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Rembrandt,

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer

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The above image from 1653 (for enlargement click here) gives at least part of one early modern artist’s interpretation of Aristotle interpreting Homer. But any statement about the opinions of the earliest Presocratic “philosophers” made by anyone after Aristotle’s own time must similarly be viewed as an interpretation of him interpreting those figures. That is to say, all of our information about their opinions (if not their practical achievements) ultimately derives either from statements he made by way of comparing them with his own opinions in his works Metaphysics, Physics, On the Heavens, and others, or from a now-lost work on their opinions by his student and successor as head of the Peripatetic school Theophrastus, whom we must assume was heavily influenced by his intellectually dominating mentor. Therefore any subsequent statement about them must perforce entail an interpretation of his interpretation. That circumstance, to be sure, has usually been downplayed, as if what Aristotle said about the Milesian school of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes was not interpretative in nature, but simply an account of the facts of what they held. Thus any tradition-based introductory discussion of the history of philosophy or of science assumes that the discipline indeed began as he said it did, with these figures offering various opinions on what material was the basic constituent of things, in the same way that scientists since the 18^th century have held the basic constituent to be molecules, atoms, protons and electrons, or quarks.

But this assumption is immediately seen to be wanting as soon as we realize a fact, long understood by philologists, that when Aristotle said the Milesians had said a given material was the “principle and element” of things, he used a technical term for “element” (stoicheion) that simply had not been available in their time, even though he may have been right about “principle” (in the sense of origin). That is to say, he interpreted whatever they had said was the relation of the chosen material to the world as being the relation of constituency. His interpretation may or may not have been close to the actual relation, but in any case it was an interpretation.

Moreover, there are some grounds to suspect that Aristotle’s interpretation of the Milesians was biased. We may grant that he was probably the most intelligent thinker to have existed up to his time (and more so than most of us after), but still he was human and therefore subject to bias. And it is easy to see where bias could creep in, because his discussion of earlier philosophers was by way of representing them as groping toward his own philosophy. That philosophy included saying that everything has a “material cause,” such as the bronze of a statue. So when for example he contemplated Thales saying that the fundamental principle of the world was in some sense water (for which we have zero testimony other than what Aristotle himself says), he might have simply neglected any aspect of the earlier theory that did not specify water as a material constituent of the world.

Indeed, one can perhaps convict Aristotle by negative example. Namely, he says of the slightly later thinker Heraclitus that he held fire to be the principle in the same sense that Thales held it to be water. Now we do have some of Heraclitus’s own words, transmitted by people who were independent of the Aristotelian tradition. What he said about fire was statements like “neither gods nor humans created this world order, the same for all; rather it always was, is, and will be ever-living fire, being kindled in measures and being extinguished in measures.” One can choose to interpret this oracular-sounding declaration as indicating that fire is the material constituent of things (as does Jonathan Barnes, to take a leading recent example), but most of us will think that it invokes a quasi-mystical notion of “living” fire which, to be sure, does partake of the realm of quantitative measurement. Surely something is being left out of the equation when we claim, with Aristotle, that to Heraclitus the relation of fire to the world was neither more nor less than that of bronze to a statue.

That opens up a wealth of possibilities, but historically, most scepticism of the traditional, neo-Aristotelian interpretation of the Milesians has taken the particular form of asking whether or not their advance beyond the myth-making of the earlier Homeric and Hesiodic poems was qualitative, as opposed to simply incremental. In other words, if Aristotle contemplated Homer as Rembrandt has it (and as he indeed did in his Poetics), perhaps he should not have made a hard and fast distinction between such activity and what he thought the Presocratics did.

Another issue for which Aristotle cannot be held responsible, but for which moderns have less excuse, is claiming that the Milesians were really the first to say what they said. Perhaps they were so within Greece, but it was only part of the ancient world. More or less concurrently with the rise of movements against colonialism in the mid-20^th century, scholars began to notice that ancient texts from places like India contained statements, both formally philosophical and not, that resembled those of early Greek thought insofar as it is attested. In taking this point into account the path of least resistance was to say that maybe the earliest Presocratics had significant historical precursors in the Orient, and Martin West in particular took this approach in a 1971 book. However, to me at least, the real issue is whether or not one should consider the Oriental material as intellectually comparable to the body of thought attested for the Milesians et al.

