Anaximander
About 530 AD the Neoplatonist Simplicius wrote an extensive commentary on Aristotle's Physics. In it he reproduced the fragment, thus preserving it for the western world. He copied it from Theophrastus. From the time pronounced his saying--we do not know where or when or to whom--to the moment Simplicius jotted it down in his commentary more than a millennium elapsed. Between the time of Simplicius' jotting and the present moment lies another millennium-and-a-half.
Can the fragment, from a historical and chronological distance of two thousand five hundred years, still say something to us? (Heidegger 16)
, it is widely believed, was responsible for constructing one of philosophy's ...
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us of his theories and thought processes. However, the fragment that remains is vast in scope and of incredible magnitude. This remaining utterance, which deals with the essence and substance of being, the origin of life, and life's cycle to death, all but forces one to believe that, with 's life, there was a marked turn in the course of human existence. A distinction was made that separated humans, most remarkably, from the other inhabitants of Earth. The fragment marked the end of exclusively introvertial human thought. This is to say that man was able to cease his focus on simple survival, and begin wondering about the universe, about how things come into being and the grand cycle of life and man's place in that cycle. Of all the people who have pondered these questions,
's answers are surely among the most boundless, and therefore the most thought provoking themselves. His is a theory of everything great from something vast but simple, of a great unlimited infinite and the ...
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terms -- justice, penalty, and retribution -- seem to show that he was also concerned with natural laws; he is trying to tell why things flower and fall. It seems to this writer as though Anaximander is attempting, in a way new to humans at the time the fragment was written, to apply the strict rules of sciences to natural systems. He is denying any and all demarcation between the lines of thought and disciplines! It is most definitely fascinating that the man could think so broadly on one topic, and show the continuity among all aspects of human life and knowledge. Let us now look upon the mention of time in the fragment. Anaximander here is very poetic; personifying time, ...
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"Anaximander." Essayworld.com. March 13, 2004. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Anaximander/4497.
"Anaximander." Essayworld.com. March 13, 2004. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Anaximander/4497.
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