Anaximenes of Miletus

Anaximenes worked in Miletus around 585–525 BC, likely taught by Anaximander, closing out the city's run as the birthplace of Western philosophy. Where his predecessors hunted for the universe's basic element, he landed on air—the arche from which all matter springs. His system was elegant: condensation turns air into wind, cloud, water, earth, stone; rarefaction thins it toward fire. He pictured a flat Earth floating on air, the Sun a disk circling overhead, hidden at night by distant peaks. None of his writings survived. Later thinkers—Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Diogenes—carried his ideas forwa…