In Miletus, about 550 B.C., together with our world-picture cosmology was born. This book tells the story. In Part One the reader is introduced in the archaic world-picture of a flat earth with the cupola of the celestial vault onto which the celestial bodies are attached. One of the subjects treated in that context is the riddle of the tilted celestial axis. This part also contains an extensive chapter on archaic astronomical instruments. Part Two shows how Anaximander (610-547 B.C.) blew (...) up this archaic world-picture and replaced it by a new one that is essentially still ours. He taught that the celestial bodies orbit at different distances and that the earth floats unsupported in space. This makes him the founding father of cosmology. Part Three discusses topics that completed the new picture described by Anaximander. Special attention is paid to the confrontation between Anaxagoras and Aristotle on the question whether the earth is flat or spherical, and on the battle between Aristotle and Heraclides Ponticus on the question whether the universe is finite or infinite. (shrink)

All human civilizations have thought that the world was made of sky above and the Earth below. All except one. For the Greeks, the Earth was a rock floating in space, and under the earth there was no ground, no turtles, nor the gigantic columns of which the Bible speaks. How did the Greeks understand that the Earth is suspended in nothingness? Who understood this and how? It is this unique "scientific revolution" of Anaximander of which the author speaks, which (...) Karl Popper called "one of the most daring ideas, revolutionary and portentous in the entire history of human thought" The concern is with the conflict that was opened, still burning, with the nature of scientific thought, its critical and rebellious character, the force with which it subverts the order of things and our image of the world of scientific knowledge, and the highly effective "error" at the same time --as we teach physics in the twentieth century. Speaking of Anaximander, the author invites us to reflect on what his ideas mean to the scientific revolution opened by Einstein. (shrink)

Through criticism and analysis of ancient traditions, Kahn reconstructs the pattern of Anaximander’s thought using historical methods akin to the reconstructive techniques of comparative linguists.

Karl R. Popper; I.—Back to the Pre-Socratics: The Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 1–24, ht.

The Presocratics were the founding fathers of the Western philosophical tradition, and the first masters of rational thought. This volume provides a comprehensive and precise exposition of their arguments, and offers a rigorous assessment of their contribution to philosophical thought.

Uses textual and archaeological evidence to argue that emerging Egyptian and Greek architectural technologies were crucial to the origins and development of Greek philosophy.

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

The paper is the revised version of an inaugural lecture given as Lecturer (”Privatdozent”) at the University of Zurich on 3 june 1985. It deals with the beginning and the main properties of “the science of nature” (hê peri physeôs historiê) (Plato.Phd.96a). According to Themistius (DK 12 A 7), the founder of this kind of Ionic philosophy is Anaximander of Miletus because he was the rst who wrote about nature (especially a cosmography and a cosmogony) and developed three main principles (...) of nature: (1) Nature has a mathematical structure (Arist. De coelo I3 295b10-14.32); (2) nature has a physical structure (DK 12 A 10-11); and (3) nature follows natural laws (DK 12 A 9). The origin of this introduction lies in the prolongation of primitive expectations of constancy. It is especially argued that the shift from mythos to logos is characterized by the depersonalization of nature and the introduction of proto-theoretical terms. In fact, the “apeiron” of Anaximander seems to be something similar to a theoretical term, because Anaximander seems to have realized that the explanans of nature cannot be one of its explananda, like water (Thales) or air (Anaximenes). (shrink)