Thus in the 1980s I wrote two pieces on these issues:

* “Syntactical Ambiguity at Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1,” Indo-Iranian Journal 29 (1986), 97-102. This short article takes as its point of departure a claim by Charles Kahn in his 1979 book The Art and thought of Heraclitus, to the effect that Heraclitus used syntactical ambiguity as a means to enhance the import of his sayings. My paper argues that there is a comparable example in an ancient Sanskrit text that was composed in the general era of the early Presocratics.

* “Concerning Milesian ‘Science’ in the Context of Archaic Literature Generally.” This is a background essay for a paper I read at the annual meeting of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, in Hampton, VA, May, 1988. The essay, which you can read here, gives some details of how the attestations of the earliest Presocratics and of the Hesiodic poems, along with some texts from contemporary societies, exemplify a single genre that one might call “archaic thought.”

It is also of interest to examine how people writing on the Presocratics between Aristotle’s time and our own have treated these questions. Here I have written two works:

* “Hegel and the Milesian ‘Origin of Philosophy,’” Classical and Modern Literature 13 (1993), 241-56. This article observes that Hegel’s (subsequently influential) adoption of the neo-Aristotelian hermeneutic which makes the Milesians the “first philosophers” is predicated on two assumptions. First, in contradistinction to his predecessors in history of philosophy such as Tiedemann, who saw the earliest personified principles cited in Hesiod’s Theogony as structurally similar to the Presocratic idea of archē (“principle”), Hegel draws a rigid distinction (in fact even more rigid than Aristotle himself had drawn) based on the formal criterion that Hesiod’s work had constituted religion. Second, although he was more knowledgeable about ancient Indian philosophy than his predecessors had been, he failed to see that the fragments of the Milesians had structural parallels, not with Indian classical philosophy, but with the pre-“philosophical” Upanishads. This is because he simply dismissed the latter as “religion.”

* “Averroës on Aristotle’s Criticism of his Predecessors: An annotated translation of the long commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics A.” This work, which I completed in March, 2007, is a translation of the Arabic text of Averroës’s commentary on the portions of Metaphysics A dealing with the “causes” of things in the world posited by the Presocratics, together with detailed annotations and with concluding remarks. It is otherwise unpublished and can be read here.

Most recently (October, 2009) I presented a paper at a meeting disputing the traditional assessment of the post-Milesian figure Parmenides of Elea, to the effect that he was an arch-rationalist who only composed in epic metrical form for some reason such as a desire to reach a popular audience. Specifically, my paper suggests as a working hypothesis that he was a trained epic poet who at some point had a mystical experience about subject matter that would subsequently be interpreted as philosophical in character. This paper can be read here.

Peripherally, just to be complete, I have one other published paper on ancient philosophy, “Diogenes Laertius on Aeschines the Socratic’s Works,” Hermes 129 (2001), 142-44. (Typographical error: in the first paragraph Περσαῖοφησις φησις Πασιφῶνγος should be Περσαῖός φησι Πασιφῶντος.) This note is not about a Presocratic, but rather an actual follower of Socrates, and simply argues against the common interpretation of the text of the doxographer Diogenes Laertius that he accuses the man of plagiarism.

The following is a select bibliography of relevant work by others, in reverse chronological order, last updated 12/20/12. Note added 2/27/10: This bibliography will no longer add new titles on early Greek “philosophy” (or “science,” “cosmogony,” etc.) that vary the theme of “the Milesians were more rational than Hesiod” but cite no recent work on the latter figure. The authors of such works may serve a need within their own community, but their efforts are of no use to the rest of us.

