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Hall of Greek Philosophers
Thales of Miletus
First of the Seven Sages; natural philosophy
- c. 624 – 546 BCE
- Greek Philosophers · 4 of 10
Hall of Greek Philosophers
First of the Seven Sages; natural philosophy
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Thales of Miletus ( THAY-leez; Ancient Greek: Θαλῆς; c. 626/623 – c. 548/545 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece.
Beginning in eighteenth-century historiography, many came to regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, breaking from the prior use of mythology to explain the world and instead using natural philosophy. He is thus otherwise referred to as the first to have engaged in mathematics, science, and deductive reasoning.
Thales's view that all of nature is based on the existence of a single ultimate substance, which he theorized to be water, was widely influential among the philosophers of his time. Thales thought the Earth floated on water.
In mathematics, Thales is the namesake of Thales's theorem, and the intercept theorem can also be referred to as Thales's theorem. Thales was said to have calculated the heights of the pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. In science, Thales was an astronomer who reportedly predicted the weather and a solar eclipse. The discovery of the position of the constellation Ursa Major is also attributed to Thales, as well as the timings of the solstices and equinoxes. He was also an engineer, known for having allowed the Lydian army to cross the Halys River. Plutarch wrote that "at that time, Thales alone had raised philosophy from mere speculation to practice."
The main source concerning the details of Thales's life and career is the doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, in his third-century-AD work Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers. While it is all we have, Diogenes wrote some eight centuries after Thales's death, and his sources often contained "unreliable or even fabricated information". It is known Thales was from Miletus, a mercantile city settled at the mouth of the Maeander River, near modern Didim, Turkey.
The dates of Thales's life are not exactly known, but are roughly established by a few datable events mentioned in the sources. According to the historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, Thales predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC. Assuming one's acme (or floruit) occurred at the age of 40, the chronicle of Apollodorus of Athens, written during the 2nd century BC, therefore placed Thales's birth about the year 625 BC.
While the probability is that Thales was as Greek as most Milesians, Herodotus described Thales as "a Phoenician by remote descent". Diogenes Laërtius references Herodotus, Duris, and Democritus, who all agree "that Thales was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the Thelidae who are Phoenicians and amongst the noblest descendants of Cadmus and Agenor" who had been banished from Phoenicia and that Thales was enrolled as a citizen in Miletus along with Neleus.
However, Friedrich Nietzsche and others interpret this quote as meaning only that his ancestors were seafaring Cadmeians from Boeotia. It is also possible that he was of mixed ancestry, given his father had a Carian name and his mother had a Greek name. Diogenes Laërtius seems to also reference an alternative account: "Most writers, however, represent him as a genuine Milesian and of a distinguished family". Encyclopedia Britannica (1952) concluded that Thales was most likely a native Milesian of noble birth and that he was certainly a Greek.
Diogenes continues by delivering more conflicting reports: one that Thales married and either fathered a son (Cybisthus or Cybisthon) or adopted his nephew of the same name; the second that he never married, telling his mother as a young man that it was too early to marry, and as an older man that it was too late. Plutarch had earlier told this version: Solon visited Thales and asked him why he remained single; Thales answered that he did not like the idea of having to worry about children. Nevertheless, several years later, anxious for family, he adopted his nephew Cybisthus.
The culture of Archaic Greece was heavily influenced by those of the Levant and Mesopotamia. It is said Thales was engaged in trade and visited either Egypt or Babylonia. However, there is no strong evidence that Thales ever visited countries in the Near East, and the issue is disputed among scholars. Visits to such places were a commonplace attribution to various philosophers by later writers, especially when these writers tried to explain the origin of their mathematical knowledge, such as with Thales or Pythagoras or Eudoxus.
Several ancient authors assume that Thales, at one point in his life, visited Egypt, where he learned about geometry. It is considered possible that Thales visited Egypt, since Miletus had a permanent colony there (namely Naucratis). It is also said that Thales had close contacts with the priests of Thebes who instructed him, or even that he instructed them in geometry. It is also possible Thales knew about Egypt from accounts of others, without actually visiting it.
Aside from Egypt, the other mathematically advanced ancient civilization before the Greeks was Babylonia, another common destination for a mathematically minded philosopher.
Historians Roger L. Cooke and B.L. Van der Waerden come down on the side of Babylonian mathematics influencing the Greeks, citing the use of e. g. the sexagesimal system (or base 60). Cooke notes "This relation, however, is controversial." Other historians, such as D. R. Dicks, take issue with the idea of Babylonian influence on Greek mathematics. For until around the time of Hipparchus (c. 190–120 BC) their sexagesimal system was unknown.
Herodotus wrote that the Greeks learned the gnomon from the Babylonians. Thales's follower, Anaximander, is credited with introducing the gnomon to the Greeks. Herodotus also wrote that the practice of dividing the day into 12 parts, and the polos, came to the Greeks from the Babylonians. Yet this too is disputed, for example by historian L. Zhmud, who points out the gnomon was known to both Egyptians and Babylonians, the division of the day into twelve parts (and by analogy the year) was known to the Egyptians already in the 2nd millennium BC, and the idea of the polos was not used outside of Greece at this time.
