Philosophy of Nature by Feyerabend Paul K.;

Author:Feyerabend, Paul K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

The familiar are the mechanical things that we know from our immediate environment but that are also pervaded by divine power and therefore causally active.

5.1. Hesiod and Anaximander: Changing Worldviews

[23] Anaximander’s own worldview is composed of elements of Thales’ list of explanations together with his own knowledge and principles borrowed from Hesiod.58 Just as in Thales, the Earth emerges because the water above it disappears. In contrast to Thales’ worldview, the water disappears because the sun makes it evaporate (Aristotle, Meteorology 353b6ff.), and not because the Earth rises above it. We may assume that this part of the story originated in the course of criticism of Anaximander’s much-traveled fellow denizen; Anaximander appears to have been far more settled than Thales. Another contrast to Thales’ worldview is the fact that explanations are only a small component not of a list but of a comprehensive development of the world and the events in it, striving to make comprehensible numerous wonders as well as everyday events by drawing on similar and coordinated basic principles. The starting point of this development, the apeiron, shares characteristics with Chaos in Hesiod; it is indefinite and unlimited, but unlike in Hesiod it is “ungenerated, immortal, and indestructible” (Aristotle, Physics 203b18-20). In this respect Anaximander had a forerunner in Pherecydes (DK 7B1), a contemporary of Thales, although the notion of the eternality of prime powers was widespread in the oriental region. The Babylonian creation myth, for example, assumed three prime powers: Apsu, Tîamat, and Mummu (personalized sweet water, equally personalized saltwater, and the mist above both).

In the myth the epithets “immortal and indestructible” are attached to the gods, and they still exhibit the epic meter as well. This may be because Anaximander regarded the gods as symbolic representations of natural phenomena, or it could be a continuation of the assumption that all basic principles of nature are divine principles. The symbolic view would later become very popular in Greece. It is hard to say whether Anaximander (and Pherecydes) held this view. It tended to be more popular with the “rationalists,” but Thales (DK 11A22, 22a, 23), by contrast, held that divinity is added to the phenomena of nature. And Newton’s example shows that rationalists were very well inclined to assume a nature governed by divine laws and to defend this view with empirical-rational arguments. Thus it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that for Anaximander, too, divinity was the cause of motion and creative power, especially in light of the quote that some authors consider as a literal repetition and according to which the apeiron is “encompassing and directing all things” (DK 12A15): the apeiron, despite being indefinite and unlimited just like Hesiod’s Chaos, is full of possibilities and powers and responsible for the orderly progression of events; it is “indefinite” only in comparison with the qualities and things that emerge from it.

In the only direct quotation, the orderly progression of events is represented according to the image of a community governed by the rule of law: “Whence things

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.