{"_index":"sire","_id":"598","_score":null,"_source":{"id":598,"authors_free":[{"id":849,"entry_id":598,"agent_type":null,"is_normalised":null,"person_id":82,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Engmann, Joyce","free_first_name":"Joyce","free_last_name":"Engmann","norm_person":{"id":82,"first_name":"Joyce","last_name":"Engmann","full_name":"Engmann, Joyce","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Cosmic Justice in Anaximander ","main_title":{"title":"Cosmic Justice in Anaximander "},"abstract":"In what may be our oldest surviving fragment of Greek literary prose, Anaximander refers to the redress of injustice among parties alternately injured and injuring. Since the parties in question are impersonal entities, and the redress is a cosmic process, Simplicius, probably repeating a remark of Theophrastus, comments on Anaximander's mode of expression as \"rather poetical.\" What, in plain terms, was the meaning of the metaphor? In this paper, I wish to look again at what Vlastos has described as the most controversial text in Presocratic philosophy.\r\n\r\nThe preceding clause in Simplicius indicates that the process of redress is one of perishing or passing away, phthora: not absolute phthora, but phthora \"into\" something. Two main views have been taken of this process. It has often been thought that that into which perishing took place was the infinite, and that that which perished was what Simplicius referred to as ta onta, existing things\u2014in effect, the world, or a world (the difference is immaterial for present purposes). Thus, the, or a, world perished as a totality into the infinite.\r\n\r\nThe view which prevails today is that both that into which perishing takes place and that which perishes are the opposites or elements, which Simplicius refers to as ta stoicheia. I believe there are difficulties in this view which have not been fully recognised.\r\n\r\nIn the reports of Anaximander in our sources, there are several pointers to a third possibility, which is, in a sense, an amalgam of the two just mentioned: that into which perishing takes place is the infinite, as on the first view, while, as on the second view, the process of perishing is not a sudden but an ongoing process, and, again, that which perishes is the opposites or elements. The hypothesis of ongoing material interaction between the world and the infinite at least seems to merit more consideration than it has received.\r\n\r\nIt has been mooted in one line and rejected in two by Kirk; dismissed in a short footnote by Vlastos; and only taken seriously by Heidel, who, however, does not apply it to the interpretation of the fragment. I believe that it supplies the key to the understanding of the fragment, and shall argue that it provides a way of reconciling Simplicius' report on Anaximander with two supplementary categories of evidence, the value of which is often discounted: Simplicius' isolated statements about Anaximander elsewhere, and the parallel reports of Aetius and pseudo-Plutarch.\r\n\r\nI shall conclude by suggesting that equality did not play the role in Anaximander's conception of justice that is commonly thought, and that for him the natural world mirrored an aristocratic rather than a democratic society. [introduction p. 1-2]","btype":3,"date":"1991","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/4jIf0maBjgUseow","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":82,"full_name":"Engmann, Joyce","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":null,"article":{"id":598,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"Phronesis","volume":"36","issue":"1","pages":"1-25"}},"sort":["Cosmic Justice in Anaximander "]}