Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

In fact, his act of faith in this factual knowledge was so extreme that he preferred to give up a well-established tenet of common sense: the notion of simultaneity.

Observations and assumptions can exist only within an already largely structured system of thinking, one that is a priori riddled with errors.

Anaximander’s greatness lies in the fact that on the basis of so little, in order to better account for his observations, he redesigns the universe.

In the history of science, perhaps the only other example of a conceptual revolution comparable in greatness to Anaximander’s is the Copernican revolution, opened by the publication of Copernicus’s treatise in 1543.[*] Like Anaximander, Copernicus rethinks the map of the cosmos.