Biography of Anaximander | Philosopher and geometrician.

(Miletus, today disappeared, today Turkey, 610 BC - ID, 545 BC) Philosopher and geometrician Greek astronomer. Disciple of such of Mileto, Anaximander was a member of the school of Miletus, and happened to such in the same direction. Apparently, he was also an active citizen of Miletus, and led an expedition to Apolonia (Black Sea). As a politician he held important positions and was entrusted the Mission of limiting the birth rate in Apolonia, one of the many colonies which had to solve the problem of overpopulation of the Ionian cities. Their fellow citizens erected him, in recognition of its political merits, a statue that has recently been discovered in excavations in Miletus.
Anaximander was devoted to multiple investigations. Making the first map of the Earth, elaborated with maps and news of Greek merchants, which would be later perfected by Hecataeus and which Herodotus is served has been attached to his name. Anaximander imagined the Earth as a stationary cylinder, against the general opinion that considered it crushed. Other works, such as the fixing of the equinoxes and the solstices and the calculation of distances and sizes of the stars as well as the elaboration of a clock of Sun and a celestial sphere, among other contributions is also attributed to.

Anaximander of Miletus
No less amazing are the speculations of Anaximander about the origin of human beings and the man. All come from the damp phenomenon (the Earth initially was liquid, and by the process of dissociation, the wet resulted in living things). The man was first ancestors to fish and other primitive animals. Rightly, it could therefore be considered as the first cosmologist and the predecessor of the theory of evolution.
Anaximander was also the first Greek thinker who put his philosophical thoughts in prose. His treatise on nature must have been one of the more notable attempts of systematization of the real prior to Aristotle; only a fragment has come to us, but some news of Aristotle and Simplicio allow to reconstruct, at least partly, the doctrine of the author.
In his philosophy, Anaximander coincides with such of Mileto in defending that there is a single basic principle (arche or Arché) as a generator of all things, that Anaximander called apeiron (the indefinite and indeterminate): indeterminate, unlimited and indefinite, substance that is eternal. Only the apeiron is incorruptible and imperishable. All other things are derived from it and are subject to birth and disappearance, by force of present them opposites: hot and cold, moist and dry, etc.
In its attempt to first determine the beginning (Arche), Anaximander follows milesios philosophers remaining constant, but is necessary to emphasize that rather than finding this principle in a finite nature (water, according to such), Anaximander sees it in something ( apeiron) that it is not perceived by the experience, but it has run as a permanent and significant cause of events of the empirical world; something indefinable in space and time which is cause and principle of defined and perishable things, and which are intended to be dissolved. The novelty of Anaximander, whose doctrine, however, many details remain dark, consists of having sought the infinite principle of finite things out of materials that are the subject of our experience.
Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas
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