Levene - Philosophy: stuff you forgot from school

According to Aristotle, who presumably knew what he was talking about, Thales of Miletus was the first real philosopher, which makes him the founder not just of Greek but ultimately of European philosophy. Unfortunately, he left behind no body of work, so his opinions are known only from later reports, but he seems to have had wide-ranging practical and intellectual interests and was renowned as an engineer, a mathematician, an astronomer and a statesman. He is said to have traveled to Egypt, where he pursued his interest in trigonometryit was presumably some sort of mathematical hot spotand to have used Babylonian celestial charts to accurately predict a solar eclipse in 585 B.C.

What makes it possible to talk about Thales and the later Presocratics as philosophersrather than, say, brilliant mathematicians or astronomersis the fact that they believed the world had an underlying unity, something physical that could be pinned down, studied and understood rationally in order to identify how it had come into being. Of course, there was one small snag: they had no idea what this miraculous substance was.

There would be plenty of false starts, but the search itself signaled a move away from mythology as an explanation for events. Rather than looking to the frankly irrational behavior of the gods to answer questions about why things were as they were, these early philosophers attempted to come up with systematic accounts of the visible world in straightforward descriptive and analytical terms.

For Thales, water was the key. Having seen the way it could take on different forms (mist, ice and so on), he decided that water must be the basis of the universeliterally, in fact, since he thought that the flat earth floated on water and that earthquakes were caused when big waves hit the land.

He was cited as one of the Seven Wise Men by Plato in his Protagoras but was more the absent-minded professor in a number of anecdotes, such as the one that had him stumbling into a ditch because he was too busy studying the stars to watch where he was going.