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Greek natural philosopher, traditionally regarded as the first philosopher, born in Miletus. His mercantile journeys took him to Egypt and Babylon, where he acquired land-surveying and astronomical techniques, and is said to have predicted the solar eclipse in 585 BC. None of his writings survive, but Aristotle attributes to him the doctrine that water is the original substance from which all things are derived.

: For the French Defense Company, see Thales Group

Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC?ca. 546 BC), also known as Thales the Milesian, was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition as well as the father of science.

Life

Thales lived in the city of Miletus, in Ionia, now western Turkey. According to Herodotus (1.74) Thales predicted a solar eclipse, which has been determined by modern methods to have been on May 28, 585 BC. Pliny's (Natural History 2.53) places it in 584, which is considered close enough for verification purposes. According to Thales however, he obtained knowledge of the eclipse from Egyptian astronomers.

According to Diogenes Laertius (DL 1.37-38), the chronicle of Apollodorus says that Thales died at 78 in the 58th Olympiad. Diogenes Laertius says that Sosicrates said he was 90. The year of his birth was the first year of the 35th Olympiad, or 640 BC. Thales would have been about 40 during the eclipse.

Diogenes Laertius (1.22) and others say that Thales was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina and that they were of the Thelidae family (hence Thales), who were of noble Phoenician descent from Cadmus of ancient Thebes. After repeating a story that Thales had been naturalized, or recently enrolled as a citizen, Diogenes Laertius asserts that he was "a right-born Milesian".

When the Greeks settled Mitelus it included a Carian population. Thales' father's name is of the Carian type, like Cheramyes and Panamyes.

According to Diogenes Laertius (1.25-26) there are two stories about Thales' reproductive life, one that he married and had a son, Cybisthus or Cybisthon, or adopted his nephew of the same name. The second is 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.

The well-traveled Ionians had many dealings with Egypt and Babylon, and Thales may have studied in Egypt as a young man. In any event, Thales almost certainly had exposure to Egyptian mythology, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as to other traditions alien to the Homeric traditions of Greece. Perhaps because of this his inquiries into the nature of things took him beyond traditional mythology.

Thales involved himself in many activities, taking the role of an innovator. Diogenes Laertius (1.43-44) quotes letters of Thales to Pherecydes and Solon, offering to review the book of the former on religion, and offering to keep company with the latter on his sojourn from Athens. One story recounts that he bought all the olive presses in Miletus after predicting the weather and a good harvest for a particular year. political life had mainly to do with the involvement of the Ionians in the defense of Anatolia against the growing power of the Iranians, who were then new to the region. A king had come to power in neighboring Lydia, Croesus, who was somewhat too aggressive for the size of his army. The story is told in Herodotus, Book 1.

The Lydians were at war with the Medes, a remnant of the first wave of Iranians in the region, over the issue of refuge the Lydians had given to some Scythian soldiers of fortune inimical to the Medes. The war endured for five years, but in the sixth (the Battle of Halys) an eclipse of the sun (mentioned above) spontaneously halted a battle in progress.

It seems that Thales had predicted this eclipse. The Seven Sages were most likely already in existence, as Croesus was also heavily influenced by Solon, another sage. Whether Thales was present at the battle is not known, nor are the exact terms of the prediction, but based on it the Lydians and Medes made peace immediately, swearing a blood oath.

The Medes were dependencies of the Persians under Cyrus. He was stopped by the river Halys, then unbridged. The channels ran around both sides of the camp.

The two armies engaged at Pteria in Cappadocia. As the battle was indecisive but paralyzing to both sides, Croesus marched home, dismissed his mercenaries and sent emissaries to his dependents and allies to ask them to dispatch fresh troops to Sardis. Diogenes Laertius (1.25) tells us that Thales gained fame as a counsellor when he advised the Milesians not to engage in a symmachia, a ?fighting together?, with the Lydians. Herodotus says that Thales advised them to form an Ionian state; that is, a bouleuterion (?deliberative body?) to be located at Teos in the center of Ionia.

Ethics

The ethics of Thales can be estimated from the sayings attributed to him, reported in Diogenes Laertius. First, he recognizes a transcendental God, who has neither beginning nor end. In this form of polytheism the transcendental god expresses himself through gods, so that a man can say theoi and mean God.