Carlos Steel, ed., Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum, with a new critical edition of the Greek text by Oliver Primavesi, Oxford 2012. As noted above, a good part of the ancient testimony on the so-called Presocratic philosophers comes from Aristotle, and in fact most of that is found in the first book of his Metaphysics, the subject of this volume. The essays comprising its first part (pp. 1-383) were originally presented at a week-long symposium in Belgium (mostly in Leuven but in Brussels for one day) in July, 2008. Primavesi’s text (385-516 including an introduction and bibliography) is as far as I know the first critical edition of any part of the Metaphysícs since Jaeger’s 1957 edition of the full work. I cannot do justice to the volume here, but I do want to note one of the essays: Rachel Barney’s “History and Dialectic in Metaphysics A3” (69-104), which is on the part of the work that introduces the earliest Presocratics. Her purpose is to clarify the genre of Aristotle’s account of them, and she reaches the conclusion that his argument is basically an example of “clarification dialectic,” that is, a demonstration that they groped toward his doctrine of four causes (and she agrees that his account of the Milesians does not actually attribute the developed materialist doctrine to them that has often been thought), although he also manifests many of the concerns of a bona fide historian of philosophy.

*Julia Sushytska, Originary Metaphysics: Why Philosophy has not Reached its End, PhD Dissertation (Stony Brook University), 2008, currently on the internet here. This work denies that “metaphysics is dead” and develops the thesis that that common sentiment only arises by our being wedded to the usual sense of time as a continuum in which history takes place rather than time as a sort of eternal present, which she says is the site of “originary” thinking. Of particular interest for visitors to this site is the chapter on the first such thinker in her view, Parmenides. He arises, she maintains, against a backdrop of traditions of thought where logos had not yet distinguished itself from mythos, contra conventional history of philosophy, and articulates a philosophy that begins in intuition, not some type of logical manipulation of entities. She describes its content in a manner owing much to a certain dissident tradition that holds Parmenides to have been a mystic or shaman, so that, for example, the journey he describes in fragment 1 is to the Underworld and the goddess who enlightens him is Persephone after her capture by Hades.

*Adam Drozdek, Greek philosophers as theologians: the divine arche (Aldershot/Burlington, 2007). One need neither invoke myth nor reject Aristotle’s stocheion hypothesis (as does D. Graham; see entry below) in order to challenge the received view of Thales et al. This book treats the entire compass of ancient Greek philosophy, but at least the part devoted to the Milesians (pp. 1-14) follows the idea that was most clearly enunciated previously by Werner Jaeger in certain 1936 lectures (which the author cites approvingly), that the “principle” of the earliest Presocratics was essentially another name for the divine. The book is probably the most thorough working out of such a thesis to date. One useful feature of the treatment of Thales (3-8) is a survey of ancient opinions on why he made water the principle. A full (skeptical) review is by Lloyd P. Gerson, Classical Review 59 (2009), 52-54.

*Scott Austin, Parmenides and the History of Dialectic: Three Essays (Las Vegas, 2007). As suggested above, I have only lately come to study of Parmenides as opposed to earlier figures, but I list this book because I was asked to review it. (The review appears in Ancient Philosophy 30, 2010, 155-58, and may be read on the website of the book’s publisher here.) Austin is a Parmenides scholar who has particularly been interested in the structure of the thought of Parmenides (i.e., as opposed to its content). Of particular interest in the book is the third of its “essays,” which compares the underlying pattern of thought of the central Parmenides fragment (B8 Diels-Krantz) with the dialectic of a number of later figures, especially Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel.

*James Warren, Presocratics. Natural Philosophers before Socrates (Berkeley/ Los Angeles, 2007). This book is part of a series currently in process at the University of California Press, which aims to make (current commentators’ views of) ancient philosophers readily accessible to students. As such it is rather elementary in presentation (giving the Presocratic fragments in English translation), and relatively conventional in content (tacitly assuming that the earliest Presocratics were characterized more by rational philosophy than by mysticism). Nonetheless, the chapter on “Ionian Beginnings” does not fall into the trap of assuming that the Milesians came up with philosophy as we now know it in a vacuum, but acknowledges that they may have owed something to Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies. The 11-page bibliography is certainly extensive (more so than one usually expects of a book meant for students), although it omits the works tending away from convention by Gagarin, Angehrn, Gobry, Shelley, Long and Colaclidès cited below.