Thales is recognized as one of the Seven Sages of Greece, semi-legendary wise statesmen and founding figures of Ancient Greece. While which seven one chooses may change, the seven have a canonical four, which include Thales, Solon of Athens, Pittacus of Mytilene, and Bias of Priene. Diogenes Laërtius tells us that the Seven Sages were created in the archonship of Damasius at Athens about 582 BC and that Thales was the first sage.
The sages were associated with the Delphic maxims, a quote or maxim attributed to each one, inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Thales has arguably the most famous of all, gnothi seauton or know thyself. According to the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, the proverb is both "applied to those whose boasts exceed what they are" and "a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitude."
Diogenes Laërtius relates several stories of an expensive, gold tripod or bowl that is to go to the most wise. In one version (that Laërtius credits to Callimachus in his Iambics) Bathycles of Arcadia states in his will that an expensive bowl "'should be given to him who had done most good by his wisdom.' So it was given to Thales, went the round of all the sages, and came back to Thales again. And he sent it to Apollo at Didyma, with this dedication...'Thales the Milesian, son of Examyas [dedicates this] to Delphinian Apollo after twice winning the prize from all the Greeks.'"
According to Diogenes Laërtius, Thales gained fame as a counselor when he advised the Milesians not to engage in a symmachia, a "fighting together", with the Lydians. This has sometimes been interpreted as an alliance.
Croesus was defeated before the city of Sardis by Cyrus the Great, who subsequently spared Miletus because it had taken no action. Cyrus was so impressed by Croesus’ wisdom and his connection with the sages that he spared him and took his advice on various matters. The Ionian cities should be demoi, or "districts".
He counselled them to establish a single seat of government, and pointed out Teos as the fittest place for it; "for that," he said, "was the centre of Ionia. Their other cities might still continue to enjoy their own laws, just as if they were independent states."
Miletus, however, received favorable terms from Cyrus. The others remained in an Ionian League of twelve cities (excluding Miletus) and were subjugated by the Persians.
Early Greeks and other civilizations before them often invoked idiosyncratic explanations of natural phenomena, attributing them to the will of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Instead, Thales aimed to explain natural phenomena via rational hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves— logos rather than mythos.
Aristotle advocated the view that Thales was the first natural philosopher (physiologoi), although this position was typically not adopted among other writers, even those within Aristotle's Peripatetic school, until the view became more prominent among eighteenth-century historians. Also, while the other Seven Sages were strictly law-givers and statesmen and not speculative philosophers, Plutarch noted: "it would seem that Thales was the only wise man of the time who carried his speculations beyond the realm of the practical."
Thales's most famous idea was his philosophical and cosmological thesis that all is water, which comes down to us through a passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics. In the work, Aristotle reported Thales's theory that the arche or originating principle of nature was a single material substance: water. Aristotle then proceeded to proffer a number of conjectures based on his own observations to lend some credence to why Thales may have advanced this idea (though Aristotle did not hold it himself).
While Aristotle's conjecture about why Thales held water as the originating principle of matter is his own, his statement that Thales held it to be water is generally accepted as genuinely originating with Thales. Writing centuries later, Diogenes Laërtius also states that Thales taught "Water constituted (ὑπεστήσατο, 'stood under') the principle of all things."
According to Aristotle:
That from which is everything that exists and from which it first becomes and into which it is rendered at last, its substance remaining under it, but transforming in qualities, that they say is the element and principle of things that are. …For it is necessary that there be some nature (φύσις), either one or more than one, from which become the other things of the object being saved... [The first philosophers] do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principles. Thales the founder of this type of philosophy says that it is water.
Aristotle further adds:
Presumably he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that heat itself is generated from moisture and depends upon it for its existence (and that from which a thing is generated is always its first principle). He derived his assumption from this; and also from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature, whereas water is the first principle of the nature of moist things."
The 1870 book Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology noted:
In his dogma that water is the origin of things, that is, that it is that out of which every thing arises, and into which every thing resolves itself, Thales may have followed Orphic cosmogonies, while, unlike them, he sought to establish the truth of the assertion. Hence, Aristotle, immediately after he has called him the originator of philosophy brings forward the reasons which Thales was believed to have adduced in confirmation of that assertion; for that no written development of it, or indeed any book by Thales, was extant, is proved by the expressions which Aristotle uses when he brings forward the doctrines and proofs of the Milesian. (p. 1016)
Most agree that Thales's stamp on thought is the unity of substance. Not merely the empirical claim that all is water, but the deeper philosophical claim that all is one. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, wrote:
Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and the womb of all things. Is it really necessary for us to take serious notice of this proposition? It is, and for three reasons. First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, because contained in it, if only embryonically, is the thought, "all things are one."
Megiston topos: apanta gar chorei (Μέγιστον τόπος· ἄπαντα γὰρ χωρεῖ.)
The greatest is space, for it holds all things.
— attributed to Thales
Thales was known for introducing the theoretical and practical use of geometry to Greece, and has been described as the first person in the Western world to apply deductive reasoning to geometry, making him the West's "first mathematician". He is also credited with the West's oldest definition of number: a "collection of units", "following the Egyptian view".
Text from the Wikipedia article “Thales of Miletus”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.