Diogenes of Apollonia

Diogenes of Apollonia ( ; ; 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, and was a native of the Milesian colony Apollonia in Thrace. He lived for some time in Athens. He believed air to be the one source of all being from which all other substances were derived, and, as a primal force, to be both divine and intelligent. He also wrote a description of the organization of blood vessels in the human body. His ideas were parodied by the dramatist Aristophanes, and may have influenced the Orphic philosophical commentary preserved in the Derveni papyrus. His philosophical work has not survived in a complete form, and his doctrines are known chiefly from lengthy quotations of his work by Simplicius, as well as a few summaries in the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Aetius. Life Diogenes was a native of the Milesian colony Apollonia Pontica in Thrace, present-day Sozopol on the Black Sea. His father's name was Apollothemis. Nothing is known of the events in his life, except that he lived some time in Athens. Diogenes Laërtius states that "great jealousy nearly put his life in danger in Athens," but there may be confusion with Anaxagoras who is mentioned in the same passage. Like all the physiologoi (natural philosophers), he wrote in the Ionic dialect. Philosophy Diogenes is characterized by Theophrastus as the last of the "physiologoi" or natural philosophers. As a material monist, he synthesized the work of earlier monists such as Anaximenes and Heraclitus with the pluralism of Anaxagoras and Empedocles and argued that air was a divine cosmic ordering principle that he also equated with intelligence. He does not appear to have been influenced by the Atomists. Air Diogenes, like Anaximenes, believed air to be the one source of all being, and all other substances to be derived from it by condensation and rarefaction. This he modified by the theories of his contemporary Anaxagoras, and asserted that air, the primal force, was intelligent: And it seems to me that that which possessed thought is what people call air, and that by this everyone both is governed and has power over everything. For it is this which seems to me to be god and to have reached everything and to arrange everything and to be in everything. And there is not a single thing which does not share in it. The nature of the universe is air, limitless and eternal, from which, as it condenses and rarefies and changes its properties, the other forms come into being.