more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
Air in itself seems to me to be God and to reach everywhere and to arrange everything and to be in everything.
Gist of Idea
Air is divine, because it is in and around everything, and arranges everything
Source
Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B05), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 152.22-
Book Ref
'Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers', ed/tr. Freeman,Kathleen [Harvard 1957], p.88
A Reaction
So water and fire and air have been offered as the ultimate explanans, though no one seems to offer earth, which is too grubby and miserable (and was denied a Form by Plato). 'Air is God' could ground a nice modern religious sect.
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 22745 | Pherecydes said the first principle and element is earth [Pherecydes, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| 1497 | For Anaximenes nature is air, which takes different forms by rarefaction and condensation [Anaximenes, by Simplicius] |
| 614 | Heraclitus said sometimes everything becomes fire [Heraclitus, by Aristotle] |
| 550 | Anaxagoras said that the number of principles was infinite [Anaxagoras, by Aristotle] |
| 21383 | The ultimate constituents of reality are the homoeomeries [Anaxagoras, by Vlastos] |
| 484 | Everything is ultimately a variation of one underlying thing [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| 488 | Air is divine, because it is in and around everything, and arranges everything [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| 13224 | There couldn't be just one element, which was both water and air at the same time [Aristotle] |
| 17177 | In nature there is just one infinite substance [Spinoza] |
| 6421 | Newton's four fundamentals are: space, time, matter and force [Newton, by Russell] |