A Comparative Analysis and Explanation of the Creation of the World in the View of Ionian Philosophers

The creation of the world, which is an important and contradictory problem with an eventful historical background, has always attracted the attention of human beings and aroused their enthusiasm and curiosity since ancient periods. This problem has been investigated in four epistemological areas: mythological cosmology, philosophical cosmology, monotheistic worldview, and scientific cosmology. Each of these disciplines has dealt with the creation of the world and its phenomena based on its own principles and methodology and introduced its particular bases of cosmological system. In this study, the process of the creation of the world and natural phenomena has been probed in the philosophical-cosmological view of Ionian philosophers, including Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. In doing so, the author initially examines the principles of the quality of going beyond a mythological view towards a philosophical approach regarding the problem of creation through focusing on the historical trend of the development of theogonic view into a cosmogenic one, the quality of the change of personal explainers into non-personal ones, leaving mythological particularism behind and developing universal philosophical concepts, and then compares their methods and methodological approaches. Thales and Anaximenes have both explained the issue of creation based on the “change and evolution” of the prime matter of “water” and “air”, and Anaximander has done so based on the “separation” of objects from the first principle of apeiron. Thales and Anaximenes consider all existents and objects as the qualities of prime matter, while Anaximander grants an objective existence to qualities and deems them to be among real existents. Toward the end of this paper, the author tries to provide answers to the questions of how the structure and nature of the world and natural phenomena are formed in the view of Ionian philosophers, how existents and objects are created and annihilated, and whether there is a single origin and a prudent intellect called the Divine Element beyond all changes and evolutions, the turning of material elements into each other, and the detachment of objects.