As Rovelli’s fans will expect, this book is excellent. It is also a chance to see a slightly different Rovelli in action. Just hitting English shelves now, it was in fact published seven years before his million-copy-selling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014) made him a star. Compared to his later books, Anaximander is both a little more guarded and a little more combative – and a little less convincing, when he strays into arguments about myth and religious thought – but it is never less than engaging, and enviably compendious. Despite its modest length Rovelli finds room for everything from a brief history of ancient Greek colonialism to critiques of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with disquisitions on religion, myth and Chinese astronomy thrown in for free. It also has the merit, for those of us who just cannot quite grasp quantum gravity, of leaving the Earth solid beneath our feet. An insightful survey of the scientific contributions of Greek philosopher Anaximander…Rovelli makes the most of the available evidence in building his case that the philosopher’s emphasis on natural causes marked a sea change in human thought. This is a masterful overview of a pivotal figure in scientific history.”— Publisher’s Weekly Kahn, Charles H. (1960). Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press. Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. That something, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in this enjoyable and provocative little book, occurred in the interaction between two of the place’s greatest minds. The first, Thales, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece, is often credited as the pioneer in applying deductive reasoning to geometry and astronomy; he used his mathematics, for example, to predict solar eclipses. Wondrous as this was, it was the reaction of the second man, Thales’s fellow citizen, Anaximander, 11 years his junior that, Rovelli argues, changed the world. Anaximander assimilated Thales’s ideas, treated them with due respect, but then rejected and improved on them and came up with more exact theories of his own.

It is certain that he [Anaximander] cannot have said anything about elements, which no one thought of before Empedokles, and no one could think of before Parmenides. The question has only been mentioned because it has given rise to a lengthy controversy, and because it throws light on the historical value of Aristotle's statements. From the point of view of his own system, these may be justified; but we shall have to remember in other cases that, when he seems to attribute an idea to some earlier thinker, we are not bound to take what he says in an historical sense." [32] In 1542 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, abolished slavery by decree in his Leyes Nuevas, although slavery persisted in Spain’s colonies in Puerto Rica and Cuba (until 1873 and 1886); in 1952 Agatha Christie’s murder-mystery The Mousetrap opened at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, starring Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim; in 1963 the funeral of the assassinated president John F Kennedy took place, with more than 800,000 people lining the streets to watch the procession through Washington DC; in 2016 Fidel Castro died, aged 90: he led Cuba from the 1959 revolution to 2008, defeated the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and presided over the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 ( obituary, November 26, 2016). Books discovered in drawers by publishers should often have been left there…Anaximander?… Shouldn’t he stay in the dusty cabinet too? Absolutely not: Anaximander is a delight and so is this book” —Sunday Times (UK) The book has many thought-provoking examples that I had not previously come across; here is the one I liked most. Rovelli is discussing the question of cultural relativism. Different societies have different belief systems, and on what grounds can we say that one is "better" or "more true" than another? It is fashionable, at least in some circles, to say that the terms make no sense. But Rovelli has a nice case study concerning the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes, who accurately measured the circumference of the Earth in the third century B.C. by comparing the shadows cast at widely separated locations. This part of the story is famous; what I hadn't heard was that a Chinese astronomer performed the same experiment several centuries later, but reached completely different conclusions. The Chinese believed that the Earth wa We may distinguish roughly two lines of interpretation, which may be labeled the “horizontal” and the “vertical.” The horizontal interpretation holds that in the fragment nothing is said about the relation of the things to the Boundless, whereas the vertical interpretation maintains that the fragment describes the relationship of the things to the Boundless. The upholders of the horizontal interpretation usually do not deny that Anaximander taught that all things are generated from the Boundless, but they simply hold that this is not what is said in the fragment. They argue that the fragment describes the battle between the elements (or of things in general), which accounts for the origin and destruction of things. The most obvious difficulty, however, for this “horizontal” interpretation is that it implies two cycles of becoming and decay: one from and into the Boundless, and the other caused by the mutual give and take of the elements or things in general. In other words, in the “horizontal” interpretation the Boundless is superfluous. This is the strongest argument in favor of the “vertical” interpretation, which holds that the fragment refers to the Boundless, notwithstanding the plural relative pronouns. According to the “vertical” interpretation, then, the Boundless should be regarded not only as the ever-flowing fountain from which everything ultimately springs, but also as the yawning abyss (as some say, comparable with Hesiod’s “Chaos”) into which everything ultimately perishes.

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This character is traditionally associated with Boethius, however his face offering similarities with the relief of Anaximander (image in the box above), it could be a representation of the philosopher. See "Raphael's School of Athens (2/2)". Archived from the original on 2007-02-14 . Retrieved 2007-02-14. for a description of the characters in this painting. Sandywell, Barry (1996). Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of Philosophical Discourse, c. 600–450 BC. Vol.3. London: Routledge. Furley, David J.; Reginald E. Allen (1970). Studies in Presocratic Philosophy. Vol.1. London: Routledge. OCLC 79496039. Themistius and Simplicius also mention some work "on nature". The list could refer to book titles or simply their topics. Again, no one can tell because there is no punctuation sign in Ancient Greek. Furthermore, this list is incomplete since the Suda ends it with ἄλλα τινά, thus implying "other works". Anaximander of Miletus considered that from warmed up water and earth emerged either fish or entirely fishlike animals. Inside these animals, men took form and embryos were held prisoners until puberty; only then, after these animals burst open, could men and women come out, now able to feed themselves. [64]

Anaximander put forward the idea that humans had to spend part of this transition inside the mouths of big fish to protect themselves from the Earth's climate until they could come out in open air and lose their scales. [65] He thought that, considering humans' extended infancy, we could not have survived in the primeval world in the same manner we do presently.Kirk, Geoffrey S.; Raven, John E. (1983). The Presocratic Philosophers (2nded.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Anaximander (31st) High School of Thessaloniki, Greece is named after Anaximander. [77] Works [ edit ] Vernant, Jean-Pierre (1982). The Origins of Greek Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-9293-9.

