Anaximander

This article is about the Pre-Socratic philosopher. For other uses, see Anaximander (disambiguation).

Anaximander (fl. early 6th c. BC) was a Greek philosopher who held that the primary principal or cause of the world consisted of a non-material, boundless entity which underlay the world and its various changes. He wrote the first surviving fragments of Western philosophy and is also known for his accomplishments, both of a practical nature and in the realm of philosophical speculation, in what we would today call the fields of geography, biology, and astronomy.

Bibliography

Web links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Anaximander

Print literature

• Barnes, J., Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1987)
• Copleston, F.C., History of Philosophy, Vol 1: Greece and Rome (Part 1 is a section on Pre-Socratic Philosophers)
• Kahn, C.H., Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York, 1960)
• Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E., and Schofield, M., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1990)