Abstract

ROSSETTI, Livio. Anaximander’s Treatise Peri Physeōs: A New Kind of Summa.Translated byGiuditta Cavalletti. Nova tellus [online]. 2015, vol.32, n.2, pp.57-73. ISSN 0185-3058.

My first claim is that we should not be prisoners of the unjustified tradition suggesting to identify the doctrines of Anaximander with his theory of Apeiron, or this theory plus his famous dikēn didonai (frg. 1 DK). His teachings go well beyond and are reasonably well known. Second: all these teachings try to account for an impressively vast spectrum of questions, esp. about earth, its dimensions, its form, its place in the space, and also its remote past. Given the intellectual discipline they show, it is hardly conceivable that topics where dealt with in a great disorder -much more likely that an inchoative order presided over the presentation of so many doctrines. Third, whichever the level reached, his Peri physeōs had the uncomparable merit of having opened the avenue to treatises meant to serve as an update collection of (supposedly) reliable pieces of information -to begin with, about our physical world and living organisms. Therefore, it would be somehow inaccurate to claim that the offer of scholarly treatises began with Aristotle.

Keywords : Greek Philosophy; Anaximander; Peri Physeōs; Summa.

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