Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.

Aither 17/2017:4-31 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2017.001

Searching for Origins of Earth Stability Conception

Radim Kočandrle
Fakulta filozofická, Západočeská univerzita v Plzni

In his De caelo, Aristotle ascribes to Anaximander of Miletus a conception according to which the Earth remains at its place in the universe only thanks to the symmetry of its position. Simplicius, however, in his commentary on this passage from Aristotle, notes that such a formulation can also be found in Plato. Aetius, meanwhile, ascribes this entire argument to Parmenides and Democritus. Plato shows that the validity of this argument is based on the assumption that both the Earth and the universe that surrounds it are spherical. Anaximander, however, in all likelihood, believes the Earth to be flat - a feature typical of Ionian cosmology. Given that a belief in a spherical shape of the universe and the Earth can be demonstrated in the Pythagorean School and is hinted upon in Parmenides, we could assume that this conception originated in the Italian branch of philosophy. And since we do not have enough texts to satisfactorily reconstruct Pythagorean thoughts and have to rely on much later reports by Philolaus, one could assume that the whole argument about the stability of the Earth due to equilibrium and symmetry is based on Parmenides's thoughts.

Published: March 30, 2017  Show citation

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Kočandrle, R. (2017). Searching for Origins of Earth Stability Conception. Aither, 9(17), 4-31. doi: 10.5507/aither.2017.001
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