Arche and Apeiron in Early Presocratic Philosophy :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Arche and Apeiron in Early pre-Socratic PhilosophyMetaphysical speculation began, long before it was so named, among the presocratic Greeks as an enquiry into cosmology and first dominions from two utterly disparate perspectives. The first of these, propounded by Herakleitos, noted the incessant flux (panta rhei) which characterises phenomena the second, advanced by his contemporary Parmenides, taught the doctrine of a single immutable substance. These rivalling perspectives endure to this twenty-four hours they announce one of the basic themes on which metaphysics since then has strung up an immense set of variations. Behind both stands the concept of arche, a line introduced into philosophic discourse by Anaximandros, rendered into English via Latin as principle and bearing the meaning of the first-begotten or underlying substance of all things. historically this might be called the first brick to leave the kiln in which the metaphysical firing off was burning. Moreover, wher e Thales teachings were apparently still subject to aural dispersion, Anaximandros, not content with the volume of mtabooh, becomes the first philosopher among the still relatively small band of logographoi to publish his theories in a formal text. His book at once set out to encompass what was known and to be known and thereby furnished a role model (presumably peri physeos) for a dozen generations to come, carrying echoes down as removed as the Romans (De rerum natura). It gave a comprehensive depiction of cosmogony and cosmology, astronomy and geography, meteorology and biology and down to a phylogeny of the human species. For Anaximandros, Barnes writes 19, Nature embraces both object of experience and every subject of rational enquiry buy food the productions of human contrivance. Meaning of Apeiron His own contribution to the more stringently philosophic debate on archaeai was the startling concept of the apeiron, which leaps out of the pages of Greek philosophical syst em like a spiky porcupine, never formally groomed as a legitimate occupant of place in a philosophical agenda dominated from the beginning by principles of rationality and intelligibility. We may hypothetical it to have emerged from debate on candidates for the Urstoff or primeval substance and it is maybe permissible to suppose lively exchanges on the virtues and demerits of sundry elements, culminating in a shock of recognition by Anaximandros that none of these substances, being determinate, qualified and therefore failed to satisfy empirical as well as theoretical criteria. The apeiron, ab initio perhaps merely a device to evade commitment to unreasonable propositions, proved itself in the long run a truly metaphysical conception with ramifications that have resisted erosion by time.