Fragments
The origin of all things cannot be any one ordinary substance like water, since that substance would already need explaining, but must be an indefinite, boundless principle (the apeiron) from which opposites separate out and to which they eventually return.
- the apeiron as boundless first principle
- opposites separating from and returning to the source
- earth suspended without support
- early speculation on the origin of life
- earliest surviving philosophical prose fragment
Anaximander of Miletus, a younger associate of Thales known through later doxography including one genuine surviving fragment quoted by Simplicius, proposed the apeiron, an unbounded, indefinite substance, as the origin of all things, reasoning that any definite substance like water could not itself explain the balance of opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) that structure the world. He is also credited with early cosmological and biological speculation, including an account of the earth as suspended freely in space without support and an early evolutionary theory that humans first arose from fish-like creatures. His surviving fragment, describing things paying penalty to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time, is among the earliest philosophical prose in Greek.
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