*Herbert Granger, “The Theologian Pherecydes of Syros and the Early Days of Natural Philosophy,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007), 135-63. Pherecydes was an approximate contemporary of the Milesians whom Aristotle acknowledges as having been a “mixed” thinker. He offered a cosmogony which, unlike Hesiod’s, was composed in prose, but which, like the latter, was mythical in appearance, starting from an initial triad consisting of something called Zas (later transformed into Zeus), Time and Earth. In the words of the current authority on him, Hermann Schibli, he “seems to have fallen between the cracks” in the effort to draw a hard and fast distinction between Hesiod and the earliest Presocratics, and he is largely ignored by those who do so. In contrast, this article discusses them in a way that takes him into account.

*Brian Black, The Character of the Self in Ancient India. Priests, Kings, and Women in the Early Upaniṣads (Albany, 2007).  I suggest above that the early Upanishads are comparable in sophistication to the fragments of the earliest Presocratics.  This book gives detailed interpretations that do not require knowledge of Sanskrit, with an introduction (1-27) covering the literary and social background of the texts, and a bibliography (202-9) that includes recent scholarly literature.

*Daniel Graham, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy (Princeton, 2006).  It is not absolutely necessary to invoke myth in challenging the Aristotle-Hegel-Barnes view of Thales et al.  In this important new book on the Presocratics from the Milesians down to Diogenes of Apollonia, the part that deals with them crystallizes a recent tendency to save their philosophical status by denying that they embraced a material monism and by saying instead that they posited a (properly philosophical) theory not involving Aristotle’s controversial stoicheion.  According to Graham in particular, this theory was that the universe was generated from some specific element, which does not thereby remain as a component of everything. John Sisko gives a perspicacious and thorough -- almost 7000 words! -- review of this work from a philosophical standpoint at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.07.64, and I comment on its relation to our discussion at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.08.65. A more recent review that strikes me as generally cogent is by Daryn Lehoux, Classical Review 59 (2009), 25-26.

*André Laks, Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” (Paris, 2006). I have not had access to this book, but according to John Palmer’s review (in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.06.42) it offers critical analyses of, among other concepts, the very categories “Presocratic” and “philosophy” as they apply to the thinkers of interest, in a manner that “draws upon and synthesizes” recent articles by the author. Of these I mention in particular “Remarks on the Differentiation of Early Greek Philosophy,” in Philosophy and the Sciences in Antiquity, ed. R. W. Sharples (Aldershot and Burlington, 2005), 8-22. Here Laks argues such points as that the category “philosophy” can have meaning to us in discussing the Presocratics even if it did not to them themselves, and that, as against counterposing it to myth, “myth is not a genre, but a function” (19). (However, according to Palmer the 2006 volume also analyzes the concept “origin” in the Milesian origin of Presocratic philosophy and says it is a fallacy to believe that this origin had, in Palmer’s words, “genuine determinative efficacy.”) See also the 2001 entry for Laks below, on an issue that Palmer does not cite as being included in the book.

*Jørgen Mejer, “Ancient Philosophy and the Doxographical Tradition,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 31), ed. M. L. Gill and P. Pellegrin (Malden, MA; Oxford; and Victoria, Australia, 2006), 20-33. Our knowledge of what the early thinkers actually said is crucially dependent on the late ancient figures now called “doxographers” who wrote about them. Mejer’s chapter in this volume is an up-to-date, careful summary of what is known about these people, with further references.

*Peter Manchester, The Syntax of Time. The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander (Leiden and Boston, 2005). The author works backward from the view of the phrase “taxis of time” (where he renders taxis, generally construed as “arrangement,” as “syntax”) on the part of the neo-Platonist Iamblichus, through Parmenides and Heraclitus, to Anaximander’s original use in his sole surviving fragment.  Manchester avers (pp. 150-51) that at least in the case of the latter, the taxis is able to shape nature by collecting its processes into the reciprocity of the cosmic oppositions suggested by the fragment, while time itself gives taxis to the “boundless” (apeiron) entity that Anaximander posited as the basic principle.  (But as to whether the fragment really means that time arranges something, rather than something arranging time, see the entry for Colaclidès below.)

