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Anaximenes
According to the surviving sources on his life, Anaximenes flourished in the mid 6th century BCE and died around 528. He is the third philosopher of the Milesian School of philosophy, so named because like Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes was an inhabitant of Miletus, in Ionia (ancient Greece). Theophrastus notes that Anaximenes was an associate, and possibly a student, of Anaximander’s.
Anaximenes is best known for his doctrine that air is the source of all things. In this way, he differed with his predecessors like Thales, who held that water is the source of all things, and Anaximander, who thought that all things came from an unspecified boundless stuff.
He was a discipline of Anaximander. He is the third and the last of the Milesian philosophers. Only a few sources survive for his life and activities. He wrote a book in prose probably within the same framework of natural philosophy as that of Anaximander. Anaximenes speculated on cosmology, cosmogony and meteorology.
A practical man and a talented observer with a vivid imagination, Anaximenes noted the rainbows occasionally seen in moonlight and described the phosphorescent glow given off by an oar blade breaking the water. His thought is typical of the transition from mythology to science; its rationality is evident from his discussion of the rainbow not as a goddess but as the effect of sun rays on compacted air. Yet his thought is not completely liberated from earlier mythological or mystical tendencies, as seen from his belief that the universe is hemispherical. Thus, his permanent contribution lies not in his cosmology but in his suggestion that known natural processes condensation and rarefaction) play a part in the making of a world. This suggestion, together with Anaximenes’ reduction of apparent qualitative differences in substances to mere differences of quantity, was highly influential in the development of scientific thought.
Sources:http://www.iep.utm.edu/anaximen/
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