Anaximenes Did Not Follow Thales Concept Of Change

One of the first concepts early philosophers focused on was the concept of change. The Milesians and Heraclitus believed that change was elemental. Thales argued change was rooted in water. Anaximenes believed it was air. Heraclitus bet his drachmas on fire. All of these philosophers have well thought out arguments. The first philosopher to explore the idea of change was Thales. He believed that water was the origin of all things or that everything was made of some form of water. He adopted this notion because he observed “that the nourishment of all things is moist, and that even the hot itself comes to be from this and lives in this”. I believe this quote means that water nourishes all things and even hot things contain moisture,
Anaximenes agrees that there is only one origin substance, but he argues that it is air. His idea of air “is more like a dense mist than what we think of as air” and I believe he uses that definition because it is more visible. He would argue that air “comes to be fire, being condensed, it becomes to be wind, hen cloud…it becomes water, then earth, then stones, and the rest come to be from these”. Here he is referring to atoms and the scientific idea of molecules solidifying in cold and expanding in heat. He later talks about clouds and how they are just cold air that dispels moisture when the wind gets caught up in
Instead, he proposed the idea that fire was the origin. But fire is not the most obvious substance to make the origin of all things, because it is the most inconstant and changeable. And that is exactly why he picked fire. It is a symbol of change and process. He took the theory a step forward and supposed that it was not a literal fire. Heraclitus claimed that “this kosmos, the same for all, none of gods or humans made, but it was always and is and shall be: an ever-living fire kindled in measures and extinguished in measures”. He is saying that there is a fire in everything and it is our life source. Another theory Heraclitus had was “all things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.” This was an interesting fragment because he is saying that all things can be measured against fire as a standard. There is equivalence between all things and gold, but all things are not identical to gold. In a similar way, fire provides a standard of value for other things, but it fire is not the same as these other things. Fire plays an important role in Heraclitus' theories, but it is not the unique source of all things, because all things in the kosmos are