Abstract:

We can say that Anaximander is the first one who philosophize in the sense that we know, who seems to have tried to develop a system and put them on paper, if we would ignore the few suspicious sentences which Thales left behind. In this context, every study on Anaximander is an attempt to understand the early Greek philosophy. All other Presocratic philosophers think of the problem that he framed, correct or deny it, and it is the path to a systematic philosophy with which begins Plato and Aristotle. In this work, we have studied Anaximander's understanding of Being, i.e., metaphysics, if we could call it as metaphysics. Anaximander, in response to the question of how the many arise from the One, which is the basic problem of early Greek philosophy, asserted that the many, in the begining, is contained by One but it had not yet seperated. In this sense, it can be said that ἄπειρον, as Oneness which can engender the Many, is the ἀρχὴwhich is boundless in space and time. Of course this is not a potential-actual situation in the Aristotelian sense. First of all it was not a distinction that Anaximander could benefit linguistically. Secondly, the opponents in ἄπειρονdo not metamorphose, they merely separate physically. In the metaphysics of Anaximander this is a necessary consequence of the movement which is thought immanent to Being. In this context, the metaphysics of Anaximandros is basically an effort to reveal how the order in nature begins, in a way that is not contradiction with nature itself. In this effort there is inevitably speculation as much as observation. As a result, what we can understand from a few fragments that have arrived today is that Anaximander carries the purpose of bringing an explanation on nature on which based reason and observation, although it is not entirely independent of the thought atmosphere of the sixth century.

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