*Dirk Couprie’s website, dirkcouprie.nl, is probably the most complete resource available concerning the key figure of Anaximander in particular.  Couprie himself largely adheres to the traditional view of the Milesians that I question herein, but his site’s bibliography (containing entries up to 2005 as of July, 2007) is rather comprehensive.

*Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York, 2002).   I was unaware of this comprehensive comparison of the thoughts of the two cultures until July of 2009, but in any case, McEvilley is a distinguished classicist and polymath, and here certainly shows the comparability of the two bodies of thought, in the earliest period which is the focus here as well as in classical times.   In particular, after an initial chapter discussing the possible routes for transmission of ideas, Chapter 2 (pp. 23-61) covers the material on the Upanishads vis a vis the Milesians and other early Presocratics down to Parmenides in a manner with which I find little to disagree.

*Michael Gagarin, “Greek Law and the Presocratics,” in Presocratic Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos, eds. V. Caston and D. W. Graham (Aldershot, 2002), 19-24.  Apart from speaking of the taxis of time, the Anaximander fragment says that entities in the world “pay the penalty to one another for their injustice,” and this use of a nominally social concept is generally considered to be metaphorical.  However, while still thinking of the citation in that general way, Gagarin allows that it may have been influenced by contemporary notions of social justice, and that the idea in Anaximander was thereby procedural in character as opposed to a principle.

*Patricia Curd, “The Presocratics as Philosophers,” in Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie Présocratique? What is Presocratic Philosophy?, ed. A. Laks and C. Louguet (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 2002), 115-38.  This article focusing on the post-Milesian figures Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Xenophanes argues that it is wrong to consider “the Presocratics” to have thought poetically or mystically and that their thinking emerges as rational and naturalistic if we do not expect too much of it.

*Cecelia Martini, “La tradizione araba della Metafisica di Aristotele Libri α-A,” in Aristotele e Alessandro di Afrodisia nella tradizione araba: atti del Colloquio La ricezione araba ed ebraica della filosofia e della scienza greche, Padova, 14-15 maggio 1999 (Padua, 2002), 75-112.  This article in Italian treats the extent to which accurate content of the key text for Presocratic opinions, Book A of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, was actually available to the medieval Arabic commentators.

*André Laks, “Écriture, prose, et les débuts de la philosophie grecque,” Methodos, 1 (2001) (an on-line journal: the URL for this article is http://methodos.revues.org/document139.html). This article in French reviews the issues surrounding the claim sometimes made that prose writing was necessary for the onset of rational thought. In particular it points out that prose was the form used not only by the Milesians but also by their contemporary Pherecydes of Syros, who like Hesiod composed a theogony if perhaps with more rational features.

*Emil Angehrn, Der Weg zur Metaphysik. Vorsokratik. Platon. Aristoteles (Weilerswist, 2000).  Angehrn’s treatment in German of the Anaximander fragment (pp. 84-89) is an elegant formulation of the claim that its underlying metaphysics cannot be solely descriptive in character, but has a prescriptive aspect.

*Ivan Gobry, La cosmologie des Ioniens (Paris, 2000).  This recent view in French stressing a mythical aspect in Milesian thought suggests that Anaximander’s “apeiron” notion was similar to the tohuwabohu initial state cited in Genesis 1:1, and that the water principle of Thales is reminiscent of the symbolic value assigned to the substance in hunter-gatherer cultures.

*Cameron Shelley, “The Influence of Folk Meteorology in the Anaximander Fragment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000), 1-17 (for those with access to the Project MUSE service, read the article here [html] or here [pdf]).  This is a novel proposal that Anaximander’s notion of justice, far from stemming from an abstract division of the world into nature and society and then from their comparison, was actually suggested to him by everyday events, particularly the weather.

