infinite and Anaximenes' air. Both philosophers claim that their principles are divine. Anaximander adds that the infinite, as he puts it, steers everything. It's not quite clear how it could do so, perhaps by enforcing the reciprocal justice between the things separated out of it. But it is important to realize that these early Greek thinkers were not giving up entirely on the notion of the divine. Anaximenes, in fact, is reported to have said that there are gods, just as Greek religion taught, but that these gods too came from air. What we see here is a subtle, but nonetheless pivotally important, feature of presocratic philosophy. These are thinkers who want to hold on to a sense of religious awe in the face of the dynamically changing cosmos they describe. They are not discarding religion, but rather throwing down a challenge to previous conceptions of the divine. The way they do this is fairly nuanced, but things are about to get a lot less subtle with the next philosopher we'll talk about, Xenophanes. He staged a direct attack on the conception of the gods that we find in Homer and Hesiod, and in so doing began an opposition, or at least a very tense relationship, between Greek religion and Greek philosophy that will persist right through Plato and Aristotle. We'll learn more about him on next week's episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.