Apeiron
Anaximander on Generation and Destruction
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Ancient Chinese Versus Greek Flat Earth Cosmology
In the two parts of this book, I discussed two concepts of flat earth cosmology which tried in different ways to solve the problems that arise from the premise that the earth is flat. There is little point in ...
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Introduction
Except for members of The Flat Earth Society, some orthodox religious and a few Indians in the Amazon forests, we all know or should know for sure that the earth is a sphere. Yet, in daily life we act as if th...
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Anaximander’s Phenomenological Cosmology
Anaximander’s model of the heavens stays as close as possible to what we actually see when we look at the sky. When we look at the stars with an unbiased eye, they give the impression of some kind of fire cont...
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Two Appendices: Cosmas Indicopleustes and Samuel Birley Rowbotham
In Book 6 of his Christian Topography, Cosmas Indicopleustes, the famous defender of the flatness of the earth who lived in the sixth century A.D., intended to prove that the sun is much smaller than the earth. C...
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Preliminaries on Sources and Methodology
Students of Presocratic philosophy have an abundance of textbooks available. Next to Diels’ Doxographi Graeci and Diels/Kranz’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, I frequently used Graham’s The Texts of Early Greek Phi...
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Anaximander’s Numbers
In 1995, when I discussed several visualizations of Anaximander’s world picture and added my own attempt, I took the interpretation of Anaximander’s numbers by Tannery and Diels for granted. Later, I got my do...
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Xenophanes’ Cosmology
The flat earth cosmology of the Presocratics is not always easy to understand. The interpretation of Xenophanes’ ideas on cosmology in particular is notoriously difficult. This has led to the suggestion that X...
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Anaxagoras and the Measurement of the Sun and Moon
According to the available sources, Anaxagoras compared the size of the sun and moon with that of the Peloponnesus. The relevant texts are the following:
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An Ancient Chinese Cosmology: Main Features
The ancient Chinese model of the cosmos called gai tian (“canopy heaven”) that is explained in the Zhou bi (“gnomon at Zhou”) in the first century BC (but containing much older material) and in additional sources...
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Peculiarities of Presocratic Flat Earth Cosmology
The issues discussed in this chapter concern peculiarities of the ancient Greek conception of a flat earth. As we will see in Part Two of this book, in the ancient Chinese gai tian system, everything, except the ...
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Anaximenes’ Cosmology
One of the strangest theories, combined with one of the most enigmatic images in Presocratic cosmology, which have puzzled many scholars, is ascribed to Anaximenes. According to him, says Hippolytus, the sun a...
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Anaxagoras on the Milky Way and Lunar Eclipses
In this chapter, I will explore the interrelations between three astronomical theories that are attributed to Anaxagoras. The first theory is the explanation of the Milky Way as effectuated by the shadow of th...
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Anaxagoras on the Light and Phases of the Moon
In Chap. 9, I stated that two different theories about the shadow of the earth have been attributed to Anaxagoras. According to the first theory, the shadow ...
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Aristotle’s Arguments for the Sphericity of the Earth
According to Aëtius, Thales stated that the earth is shaped like a ball. Diogenes Laërtius reports that Hesiod, Anaximander and Pythagoras taught that the earth was spherical. These testimonies are usually con...
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An Ancient Chinese Flat Earth Cosmology: Details and Calculations
Based on the introductory representation in the previous chapter, this chapter provides more details, calculations, and an extrapolation.
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Anaximander’s Images
Anaximander’s cosmology is often described as a bizarre concoction of strange images that has nothing to do with observational data. One example out of many is Dicks, who writes: “The tertiary sources (…) attr...
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Book
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Archē
When Aristotle, in the first book of his Metaphysics, speaks of his predecessors, he mentions Thales of Miletus as the first representative of philosophy.
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Gonimon
Based on secondary reports, one can assume that the works of the Presocratics dealt with the origin of the world, its appearance and transformations. These issues were expressed, as we will demonstrate, in wor...
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Ordering of Time
Thus far we have mainly shown how, according to Anaximander, the creative power of boundless nature works through the coming to be of the cosmos and all that it contains. But apart from creation, there is also...