*Walter Burkert, “The Logic of Cosmogony” in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. R. Buxton (Oxford, 1999), 87-106.  This article draws on a wealth of cross-cultural parallels to argue that in the old notion of a transition from mythos to logos in early Greece, the mythos end of the process, in Hesiod’s Theogony as elsewhere, in fact contains some logos.

*Roger Arnaldez, Averroes: A rationalist in Islam, transl. D. Streight (Notre Dame, 2000 [French 1998]).  A readable treatment of the philosopher, Aristotle commentator (for which see pp. 31-78), theologian, and jurist.

*Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic philosophers (London and New York, 1999 [1982]).  The most recent comprehensive treatment of the Presocratics from a completely traditional point of view.

*Steven Harvey, “Conspicuous by His Absence: Averroes’ Place Today as an Interpreter of Aristotle,” in Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition, ed. G. Endress and J. A. Aertsen (Leiden, Boston and Kvln, 1999.  One of the suppressed truths of the history of philosophy is that, although such works as the commentaries of Boethius on logical questions were transmitted in the West through medieval times, on physical and metaphysical questions there was no substantial tradition that did not pass through the Arabic writers.  This article treats one aspect of the suppression.

*Jean Jolivet, “From the beginnings to Avicenna” and Alfred Ivry, “Averroes,” in Medieval Philosophy, ed. J. Marenbon (London and New York, 1998), 29-48 and 49-64, respectively.  Two scholarly articles on the Arabic component of the history of philosophy.

*Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi. Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden and New York, 1997).  The classical world already speculated on the influence of Zoroastrianism, and this is a source book on the point.

*Laurence Bauloye, “La traduction arabe de la Métaphysique et l’établissement du texte grec,” in Aristotelica secunda: Mélanges offerts à Christian Rutten (Liège, 1996), 281-89.  The Arabic translation used by Averroës for most of his commentary on the Metaphysics antedates the earliest of our extant Greek manuscripts.  Bauloye is the latest scholar to stress the often ignored point that it thereby offers assistance in deciding between their readings at a given location in the text.  She also notes that some authorities who claim to take the issue into account (in particular Jaeger) only do so partially.

*Aristotle transformed: the ancient commentators and their influence, ed. R. Sorabji (Ithaca, 1990).  The essential starting point for research on Aristotle’s Greek commentators.  (added 9/14/07) However, an article by Philippe Hoffmann in the Blackwell Companion volume cited above for Jxrgen Mejer, pp. 597-622, seems to be the most current treatment of the subject now.

*G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic philosophers: a critical history with a selection of texts, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge, 1983).  A commonly used reference for the texts of the most important Presocratic fragments.

*Herbert S. Long, “The Milesian School of Philosophy,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 3 (1980), 256-63.  This article takes a semi-traditional view of the Milesians, but nonetheless denies that Anaximander made a distinction between nature and society (as is implied when one considers the citation of justice in the surviving fragment to be metaphorical), saying that the fragment “obscures” human ethics and morals.

*Pierre Colaclidès, “Sur le sens d’une phrase d’Anaximandre,” in Langue, discours, société; pour Émile Benveniste, ed. J. Kristeva, J.-C. Milner and N. Ruwet (Paris, 1975), 41-43.  This is a linguistic argument that the “taxis of time” phrase in the surviving Anaximander fragment does not refer to the metaphysically-construed concept of time arranging things, as the traditional interpretation assumes, but rather to some agency arranging time.  This possibility has been ignored by virtually everyone who has since spoken on the fragment, including the authors cited above.

*M. L. West, Early Greek philosophy and the Orient (Oxford, 1971). A treatment of the allegation that the latter influenced the former.

*Michael C. Stokes, “Hesiodic and Milesian Cosmogonies - II,” Phronesis 8 (1963), 1-34.  A detailed study of possible continuity between Hesiod’s Theogony and what is attributed to the Milesians.

*George P. Conger, “Did India Influence Early Greek Philosophies?,” Philosophy East and West 2 (1952) 102-28 (for those who can access the JSTOR service, read the article here).   This is an early contribution on the issue, which in particular (pp. 115-16) notes a parallel between Anaximenes fragment 2 and some Upanishad passages.

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