Luchte, James (2011). Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-0567353313. Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference These factors have an urgent relevance, he suggests, for the scientists and citizens and policymakers of today. For a start, the Miletus of 2,600 years ago was a time and place in which the ability to read and write moved beyond a limited circle of elite scribes. The effect of extending education far and wide was instantaneous. And it was no coincidence that Anaximander’s revolutionary thinking also coincided with the birth of the polis – the nascent democratic structures built on debate as to how best to govern society. Once people started seeing power as negotiable then everything else became debatable too. “Alongside the desacralisation and secularisation of public life,” Rovelli argues, “which passed from the hands of divine kings to those of citizens, came the desacralisation and secularisation of knowledge… law was not handed down once and for all but was instead questioned again and again.” Anaximander was the first to conceive a mechanical model of the world. In his model, the Earth floats very still in the centre of the infinite, not supported by anything. It remains "in the same place because of its indifference", a point of view that Aristotle considered ingenious, in On the Heavens. [41] Its curious shape is that of a cylinder [42] with a height one-third of its diameter. The flat top forms the inhabited world, which is surrounded by a circular oceanic mass. Zühmer, T. H. (19 October 2016). "Roman Mosaic Depicting Anaximander with Sundial". Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. New York University.Hahn, Robert (2001). Anaximander and the Architects. The Contribution of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-4794-9. Aristotle puts things in his own way regardless of historical considerations, and it is difficult to see that it is more of an anachronism to call the Boundless " intermediate between the elements " than to say that it is " distinct from the elements." Indeed, if once we introduce the elements at all, the former description is the more adequate of the two. At any rate, if we refuse to understand these passages as referring to Anaximander, we shall have to say that Aristotle paid a great deal of attention to some one whose very name has been lost, and who not only agreed with some of Anaximander's views, but also used some of his most characteristic expressions. We may add that in one or two places Aristotle certainly seems to identify the " intermediate " with the something " distinct from " the elements." [31] The premise of this short book seemed unpromising: a physicist with no formal training in classics or history was apparently claiming that Anaximander, a Greek philosopher about whom almost nothing is known, is the spiritual father of modern science. But, in the event, it was much better than I'd expected. Rovelli is certainly not a historian, but he appears to know Latin and Greek, has read widely, and had enough interesting things to say that he kept me thoroughly entertained. I started this afternoon at Luton airport, and didn't put it down until I finished just now in Geneva.

The Refutation attributed to Hippolytus of Rome (I, 5), and the later 6th century Byzantine philosopher Simplicius of Cilicia, attribute to Anaximander the earliest use of the word apeiron ( ἄπειρον "infinite" or "limitless") to designate the original principle. He was the first philosopher to employ, in a philosophical context, the term archē ( ἀρχή), which until then had meant beginning or origin.A celebration of the scientific spirit of inquiry and the remarkable achievements of one man more than 2,500 years ago.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) Carlo Rovelli suggests that Anaximander took the idea of the Earth's shape as a floating disk from Thales, who had imagined the Earth floating in water, the "immense ocean from which everything is born and upon which the Earth floats." [43] Anaximander was then able to envisage the Earth at the centre of an infinite space, in which case it required no support as there was nowhere "down" to fall. In Rovelli's view, the shape – a cylinder or a sphere – is unimportant compared to the appreciation of a "finite body that floats free in space." [43] Whereas Thales thought the Earth floated in the great Ocean, Anaximander saw the Earth as floating in the infinite. Where Thales conceived of things falling down to Earth, and Earth being above the Ocean, Anaximander saw the Earth as the centre, and that things could fall from any direction. This has been thought a large conceptual advance in cosmology. [44] Dirk L. Couprie; Robert Hahn; Gerard Naddaf (1 February 2012). Anaximander in Context: New Studies in the Origins of Greek Philosophy. State University of New York Press. pp.1, 167. ISBN 978-0-7914-8778-5. OCLC 1018071798. A large part of the book is concerned with the question of what "science" is, and in what ways it differentiates itself from religion. Rovelli's central argument is that the distinguishing mark of science is that it is always willing to question established authority. This, above all, is why he wants to argue that Anaximander should be considered the founder of the scientific tradition. Anaximander's teacher, according to later authors, was Thales of Miletus; but rather than simply accepting his master's ideas as holy writ and further developing them, Anaximander changed them in many important ways. Even if the story is just a myth - Rovelli is happy to admit that the facts are extremely uncertain - I think he has a good point. This way of reasoning about things is historically unusual. The philosophical/scientific tradition may not have started exactly here, but it began around this point in time, and, if nothing else, Anaximander is a nice way of symbolizing the break with what had gone before. According to Simplicius, Anaximander already speculated on the plurality of worlds, similar to atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and later philosopher Epicurus. These thinkers supposed that worlds appeared and disappeared for a while, and that some were born when others perished. They claimed that this movement was eternal, "for without movement, there can be no generation, no destruction". [54]