Who first came up with the theoy of the earth as a sphere, Pythagoras or Anaximander?

Factual Questions
1

Hi,

Who first came up with the theoy of the earth as a sphere, Pythagoras or Anaximander?

This says Pythagoras
http://patrick.maher1.net/317/lectures/anax.pdf

This says Anaximander

How original were Greek thinkers/philosophers? Did anyone predate Aristarchus in terms of his geocentric model?
I look forward to your feedback
davidmich

2

Here it says:
“Anaximander believed that the earth was a cylinder. If this seems a little strange, then we believe that his reasoning was that if one looked around one saw a circle, then he used a symmetry argument to argue that there was another circle with a cylinder between. He appears to have been the first person to argue that the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth so the sun which rose in the morning was the same sun that had disappeared on the evening of the preceding day.”

I’m not sure whom to believe.

3

This is what Wiki says: Link

However, what is more concerning is; that people still believe in a FLAT Earth.
Here’s a Youtubevideo, that reminds me of Monty Python, however, they seriously think that the Earth flat.

4

Your second post correctly reports Anaximander’s view, although it does not seem to make it entirely clear that he held that we live not on the curved sides of a cylinder, but on one of the flat ends of a cylinder that is probably not very tall. A disk might be a better description. He describes it as “like a drum”. In fact, the Wikipedia article you cite in your OP does not assert that he thought the Earth to be a sphere (although it does not clearly say what he did think about the issue, despite this being well known to scholars). Its references to the “celestial sphere” are concerned with the shape of the heavens around the Earth, not the Earth itself.

(Much of the Wiki article also seems to me to be highly speculative, going well beyond the well established facts about Anaximander, and presenting a particular interpretation of his thought in a way that is seriously in violation of the spirit of Wikipedia policies on “original research”. It seems to be well informed, but I don’t think it gives an objective, unbiased picture of the state of Anaximander scholarship.)

I do not think we know for certain who amongst the Greek philosophers was the first to argue that the Earth is a sphere. It is possible it was Pythagoras (if he did so argue, it was probably merely on grounds of symmetry), but there is no direct evidence of this, and your cite does not, in fact, say so. Actually, very little is known for certain about Pythagoras’ actual views. He seems to have been more the founder of a sort of religious cult than a philosopher in the true sense, and recent scholarship has shown that writers in later antiquity had a considerable tendency to attribute ideas and discoveries to Pythagoras that were really due to late followers of his religion, or even to people unconnected with him entirely. Because this is a fairly recent discovery it means that much of the information you will find on Pythagoras, even from what may appear to be reliable sources, (let alone Wikipedia) is false or misleading. We actually know a lot less about about Pythagoras than we used to think we did, not that long ago. A good resource that explains the current situation in Pythagoras scholarship is the entry on Pythagoras in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That entry has the following to say about the sphericity of the Earth:

So, the best evidence we have (although it is not actually very strong, and there are other possible candidates) suggests that it was Parmenides who first taught that the Earth is spherical. I have seen it suggested elsewhere (by Popper, IIRC) that he discovered this by observing the shadow cast by the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, and even that he may have experimented with various shaped objects, including spherical balls, in order to understand the sorts of shadow they would cast on a spherical object like the Moon. However, as far as I can make out, the evidence suggesting that he made these experiments and observations is not very solid.

You may also think that this is all contradicted by the relatively well known and well attested fact that Parmenides held the paradoxical view that the universe as a whole is a solid, undifferentiated and unchanging spherical block. However, the apparent contradiction is probably to be resolved in the distinction he drew between “the way of truth” and “the way of seeming”. Unfortunately we do not know very much about that, either. As with all* of the presocratic philosophers, we only have a few short fragments of his writings and a few second-hand reports about him (often by much later writers) to go on.

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*Actually in the cases of Pythagoras and Thales, we don’t really even have fragments, and, as already mentioned, most of the anecdotes about Pythagoras, in particular, are probably false.

5

On further examination, the Wikipedia article on Anaximander does contain the correct information about his view of the Earth as cylindrical, “with a height one-third of its diameter”. My other reservations about the article remain strong, however.

6

Thanks njtt. Very helpful and very enlightening.
davidmich