Thales? However, don?t be rich badly (?????).

As to the spirit of the law, we find Thales expressing a rather well known principle for leading the best (??????) and most just (??????????) life:

?? ??????

?That for which we blame others, let us not do ourselves?

This rejection of hypocrisy resembles the foundational principle of Jewish law, ?Do not unto thy neighbor what is hateful to thyself.? After all, Hebrew and Phoenician are closely related, coming from a common ancestor about the time of Cadmus.

There is no known connection between Thales and any Hebrew speakers, however. The Old Testament supports an equal exchange of penalties: an eye for an eye, etc. According to Thales, a man can better bear adversity if he sees that his enemies are worse off.

There are certain other prejudices that some of us would find jarring today: men are better than women and Greeks are better than barbarians (this coming from a man whose proudest ancestor was dethroned in Thebes for being a barbarian).

Democratic, Thales was not. One story has him living with Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus. In his letter to Solon he offers to live elsewhere with Solon, seeing that the latter finds tyranny so offensive.

However, ancient philosophers in general tended to support or advocate benign tyranny, such as Plato?s ideal philosopher-king. They could not resist undertaking to reform the morals of the citizens, with well-known results.

In addition to his social ethic, Thales had a set of personal principles as well. According to Thales, a happy man is defined as one

?? Perhaps Thales did exercise, but he did not cultivate the body, as he preached not beautifying the appearance (?????) but practicing the good.

Sagacity

Diogenes Laertius (1.22) 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 same story, however, asserts that Thales emigrated to Miletus. Much as we would like to have a date on the seven sages, we must reject these stories and the tempting date if we are to believe that Thales was a native of Miletus, predicted the eclipse, and was with Croesus in the campaign against Cyrus.

Thales had no instruction but that of Egyptian priests, we are told. Moreover, the ordinary citizen, unless he was a seafaring man or a merchant, could not afford the grand tour in Egypt, and in any case did not consort with noble lawmakers such as Solon. Perhaps the source only meant that Thales had not been instructed in philosophy before proposing his theories about nature.

He did participate in some games, most likely Panhellenic, at which he won a bowl twice. He dedicated it to Apollo at Delphi. As he was not known to have been athletic, his event was probably declamation, and it may have been victory in some specific phase of this event that led to his being designated sage.

Another trophy, a tripod, is said to have been bestowed upon him and was given by him to another sage, going the rounds until it came back to him, at which time he dedicated it to Apollo. The oracle given to the Coans, in obedience to which the tripod was given to Thales (in this story), said that it should go to

??? ?'?????

?Who is wise in the things that are, the things that will be, and the things that were?

which is delivered in dactylic hexameter, the verse form of the Iliad, and contains a formula said of Calchas (Book I, first part), a Homeric mantis, or ?seer?. ?????

?Time is the wisest because it discovers everything?

The ability to predict also is a hallmark of good science, but not all the sages were known for their ability to predict.

The time, place and reasons for Thales being declared officially sage remain obscure, although the sources made some good guesses, one or more of which were probably right. ??????.

?Never did many words declare a mindful teaching: strive after a single wise thing, pick one thing you can depend on.?

It is ironic that a man with this principle had many and various achievements.

Death

Thales is said to have died in his seat, while watching an athletic contest.

Theories

Before Thales, the Greeks explained the origin and nature of the world through myths of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Phenomena like lightning or earthquakes were attributed to actions of the gods.

Nature as the principles in the form of matter

By contrast, Thales attempted to find naturalistic explanations of the world, without reference to the supernatural. He explained earthquakes by imagining that the Earth floats on water, and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves. Fire, for example, is not naturally hot, but is moved to hotness by the daemon of fire.

Thales, according to Aristotle, asked what was the nature (Greek physis, Latin natura) of the object so that it would behave in its characteristic way. Physis comes from phuein, "to grow", related to our word "be". (G)natura is the way a thing is "born", again with the stamp of what it is in itself.

Aristotle (Metaphysics 983b6) characterizes most of the philosophers "at first" (??????) as thinking that the "principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things", where "principle" is arche, "matter" is hule ("wood") and "form" is eidos.

"Principle" translates arche, but the two words do not have precisely the same meaning. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what modern scientists are trying to do in nuclear physics, which is a second reason why Thales is described as the first scientist.

