Robert Hahn

Technology and Anaximander’s Cosmical Imagination

How shall we account for the origins of western philosophy, a tradition, following Aristotle, commonly traced back to the Milesian phusiologoi, or “nature-accounters,” like Thales and Anaximander? The field has been ripe with hypotheses. Aristotle offered a strictly economic hypothesis when he claimed that it was the availability of leisure, made possible by the wealth of economic surplus, that proved sufficient to account for the development of speculative thinking.1 Historians of science, like Sarton, advanced what might be called the intermingling of beliefs hypothesis, that the sharing of different ideologies in the interactions with different peoples on the west coast of Asia Minor led to a toleration for differing points of view and consequently an openness in thought for one’s own traditional beliefs.2 The literacy hypothesis, advanced by Goody and Watt, claimed that written records provided a sufficient condition to account for the distinct kind of critical evaluation characteristic of Greek philosophy.3 And others, like Farrington, argued on behalf of technology, that technological mastery is a sufficient condition for the development of the critical inquiry that characterizes the emergence of early Greek philosophy.4