What ideas do Thales and Anaximander have in common? Where do they disagree? What, do you suppose, accounts for their disagreement?
Answers
The earliest Greek philosophers all came from one small area on the Ionic coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes lived in the prosperous trading port of Miletus, less than 50 kilometres from Heraclitus' city, Ephesus.
These philosophers all tried to answer the central question: what was the underlying "stuff" of the universe. All four believed it was a material substance rather than mental or spiritual.
As Aristotle wrote:
Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the from of matter were the only principles of things. For they say that the element and first principle of the things that exist is that from which they all are and from which they first come into being and into which they are finally destroyed, its substance remaining and its properties changing. [Metaphysics 983]
As to the precise character of the primary substance, the four Ionians came up with four different answers. For Thales it was water. For Anaximenes it was air. For Heraclitus it was fire. For Anaximander it was none of the familiar elements, but an indefinable "apeiron" or infinite underlying all four, not unlike the Tao.