Water as a first principle

Thales' most famous belief was his cosmological doctrine, which held that the world originated from water. Aristotle considered this belief roughly equivalent to the later ideas of Anaximenes, who held that everything in the world was composed of air.

The best explanation of Thales' view is the following passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics (983 b6). Thales says that it is water."

Aristotle's depiction of the change problem and the definition of substance could not be more clear. He was probably not far off, and Thales was probably an incipient matter-and-formist.

The essentially non-philosophic DL states that Thales taught as follows:

"Water constituted (???????????, "stood under") the principle of all things."

Heraclitus Homericus (Quaes. 22, not the same as Heraclitus of Ephesus) states that Thales drew his conclusion from seeing moist substance turn into air, slime and earth. It seems clear that Thales viewed the Earth as solidifying from the water on which it floated and which surrounded Ocean.

Beliefs in divinity

Thales applied his method to objects that changed to become other objects, such as water into earth (he thought). When asked why he didn?t die if there was no difference, he replied ?because there is no difference.?

Aristotle defined the soul as the principle of life, that which imbues the matter and makes it live, giving it the animation, or power to act. Accordingly, the sources say that Thales believed all things possessed divinities. In their zeal to make him the first in everything they said he was the first to hold the belief, which even they must have known was not true.

However, Thales was looking for something more general, a universal substance of mind. Zeus was the very personification of supreme mind, dominating all the subordinate manifestations. From Thales on, however, philosophers had a tendency to depersonify or objectify mind, as though it were the substance of animation per se and not actually a god like the other gods. Instead of referring to the person, Zeus, they talked about the great mind:

"Thales", says Cicero, "assures that water is the principle of all things; Deorum,"i.,10.)

The universal mind appears as a Roman belief in Virgil as well:

"In the beginning, SPIRIT within strengthens Heaven and Earth,

The watery fields, and the lucid globe of Lina, and then --

Titan stars; and mind infused through the limbs

Agitates the whole mass, and mixes itself with GREAT MATTER"

(Virgil:"Aeneid," vi., 724 ff.)

Geometry

Thales was known for his innovative use of geometry. For example, he said:

Megiston topos: hapanta gar chorei

?Place is the greatest thing, as it contains all things?

Topos is in Newtonian-style space, since the verb, chorei, has the connotation of yielding before things, or spreading out to make room for them, which is extension. Points, lines, planes and solids related by distances and angles follow from this presumption.

Some have argued that his geometry was simply a lucky happenstance resulting from empirical method worked out by the Babylonians or Egyptians and that he had no understanding of the basic principles involved. This overskeptical view neglects Thales own predilection for insight and also human nature. The mathematics of the times was not especially difficult or obscure and we have a convincing story from DL that when he had inscribed a right triangle in a circle he sacrificed an ox. Better known is Archimedes? Less dramatically, most of us just evidence the behavior associated with being startled.

Thales understood similar triangles and right triangles, and what is more, used that knowledge in practical ways. cit.) that he measured the height of the pyramids by their shadows at the moment when his own shadow was equal to his height. The length of the pyramid?s shadow measured from the center of the pyramid at that moment must have been equal to its height.

This story reveals that he was familiar with the Egyptian seqt, or seked, defined by Problem 57 of the Rhind papyrus as the ratio of the run to the rise of a slope, which is currently the cotangent function of trigonometry. It characterizes the angle of rise.

Our cotangents require the same units for run and rise, but the paryrus uses cubits for rise and palms for run, resulting in different (but still characteristic) numbers. We would go on to calculate the cotangent as 70 divided by 93.33 or.75003 and looking that up in a table of cotangents find that the angle of rise is a few minutes over 53 degrees.

Whether the ability to use the seqt, which preceded Thales by about 1000 years, means that he was the first to define trigonometry is a matter of opinion. More practically Thales used the same method to measure the distances of ships at sea, said Eudemus as reported by Proclus (?in Euclidem?). It would be hard to imagine civilization without these theorems.

It is possible, of course, to question whether Thales really did discover these principles. The sources are all that we have, even though they sometimes contradict each other.

Astronomy

According to Diogenes Laertius, Lobon of Argos wrote that he saw a statue of Thales at Miletus with an inscription describing him as "most senior in wisdom of all the astronomers (??????????)." The word, astrologoi, could mean what it does today, the divination of human affairs from the positions of the stars, but it also meant scientific astronomy, as in the case of Thales.

