So it is with Anaximander: Thales was the first philosopher, and many textbooks begin with his name. But less often do philosophy classes dwell on the work of his successor.
Anaximander began where Thales left off: the quest for a grand unified theory, to borrow a phrase from modern physics, or, in older phrasing, cosmology. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:
Leaping beyond the brilliant yet simple notion that all things are made of the same stuff, Anaximander showed how deep an objective analysis of the real world must penetrate. He made four distinct and significant contributions to human understanding:1. He realized that neither water nor, indeed, any such ordinary material could be the fundamental form of matter. He saw the basic stuff as a more sophisticated though somewhat obscure boundless something. This theory was to serve science well for twenty-five centuries.
2. He extended the concept of law from human society to the physical world - a clean break with the older view of a capricious, anarchic nature.
3. He invented the use of models to make complex natural phenomena easier to understand.
4. He deduced, in a rudimentary way, that the earth had changed over the ages.
Quite a list of intellectual accomplishments! His understanding of matter is a direct ancestor of both modern chemistry and modern atomic physics. His understanding of the laws of nature - which amounts to saying that the universe is rationally constructed using algebra and geometry - is the necessary precondition for the development of chemistry and physics. The skill of modeling, which follows from the fact that the universe is assembled using the laws of algebra, is the basis for the understanding of natural processes: they can be mathematically modeled, which allows us to predict where the planet Neptune will be at this time next year, or describe how continental drift has slowed from miles to per to inches per year. A fossil hunter himself, Anaximander reasoned that even the highest mountains must have at one time been covered by water, a massive world-wide flood.
Agreeing with Thales that there must be one common principle underlying all matter, he disagreed with Thales on what it was. Rejecting the first philosopher’s hypothesis of water, Anaximander noted that this proto-material must be able to manifest itself in nearly endless qualities and properties we see in different objects:
If everything real is a matter with definite qualities, it must be possible for this matter to be hot in some cases, cold in others, sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Anaximander thought of qualities as always being contrary pairs. If one identifies matter with one quality of such a pair, as in Thales’ “all things are water,” how can one explain the existence of the contrary quality? If “to be is to be material,” and “matter is water,” then it would seem to follow that “to be is to be moist.” All right: what happens when things become dry? If the matter they are made of its always wet, drying would destroy the matter of things: they would become immaterial and cease to be. In the same way, matter cannot be identified with any one quality to the exclusion of its opposite. From this, the concept of matter as the boundless, a neutral and indeterminate something, follows. From this reservoir, the opposite qualities “separate out”: from the boundless all specific things arise, and to it they return when they cease to be.
Although we don’t think of neutrons, protons, and electrons as “boundless”, they are in some sense “neutral” and, until they are placed into atoms and molecules, indeterminate. Anaximander was realizing that, in order to express all possible qualities and properties, the basic building blocks of matter would have none of those qualities or properties, and would be capable of being configured in many, perhaps infinitely many, different patterns to yield the different properties we experience in actual bits of matter.
