Andrew Gregory - Anaximander: A Re-assessment

Also available from Bloomsbury

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For Sheelagh, with love

The prologue consists of three loosely philosophical anecdotes related to this book. When I was a Masters student, I attended a paper on Bayes theorem, a view in the philosophy of science. Now in my opinion, Bayes theorem is pointless, dull and excruciatingly tedious. In the middle of the audience was an eminent British philosopher who after five minutes of this paper was asleep, slumped back in their chair and snoring extremely loudly. Although I initially thought this rather rude on reflection, perhaps this was the proper philosophical response to Bayes theorem. After all, nothing so dull and so tedious could possibly be true. I told this tale to a colleague, who related a converse experience. They gave a paper at Oxbridge, and after speaking, an elderly Oxbridge philosopher came up to them and said: Yes, young man, that was a very interesting paper, very interesting indeed. Interesting, and therefore wrong. The truth is always dull. The reader will have their own view of these anecdotes, but beware this book will at least try to be interesting.

On the Athens Metro, you can find warning signs which say PROSOCHE TON KENON. Now prosoche simply means beware. When I first saw one of these signs I had been writing on Leucippus and Democritus, where ton kenon is the infinite void. So my initial thought was that this meant beware of the infinite void. Surely though, the infinite void would not fit into Monastriaki Metro station? And what danger was there in the infinite void anyway? This must mean something else, but what? Perhaps they had been reading Sartre, and I should prepare my soul for an encounter with the existential void? Is Monastriaki Metro station really that bleak and soulless? Or perhaps this is a Greek Orthodox Church slogan about the emptiness of life in the absence of God? Then the much more mundane answer dawned on me. As on the London underground, this simply means mind the gap (between the train and the platform). There is a moral here somewhere about over-philosophising the Greek text, but whatever it is, I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.

While teaching the ancient science module on our Masters programme, I was asked to explain Anaximanders apeiron. Well, I said, according to some commentators it is entirely characterless and seemingly endless in extent. Ah, replied one of my students, just like visiting an IKEA warehouse then This student will go far.

Andrew Gregory

August 2015

Chapter Two develops some material first published in Anaximanders Zoogony, Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University June 2009, ed. Rossetto, M. M. Tsianikas, G. Couvalis and M. Palaktsoglou, pp. 44-53. Chapter Three develops some material first published in my The Ancient Greeks and the Supernatural, Bloomsbury 2013.

I would like to thank Robert Hahn, Gerrard Naddaf, Dirk Couprie, Radim Kocandrle, Jaap Mansfeld, Alex Mourelatos, Dan Graham, Norman Sieroka, Jason Jordan, and Jason Rheins for correspondence, conversations and sight of pre-publication papers concerning Anaximander.

I would also like to thank audiences at The London Ancient Science Conference, University of Texas, University of Pittsburgh, Brigham Young University, Kings College London, University of Edinburgh, University of St. Andrews, Institute of Classical Studies London, Aristotle University Thessaloniki and the University of Kent for their stimulating questions and comments on Anaximander papers which I gave there.

This book will attempt a re-assessment of Anaximanders thought and some of the claims about him. Why should there be such a re-assessment? There has been a considerable amount of work on Anaximander of late, with some interesting new insights; I am interested in how these affect our overall picture of him. There have been some important recent advances in historiography which are relevant to how we look at Anaximander. I also feel that I have some new things to say, particularly about the zoogony, Anaximanders relation to his predecessors, the apeiron, the extant fragment and astronomy and cosmology. Where does this re-assessment lead us? In outline, to an Anaximander who relies more heavily on biological ideas in cosmogony and cosmology and for whom the idea that the apeiron steers plays a highly significant role. It leads to a simpler but more symmetrical and stable cosmos for Anaximander, one which displays considerable good order. Controversially, perhaps, it leads towards a single cosmos for Anaximander, rather than many worlds at the same time or many worlds in succession. It leads towards an Anaximander with fewer superficial similarities to modern scientific theories, but with theories of greater epistemic merit and contextual plausibility. Finally, it leads to an Anaximander who is self-consciously different from and critical of the preceding poets, especially Hesiod, but who is also significantly different from the early atomists. More than most works on Anaximander, I will be concerned with the criteria we use to reconstruct his thought from what little evidence we have and making explicit historiographical choices.

Anaximanders life and works

Anaximander lived from around 611/ 610 BCE to 547/546 BCE, being active at Miletus in Asia Minor, now Milet on the Anatolian coast of Turkey. Our best reconstruction of Anaximenes dates is 586/5528/5 BCE, making him about twenty-five years younger than Anaximander.

Anaximander is often held to be the first Greek to produce a written account of nature. I would at least entertain the possibility that Anaximander wrote several works.

Anaximander is reputed to have drawn a map of the world and to have been the first to have done so, at least among the Greeks.

We have relatively little evidence on Anaximander. What evidence we do have is open to a wide range of interpretations, so it is important that we are clear about the criteria for interpreting that evidence. This chapter begins by looking at some issues concerning how we attempt to reconstruct Anaximanders views and where we place him in the history of early Greek thought. These issues can interact in interesting ways and it is important to draw out and examine some assumptions that often remain tacit here. Most of our evidence on Anaximander comes directly from Aristotle, or from the doxographers and commentators who relied on him and the now largely lost work of his pupil, Theophrastus. The second half of this chapter looks at how reliable this evidence is and questions whether Aristotle and Theophrastus had full access to the written work of Anaximander. If they did not, that has considerable historiographical implications. I also want to investigate the possibility that there are two sources of evidence which we have not fully explored, based on the idea that Anaximander may have alluded to passages in Homer, Hesiod and other early poets and that some later Presocratics and Plato may have alluded to Anaximander.

Coherence

One aim of this book is to try to produce, as far as possible, an integrated, coherent view of Anaximander. There are two senses of coherence which we need to distinguish here. Couprie has commented that: