Essay Database

Anaximander was a Greek philosopher of Miletus, born 611 BCE., and hence a younger contemporary of Thales and Pherecydes. He lived at the court of Polycrates of Samos, and died 547. He wrote a prose work in the Ionic dialect of which on fragment survives. Anaximander thought it unnecessary to fix upon air, water, or fire as the original and primary form of body. He preferred to represent it simply as a boundless something from which all …

…observation of certain sharks or dogfish, and evidently regarded them as an intermediary between fishes and land animals. His proof that man must have been descended from an animal of another species has a curiously modern ring. The young of the human species require a prolonged period of nursing, while those of other species soon find their food for themselves. If, then, man had always been as he is now he could never have survived.