It adopted apeiron as the origin of all things, because it is completely indefinite. Greek philosophy entered a high level of abstraction. The word nomos (law) may originally have meant natural law and used later to mean man-made law. The Greeks believed that the universal principles could also be applied to human societies. This language was more suitable for a society which could see gods everywhere therefore the first glimmerings of laws of nature were themselves derived from divine laws. Searching for some universal principle, Anaximander retained the traditional religious assumption that there was a cosmic order and tried to explain it rationally, using the old mythical language which ascribed divine control on various spheres of reality. His ideas were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition and by his teacher Thales (7th to 6th century BC). He believed that infinite worlds are generated from apeiron and then they are destroyed there again. Everything is generated from apeiron and then it is destroyed by going back to apeiron, according to necessity. Apeiron generated the opposites (hot–cold, wet–dry, etc.) which acted on the creation of the world ( cf. From the few existing fragments, we learn that he believed the beginning or ultimate reality ( arche) is eternal and infinite, or boundless ( apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything we can perceive is derived. The apeiron is central to the cosmological theory created by Anaximander, a 6th-century BC pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose work is mostly lost. For other uses, see Apeiron (disambiguation).Īpeiron ( / ə ˈ p aɪ ˌ r ɒ n/ ἄπειρον) is a Greek word meaning '(that which is) unlimited,' 'boundless', 'infinite', or 'indefinite' from ἀ- a-, 'without' and πεῖραρ peirar, 'end, limit', 'boundary', the Ionic Greek form of πέρας peras, 'end, limit, boundary'.

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