Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology
From Thales to Heraclides Ponticus
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Apeiron According to Aristotle
Of all the authors who refer to Anaximander, Aristotle was closest to the Milesian in time and, therefore, his reports must be considered important.
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Chapter
Boundless Nature
In the previous chapters, we argued that Anaximander must have used ἄπειρος adjectively as an attribute or property of something else. Accordingly, the question has to be answered: What could it have been that...
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Generation
One of the few occasions Aristotle mentions Anaximander by name appears in a passage from Physics. Here he contrasts Anaximander’s rendition of the process of generation with that of those who explain generation ...
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Apeiron: A Preliminary Understanding
In the fifty-four pages of the first chapter of his book Infinity in the Presocratics, discusses “twenty-three noteworthy studies on Anaximander’s to apeiron”.
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Apeiron According to Theophrastus and the Doxography
Generally speaking, the sources of the so-called doxographers were Aristotle and Theophrastus. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the little we know from Aristotle about Anaximander is embedded in his ow...
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Bellows or Lightning? A Curious Terminology Explained
Anaximander’s image of celestial wheels is in itself clear: it visualizes the circular orbits of the celestial bodies, and it explains why these bodies turn in circles around the earth, as well as why they do ...
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A Survey from Anaximander to Aristarchus
With his three fundamental insights, that the celestial bodies make full circles around the earth, that the earth dwells unsupported in the center of the universe, and that the celestial stars are behind each ...
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The Sun at the Horizon, Anaxagoras’ Proof of the Flatness of the Earth
Most Presocratics believed that the earth is flat, shaped like a drum, as we see in Chap. 4. In On the Heavens 293b34 ff. Aristotle argues with those who maintain that the earth is flat, until he finally, in 298b...
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The Shape of the Earth According to Thales
In the archaic world picture, the earth is flat and usually conceived of as a round disk. First of all, it is important to bear in mind that almost all the Presocratics, of which we have reports about what the...
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The Dodecahedron, or the Shape of the Earth According to Plato
The discovery of the spherical shape of the earth is the finishing touch of the new world picture that was introduced by Anaximander. Strictly speaking, it is not right to use the word “discovery,” since the i...
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The First Map of the Earth
Several sources attest that Anaximander drew a map of the earth and even that he was the first one to do so (see DK 12A1(2) and DK 12A6). His map has been lost, just like his book. Several scholars, however, h...
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Heraclides Ponticus and the Infinite Universe
In Chap. 8, it was explained how Anaximander, with one of his fundamental speculative insights, broke through the firmament of the archaic world picture by placing the celestial bodies at different distances f...
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The Visualization of Anaximander’s World Picture
In Chap. 9, we drew a map, a two-dimensional representation, of Anaximander’s universe (see Fig. 9.5). One of the conclusions was that Anaximander probably did not fabricate a three-dimensional model of his co...
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Critique of an Alleged Cosmic Architecture
According to Anaximander, the earth has the shape of a cylinder and looks like a column drum, the height of which is one third its width. This datum has induced Robert Hahn to outline in several studies what h...
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The Archaic World Picture
The archaic world picture, the picture of a flat earth with the dome of the heaven vaulted above it, on which the celestial bodies are attached, is the basic world picture of many ancient cultures. Here “world...
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With Fear for His Own Life: Anaxagoras as a Cosmologist
The dates of Anaxagoras’ life are a matter of dispute. Usually they are given as 500–428 B.C. but the dates 533–462 B.C. have also been defended. According to Diogenes Laertius, Anaxagoras was an apprentice of...
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How Thales Was Able to Predict the Solar Eclipse of 28 May 585 B.C.
In the year 467 B.C. at Aegospotamoi, a stone fell from the heaven. It is said that Anaxagoras, thanks to his knowledge of astronomy, was able to predict the fall of this famous meteorite (DK 59A1(10), DK 59A6...
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Chapter
The Sun Is as Big as the Peloponnesus
Plutarch, Hippolytus, and Diogenes Laertius report that Anaxagoras compared the size of the sun with the Peloponnesus (see Fig. 16.1). The aim of this chapter is to show that Anaxagoras was not crazy when he s...
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The Riddle of the Celestial Axis
The tilting of the axis of the heavens must have been one of the big riddles for the ancients who studied the skies. Why does it look as if the stars turn around a point in the northern region of the heavens, ...
