Thales and Anaximander
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One man said everything is secretly water. His student said no — the source of everything cannot be any one thing at all. That disagreement is philosophy learning to argue.
Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 BCE) proposed that the archē is water. All things, he held, come from water and are somehow sustained by it. We have none of his own words; we know his view through Aristotle, who reports it in Metaphysics A.3 (983b).
A saying attributed to Thales — “all things are full of gods” (Aristotle, De Anima 411a) — sounds like a step back toward myth. It is better read as hylozoism: the view that matter itself is alive, self-moving, ensouled. The “divine” here is a principle of motion inside nature, not a person on a throne.
Thales was also a working scientist and engineer. Tradition credits him with predicting a solar eclipse — the one that stopped a battle between the Medes and Lydians, dated by modern astronomy to 28 May 585 BCE. He is said to have brought Egyptian land-measurement to Greece as the beginnings of deductive geometry, and to have measured a pyramid’s height from its shadow.
Thales' eclipse prediction and olive-press coup were both meant to illustrate that…
Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610–546 BCE), Thales’ younger associate, made a radical objection. The archē, he argued, cannot be water — or any specific, familiar substance. It must be the apeiron (apeiron = the boundless, unlimited, indefinite).
Anaximander is also the first true cosmologist we know of. He held the Earth to be a free-floating cylinder, held in place by nothing because it is equidistant from everything and so has no reason to move in any direction — a startling early argument from symmetry. He is credited with drawing the first map of the world and a map of the heavens, and with writing the first Greek prose treatise, On Nature.
His one surviving sentence — the oldest recorded fragment of Western philosophy — describes a lawlike cosmic balance. Things arise from the boundless, and out of it come the opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) that make up the world; then, in his words, they pay to one another “the penalty and recompense for their injustice according to the ordering of time.”
Why does Anaximander reject any specific substance (like water) as the archē?
Anaximander even offered a naturalistic zoogony — an account of how life arose without divine craftsmanship. The first living things, he said, came to be in moisture, enclosed in prickly husks; as they matured they moved onto drier land. Humans, being helpless as infants for so long, could not have survived if they had always been as they are — so we must originally have been born from and nurtured inside fish-like creatures, emerging only once we could fend for ourselves.