---
date: '2023-09-09'
description: presocratic philosophers including anaximander's aperion, parmenides on being, empedocles' elements, and democritus's atomism with primary and secondary qualities.
id: Presocratics
modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:42 GMT-04:00
tags:
  - philos1aa3
  - philosophy
title: Presocratics philosophers
created: '2023-09-09'
published: '2023-09-09'
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---
### Anaximander

Anaximander’s first principle is the _apeiron_, the boundless or indefinite. The hot and cold separate from it in the formation of a world. Calling it the material cause uses Aristotle’s later vocabulary; we know much of this account through later reports.

Those reports describe a cylindrical earth with depth one-third of its breadth, heavenly wheels of fire enclosed in air, and early animals arising in moisture. Human beings develop inside fish-like creatures until they can survive independently. These are ancient cosmological proposals. The fish account addresses a specific problem: human infants need prolonged care, so the first humans could not have survived unaided. [Testimonia in Fairbanks, especially Hippolytus I.6 and pseudo-Plutarch, _Stromateis_ 2](https://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/anaximan.html).

### Xenophanes

1.

---

#### Parmenides

In the poem’s argument, what-is cannot arise from what-is-not: non-being supplies nothing from which something could come. Fragment B8 develops this constraint into an account of what-is as ungenerated, imperishable, continuous and unmoving. Its completeness rules out becoming and perishing in the account of truth.

The poem also gives a cosmology of mortal opinion. How that cosmology relates to the argument is an interpretive problem. [Poem, especially DK B2 and B8, translated by Burnet](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Early_Greek_Philosophy/Parmenides_of_Elea).

## Materialism

atheist?

Explaining bodies through material constituents leaves a further question about gods and souls. Empedocles names his roots with divine names; Democritus gives the soul an atomic constitution. A material explanation alone does not settle the question.

### Empedocles

Four enduring roots: earth, air, fire and water. Love brings them together; Strife separates them. The things we encounter differ through their mixtures and proportions. Birth and death are names for the mixing and separation of constituents that persist. This lets Empedocles explain changing things without making the roots themselves arise from nothing or disappear into nothing. [Fragments B6, B8, B12 and B17, translated by Burnet](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Early_Greek_Philosophy/Empedokles_of_Akragas).

### Democritus

Atoms and void. The atoms are indivisible bodies; the void allows them to move and remain distinct. Bodies form when atoms join and break up when they separate. Their different shapes, arrangements and orientations account for differences among compounds. The atoms persist through these changes. [Aristotle’s report, _On Generation and Corruption_ I.1–2 and I.8](https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/gener_corr.1.i.html).

Aristotle reports that Democritus identifies soul with fine spherical atoms, whose mobility explains how living bodies move. The claim concerns a particular atomic constitution, rather than an identity between soul and every kind of body. [_On the Soul_ I.2, 403b31–404a16](https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.1.i.html).

The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is a later way to frame his account. Shape and size belong to atoms; sweetness, heat and colour depend on their effects in perception. Fragment B9 contrasts these perceived qualities with atoms and void. The atoms’ persistence does not establish the immortality of a compound organism. [Democritus B9 and the surviving reports](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democritus/).