Anaximenes
Everything is air, thickening and thinning. The first attempt to explain change by a single measurable process.
The third of the Milesians took a step his teacher Anaximander would have called a retreat, and yet it was an advance. Anaximenes returned to a definite substance, air, but added the mechanism the others lacked. Air rarefies into fire and condenses into wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. One stuff, one process, the whole world explained by how tightly it is packed. Breath is the soul, and as breath holds a person together, air holds the cosmos together. It is the first clear case of explaining quality by quantity, the seed of every physics that followed.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so breath and air encompass the whole world.”
“Air differs in rarity and density: rarefied it becomes fire; condensed, wind, then cloud, then water, then earth, then stone.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Miletus
Born in Miletus, the third of the great Milesian thinkers and a student of Anaximander.
Third of the Milesian line
Studied with Anaximander in Miletus, inheriting the school's question: what is the one stuff beneath all things? He answered air, whose thinning and thickening makes fire, wind, water, and stone. With him the first school of philosophy reached its final form.
Air as the First Principle
Argued that one substance, air, becomes all things by condensing and thinning, the first attempt to explain quality through a measurable process.
Influence
Influenced by
- Anaximander
Anaximenes was the pupil of Anaximander and the third of the Milesian thinkers.
Influenced
- Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras inherited the Milesian project of explaining the whole cosmos from a single material starting point.
