From Anaximander on, early Greek philosophers regarded the structure and regular processes of the world as central to their accounts of nature. However, their understanding of this order differed considerably. These processes might be viewed as harmony or balance and as the result of growth or conflict or an intelligence, or they might be considered the result of random collisions of particles. The order might involve cycles or it might be a single continuous development from a primal state. In some philosophers, order itself exemplifies the goodness of the world. Many of these elements can be found in nonphilosophical cosmologies as well, such as the emergence of the world from waters in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, or the Genesis creation story. What distinguishes Greek philosophers is the variety of their attempts to describe the world as ordered, their reflection on what such an account must consist in, their...