Philosophy
c. 624 to 546 BC, Miletus
The first philosopher: all things are water, and nature explains itself.
Start learning Thales →Thales of Miletus asked a question no one had asked before - what is everything ultimately made of? - and answered that all things arise from a single underlying stuff: water. With that question, philosophy and science…
Thales’ deepest revolution was not water but method: the demand that natural events have natural causes. By taking the gods out of the business of explaining the world, he founded the naturalistic worldview on which all…
Thales was not a remote theorist but a working engineer, astronomer, and statesman - the first of the Seven Sages of Greece. His life shows philosophy born not in retreat from the world but in mastery of it.
Thales held that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron, and that ‘all things are full of gods.’ His doctrine of a living, self-moving cosmos - hylozoism - shows that the first naturalism was not a dead…
From Thales’ question grew the Milesian school - Anaximander, Anaximenes - and from it the whole tradition of theoretical inquiry: cosmology, geometry as proof, and the conviction that the world is a law-governed order…
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