Thales

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathon Barnes
2001

Chapter 2 - Thales

According to Aristotle, Thales was the founder of natural philosophy and lived sometime between 625 BC  and 545 BC. He is famous for observing or predicting an eclipse on May 28, 585 BC.

Thales may have or may not have written a book. There were no existing texts authored by him by the time of Aristotle so all knowledge we have of him comes from later writers.

"Thales was a man of practical wisdom, one of the so-called Seven Sages of early Greek history, and he was regarded by posterity not only as an original contributor to science and philosophy, but also as an astute statesman" (Barnes, 9).

Herodotus notes that he formed a political system for Ionia and that he engineered an easier crossing point for an army, marking both his ability as a statesmen and an engineer.

Aristotle notes that Thales held that everything was made from water and that water was the material principle of the world. This material principle comes and goes and is born and destroyed, returning to the original principle; thus, the substance remains while its properties change. He also notes that Thales seems to have believed that the soul was the cause of motion and that the soul is mixed with everything in the universe. "Perhaps this is why Thales thought that everything was full of gods" (Barnes, 12).

Proclus, a student of Aristotle, gives Thales credit for numerous geometrical functions that were used in practical matters, like the theorem that states a pair of triangles with one equal side and two equal angles are equal, which Thales used to determine the distance of ships out to sea.

Many ancient writers said Thales was descended from an exiled Phoenician family, but this is doubtful. He is most likely a native of a well-to-do Milesian family.

Various ancient writers have said that he was a great many things, and a great many first of things. He is thought to have been an early astronomer, geometry master, philosopher, scientist and an early proponent of the notion of an immortal soul.

Hermippus quotes Thales giving thanks for three things: "First, that I am a man and not a beast; secondly, that I am male and not female; thirdly, that I am Greek and not foreign" (Barnes, 15).

He was ascribed numerous aphorisms, my favorite of which is when he claimed that life is no different than death. A smart ass then asked, why don't you die? To which, Thales replied, because death is no different than life. In dealing with sin he said that no man can escape the notice of the gods if he does wrong, even if he thinks of doing wrong. When someone who had committed adultery asked him if he should lie about it in court, he told the man perjury is no worse than adultery.

His ethical stance comes from another aphorism in answering the question 'how can we live most justly? To which he replied, by not doing ourselves what we blame others for doing.

A History of Western Philosophy - The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980

Chapter 1 - Pre-Socratic Philosophy

Thales was from Miletus, an Ionian colony on the coast of Asia. According to Aristotle, who lived 250 years later, Thales believed that water is the cause of all things and that all things were filled with gods.

While much of our knowledge of Thales is conjectural and second hand (and third hand and fourth hand, etc.) just those two things show that Thales viewed the world process in natural terms, in breaking with the more mystical earlier elements of Greek thought. His cosmology wasn't quite science yet, but it was no longer a mere genealogy of deities describing natural events.

Thales, being interested in the natural world must have seen water as being able to transform into various things (air through evaporation, earth through witnessing deltas, etc.) and his predisposition to believing that the world was somehow one thing, water seemed like a natural choice.

Thales was a break from the Hesiods of the world. Hesiod was a master poet, but his Theogony was merely a poetic genealogy of gods wrapped into a creation myth. Later poets could improve upon the poetry aspect and be better poets than Hesiod, but they would still be trading in myths. Thales' greatest contribution was his breaking from the myth business and entering the scientist business. Better science and scientists would come along after Thales, but without his break from myth, science could never have started. Thales proposed a theory, something testable. And while water may not be the original substance, it could be falsified, rejected and a new theory could be produced. Hesiod's Theogony cannot be refuted, it can only be written from a different point of view, if the different point of view had a more fluid style of poetry.

"Thales' name is remembered then, because he was the first person whom we know to have answered in natural terms the question, 'Why do things happen as they do?'" (Jones, 9). Much of western philosophy for a long time was shaped by testing Thales' assertion, rejecting or revising it because of the various paradoxes it produced.

Thales' first major assumption was monism. That is to say, that there was one thing that was the cause of everything else. His second major assumption was that this one thing was in fact a thing, not a god. Thirdly, he assumed that the ultimate stuff is active and can change. In his notion that 'everything was full of gods' he was not making a theological statement, rather explicitly denying divine causation. The Greek notion, beginning with Homer, was that the gods were causal agents. By Thales' assertion that everything was full of gods, he was denying the Homeric notion that the gods caused change, but the thing itself was the cause of change.

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972

Chapter II - The Milesian School

Miletus was a flourishing commercial city in Asia Minor when Thales was making his discoveries. But it was a city rife with class struggles between a large slave population and the lower and upper classes. The commercial nature of the Ionian coastal towns brought them into contact with the Kingdom of Lydia and Egypt. These contacts brought them contact with the wider ancient world.

"His science and philosophy were both crude, but they were such as to stimulate both thought and observation" (Russell, 26).

A great story that Russell relates is that Thales was made fun of for being poor. So, Thales purchased all of the olive presses in the town in winter at a low price and rented them out for an exorbitant profit in summer time. He is said to have stated, 'philosophers could be rich if they wanted, but their aims are elsewhere'.