Thales was said to be able to predict eclipses and fix the solstices, which abilities made him a very useful man in business and politics. He was able to estimate the heights of the pyramids from the lengths of their shadows. He knew and taught the value of Ursa Minor to navigators, which the sources say he got from the Phoenicians, but as far as they were concerned, he "discovered" it.

We know that he observed the stars, as he is related to have fallen into a ditch one night. Plato makes the ditch a well and questioner a witty and attractive Thracian slave girl (Theaitetus 174a), unless we presume he fell twice and elicited the same sort of comment.

In terms of modern science, Thales had as high a batting average as anyone in the ancient world. His reason for the yearly flooding of the Nile, for example, was that seasonal winds blowing upstream impeded the water.

Interpretations

In the long sojourn of philosophy on the earth there has existed hardly a philosopher or historian of philosophy who did not mention Thales and try to characterize him in some way. Thales added something to these different collections of knowledge to produce a universality, which, as far as writing tells us, was not in tradition before, but resulted in a new field, science.

Ever since, interested persons have been asking what that new something is. Once an answer has been arrived at, the next logical step is to ask how Thales compares to other philosophers, which leads to his classification (rightly or wrongly).

Theory

The most natural epithets of Thales are "materialist" and "naturalist", which are based on ousia and physis. The Catholic Encyclopedia goes so far as to call him a physiologist, a person who studied physis, despite the fact that we already have physiologists. On the other hand, he would have qualified as an early physicist, as did Aristotle. They studied corpora, "bodies", the medieval descendants of substances.

Most agree that Thales' stamp on thought is the unity of substance, hence Bertrand Russell ("Wisdom of the West"):

"The view that all matter is one is quite a reputable scientific hypothesis."

"...But it is still a handsome feat to have discovered that a substance remains the same in different states of aggregation."

Russell was only reflecting an established tradition; for example, Nietzsche, in his "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", (則 3), 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. The arrival of uncertainty in the modern world made possible a return to Thales; for example, John Elof Boodin writes ("God and Creation"):

"We cannot read the universe from the past..."

Boodin defines an "emergent" materialism, in which the objects of sense emerge uncertainly from the substrate. Thales is the innovator of this sort of materialism.

Method

Thales represents something new in method as well. Edmund Husserl ("the Vienna Lecture") attempts to capture it as follows.

Classification

The term, Pre-Socratic, derives ultimately from Aristotle, a qualified philosopher ("the father of philosophy"), who distinguished the early philosophers as concerning themselves with substance.

Influence on others

Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers and therefore on Western history. Some believe Anaximander was a pupil of Thales. Early sources report that one of Anaximander's more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and that Thales advised him to travel to Egypt to further his philosophical and mathematical studies.

Many philosophers followed Thales' lead in searching for explanations in nature rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched them in the language of philosophy rather than of myth or of religion.

When you specifically look at the influence Thales had in the pre-Socrates era, he was one of the first thinkers who thought more in the way of logos than mythos. This lays the foundation of philosophy and its way of explaining the world in terms of abstract argumentation, and not in the way of gods and mythical stories.

Sources

Our sources on the Milesian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) were either roughly contemporaneous (such as Herodotus) or lived within a few hundred years of his passing. Compared to most persons, places and things of classical antiquity, we know a great deal about Thales. More than likely, the non-writing tradition about Thales is a complaint that such a famous man did not leave enough to be quoted by the secondary sources.

The main secondary source concerning the details of Thales' life and career is Diogenes Laertius (DL here), "Lives of Eminent Philosophers". DL does give us the extant primary sources on Thales (the two letters and some verses).

Most philosophic analyses of the philosophy of Thales come from Aristotle, an Academic and a professional philosopher, tutor of Alexander the Great. It is not clear that the theory of matter and form existed as early as Thales, and if it did, whether Thales espoused it.

See also

• Thales' theorem
  
• Know thyself
  

Trivia

• In the A&E television rendition of Nero Wolfe, one of the antagonists, a mathematician, uses the name "Milton Thales" as a pseudonym, a reference to Thales of Miletus.
  

References

• G.E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle
  
• Burnet, John, Early Greek Philosophy, The Meridian Library, 1957.