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Anaximenes

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Philosopher and scientist; worked c. *545 BC*

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Not much is known about the life of Anaximenes, and no known image of
him exists. It is generally assumed that he lived and taught in Miletus,
which was the centre of intellectual development during his time.

Like his contemporary Thales, Anaximenes believed that all things in
nature are based on a single substance. Thales thought it is water;
Anaximenes taught that it is /aer/ in its various forms: When "most
evenly distributed," /aer/ is the common, invisible air of the
atmosphere. By condensation it becomes visible, first as mist or cloud,
then as water, and finally as solid matter such as earth or stones. If
further rarefied, it turns to fire.

Only a single fragment of his works survives, but he is quoted or
discussed in the works of later philosopher-scientists, which allows a
reasonable assessment of his ideas. The fragment reads:

"Air is the nearest to an immaterial thing; for since we are generated
in the flow of air, it is necessary that it should be infinite and
abundant, because it is never exhausted."

Anaximenes stressed that air is in constant motion and that this
everlasting motion is the cause of all change. He linked changes between
the various phases of matter (solid, fluid and gaseous) to changes of
temperature:

"According to Anaximenes, the early philosopher, we should not neglect
either cold or heat in being but should regard them as common
experiences of matter which are incident to its changes. He says that
the compressed and the condensed state of matter is cold, while the
rarefied and relaxed (a word he himself uses) state of it is heat.
Whence he says it is not strange that men breathe hot and cold out of
the mouth; for the breath is cooled as it is compressed and condensed by
the lips, but when the mouth is relaxed, it comes out warm by reason of
its rarefaction." (Plut. Prim. Frig. vii. 3, p. 947.)

There is some indication that Anaximenes gave /aer/ divine qualities and
that he equated /aer/ that fills the cosmos with God and /aer/ inside
the human body as the human soul:

"Afterwards Anaximenes said that air is god, [and that it arose] and
that it is boundless and infinite and always in motion; just as though
air without any form could be god, when it is very necessary that god
should be not only of some form, but of the most beautiful form; or as
though everything which comes into being were not thereby subject to
death." (Cic. de Nat, Deor. i. 10; Dox. 531. )

"Anaximenes of Miletos, son of Eurystratos, declared that air is the
first principle of things, for from this all things arise and into this
they are all resolved again. As our soul which is air, he says, holds us
together, so wind [i.e. breath] and air encompass the whole world."
(Aet. i. 3; Dox. 278.)

Anaximenes was an outstanding observer of natural phenomena and tried to
find natural processes as their explanation. He explained the phenomenon
of rainbows sometimes seen in moonlight and the phosphorescence produced
by an oar moving through water as the effect of compacted air acting on
the Sun's rays. It is this radical break with the old view of the world
(which would have seen a goddess or a fairy in the rainbow) that makes
Anaximenes, Anaximander and Thales the founders of modern science.

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Reference

The translations of the fragment and texts about Anaximenes are taken from

Arthur Fairbanks, ed. and trans. (1898) Anaximenes, Fragments and
Commentary, in: /The First Philosophers of Greece/, London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trubner, 17-22.
(quoted from http://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/anaximen.htm)

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