Born in Miletus
Born in Miletus, the third of the great Milesian thinkers and a student of Anaximander.
The third of the Milesians took a step his teacher Anaximander would have called a retreat, and yet it was an advance. Anaximenes returned to a definite substance, air, but added the mechanism the others lacked. Air rarefies into fire and condenses into wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. One stuff, one process, the whole world explained by how tightly it is packed. Breath is the soul, and as breath holds a person together, air holds the cosmos together. It is the first clear case of explaining quality by quantity, the seed of every physics that followed.
Born in Miletus, the third of the great Milesian thinkers and a student of Anaximander.