PRINCIPLE BEYOND THE SENSES: (METAPHYSICAL THEOLOGY)
PRINCIPLE BEYOND THE SENSES: (METAPHYSICAL THEOLOGY) ANAXIMANDER: Anaximander of Miletus left behind a book entitled ‘On Nature’, written in prose, a medium just beginning to come into fashion. 1. He thinks it is an error to identify the ultimate material of the universe with any of the elements we can see around us in the contemporary world, such as water or fire. 2. The fundamental principle of things, he said, must be boundless or undefined (apeiron). 3. He may or may not have thought that his principle extended for ever in space; what we do know is that he thought it had no beginning and no end in time and that it did not belong to any particular kind or class of things. PARMANIDES: Like Xenophanes, Parmanides was a poet: he wrote a philosophical poem in clumsy verse, of which we possess about 120 lines. He is the first philosopher whose writing has come down to u...