Thinkers

Anaximander

Ancient Greek · Europe · 610 to 546 BCE

Greek thinker from Miletus who said all things come from the boundless, and who drew an early map of the world.

What it is

Anaximander was a Greek thinker from Miletus, a city in Ionia on the coast of what is now Turkey, who lived from about 610 to about 546 BCE. He was a younger fellow citizen of Thales, often described as his student or associate, and he tried to explain the whole of nature, from the origin of things to the shape of the earth.

He is among the first people known to have written a work of philosophy in prose. Only a single fragment of it has survived, so almost everything we know about his ideas comes from later Greek writers who reported them.

The main ideas

• The boundless. He held that all things come from the apeiron, a word usually rendered as the boundless, the infinite or the unlimited. Exactly what he meant by it is argued over, and infinite and indefinite are two of the ways the word is put into English.
• An earth with nothing under it. He pictured the earth hanging free in the middle of the universe, with nothing holding it up. It stays in place, he is reported to have argued, because it is equally far from everything, so there is no reason for it to move one way rather than another.
• A drum-shaped earth. He thought the earth is a cylinder, shaped like the drum of a column and about three times as wide as it is tall, and that people live on the flat top.
• Order and repayment. The one fragment we have says that things give justice and recompense to one another for their injustice, following the order of time. Scholars read it in more than one way.
• Life from moisture. He thought the first living creatures came from moisture, and that humans arose from another kind of animal, such as fish, because a human child needs long care and could not have survived if it had always been as it is now.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone looking at the night sky and asking what holds the earth up. Instead of naming a god or a pillar, they ask what would make it fall in one direction rather than another, and find that being in the middle gives no reason to fall at all. This is an illustration of the kind of reasoning attributed to him, not an episode from his life.

Books and moments

• His book. A prose work on nature, now lost except for one fragment. It is often counted among the earliest philosophical writings.
• The map. He drew a map of the world, an early attempt to set the known lands on a single page.
• The gnomon. He is said to have introduced the gnomon, an upright pole whose shadow shows the time of day and the seasons, into Greece, and to have set one up at Sparta.

Questions and criticism

• What was the boundless? The word is translated in more than one way, and accounts do not settle which meaning he intended.
• How much do we really know? Because his book is lost, every account of his views passes through later writers, and some of his own reasoning has been rebuilt from their summaries. It is fair to ask how much of the picture is his.
• Argument or guess? His claims about the earth and about the origin of life were reasoned from nature, not from myth, but he had no means to test them. How far that counts as science is a question each reader can weigh.

Close neighbours

The page on Thales is the nearest, as the other great thinker of Miletus and the person he is linked with. The page on Anaximenes belongs beside it.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

• Anaximenes · He is named as the pupil and successor of Anaximander, and answered his claim that the source is without limit.

Influenced by

• Thales of Miletus · Anaximander is traditionally named as his pupil and successor in Miletus.

Other Ancient Greek thinkers

• Thales of Miletus · 624 to 546 BCE
• Anaximenes · 586 to 526 BCE
• Pythagoras · 570 to 495 BCE
• Xenophanes · 570 to 475 BCE
• Heraclitus · 535 to 475 BCE
• Parmenides · 515 to 450 BCE
• Anaxagoras · 500 to 428 BCE
• Empedocles · 494 to 434 BCE
• Zeno of Elea · 490 to 430 BCE
• Leucippus · 480 to 420 BCE

Sources we used

• Anaximander · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
• Anaximander · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026
• Anaximander · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026