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 forward, but modern accounts tend to rank him below Thales and Anaximander, the names that opened the door.