The indefiniteness is spatial in early usages as in Homer (indefinite sea). In his opinion the origin should be indefinite and indeterminate. Hesiod made an abstraction, because his original chaos is a void, something completely indefinite. In the Hindu cosmogony which is similar to the Vedic ( Hiranyagarbha) the initial state of the universe was an absolute darkness. The Babylonian cosmology Enuma Elish describes the earliest stage of the universe as one of watery chaos and something similar is described in Genesis. The only existing thing prior to creation was the water abyss. In the creation stories of Near East the primordial world is described formless and empty. Pherecydes of Syros (6th century BC) probably called the water also Chaos and this is not placed at the very beginning. One can name it also abyss (having no bottom).Īlternately, Greek philosopher Thales believed that the origin or first principle was water.

Chaos is described as a gap either between Tartarus and the earth's surface (Miller's interpretation) or between earth's surface and the sky (Cornford's interpretation).

In the mythical Greek cosmogony of Hesiod (8th to 7th century BC) the first primordial god is Chaos, which is a void or gap. This shift in thought is correlated with the new political conditions in the Greek city states during the 6th century BC. This is a further transition from the previous existing mythical way of thought to the newer rational way of thought which is the main characteristic of the archaic period (8th to 6th century BC). 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.

5 Influence on Greek and Western thought.

Unbound synonym