---------------------------------------------------------------------------, "The achievement of Thales," notes W. K. C. Guthrie, "has been, represented by historians in two entirely different lights: on the one, hand, as a marvelous anticipation of modern scientific thinking, and on, the other as nothing but a transparent rationalization of a myth. For it is necessary that there be some nature (), either one or more than one, from which become the other things of the object being saved Thales the founder of this type of philosophy says that it is water. Instead of the origin of all things being some kind of element (air, water, fire, earth) Anaximander said that the origin or things and the underlying element of everything is "the Boundless" something outside of the normal four elements. 44, It consists of constructing two equal right-angled triangles, one of which, is situated on land and therefore can be measured. Everything originates from water and also disappears in the water. The eclipse of February 13, 608, B.C., took place 17 lunations after the previous one, and after 18, lunations the eclipse of July 30, 607 B.C., took place; that was the first, series. However, there was some ground for this paradox in the. What questions did Thales ask? - Ask a Philosopher Philosophy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those interested in the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Twenty years ago, the received view was that everything is made of hydrogen, which is two thirds of water. His astronomical studies show, it quite well.30 Tradition has attributed to Thales the explanation of solar, eclipses. 16, That Thales' thesis was of two parts--in one form or another of the idea, that all comes out of water and is resolved into water--is confirmed. If I remember Russells Short History of Western Philosophy correctly, Russell unequivocally maintains that Thales was the first philosopher of note. We. The study of ratios became a more or less, deliberate program, Pythagoras's theorem and the proof of, This path was fruitful also in two other interdependent aspects. However, for this work's purposes it is Thales', approach that matters, not his separate achievements and statements. Who would have disputed something self-evident? rev2023.7.5.43524. However, we have enough, information to enable us to make judgments as to the structure of his, statement. The statement that everything is made of water is to be regarded as a scientific hypothesis, and by no means a foolish one. In particular, this leads to a generalized approach, toward the problem of change (is there anything stable), which inspired, Heraclitus's fruitful theories, and then Eleatic reaction to Ionian, philosophy, and, in turn, the reaction of atomists, and so on. It was this way of thinking that led to the formation of geometry as a, system of interdependencies. Thus, according to Pamphila's evidence quoted by, Diogenes Laertius (D.L.1.24), but naturally absent from Proclus's, commentary on the first book of Euclid's Elements, Thales also. 41 This statement implies not, only that he introduced geometrical studies into Greek usage, but also. triangles are equal, what happens to the angles when straight lines cross. The opinion according to which Thales, craftily made use of wisdom adopted from the East assumes a positive, answer to this question. Of course, the thesis that the new forms of, knowledge had their roots in the character of Greek political and social, life has been expressed many times. destruction and disappearance of many things. As previously mentioned, it relies on, contrasting Thales' untimely mature theory with the naive theory of, Anaximander. . Besides, it is necessary to take into account that neither Eudemus nor, Aristarchus, though both understood the nature of solar eclipses, could, have predicted them on the basis of their knowledge,37 and therefore, they are not likely to have done their best to ascribe their knowledge to. Too little is known of Thales to make it possible to reconstruct him at all satisfactorily, but of his successors in Miletus much more is known, and it is reasonable to suppose that something of their outlook came from him. Furthermore, at that time, he was known as one of the seven sages. The first is that they looked for naturalistic explanations of things and the second is that they used rational arguments to come to their conclusions. It must be, admitted that some of the facts of experience which scholars adduce, (like those of metallurgy, or the introduction of money) could support, the idea of all things' unity despite their apparent diversity after this idea, had already been [End Page 389] proposed. nevertheless gave an answer he needed to prove its correct- ness. Thales established a basis for this structure by making the transition. He believed that the principle of everything was water. concomitant equality of the segments into which the circle is divided, two by two). Why didn't Thales say the water is principle of matter, but the Thales is also believed to anticipated an eclipse of the sun - the one which occurred on 28th of May 585 B.C, according to Herodotus. 6 However, such observations, although they could probably lead to the assumption that there are a, number of interrelated transitions and circulations that connect separate, things (a common idea in ancient Indian philosophy), could not lead to, the conclusion that all things are modifications of one stuff. This explanation makes the. This Greek philosopher had the right idea, just too few elements all life depends on water - remove the water from a plant and it dies;depriveanimals waterand they dies; all seeds are themselves nothing but moisture; heat (in the form of sun and moon) is generated out of moisture and kept alive by it. Essentially, Thales' solution was improved, not re- placed. Something persists through that change. The claim that there is a single substance out of which everything else derived is commonly referred to as material monism: material because it claims that the source of all nature is something physical (as opposed to, say, something mental), and monism . In fact it is only in Aristotles Metaphysics that we have any evidence that Thales made this claim, and Aristotle then goes onto conjecture what he may mean by this. In the beginning, philosophy and science were in essence the same. everything Then it's easy to go from here to think water is the arche of everything: in being infinitely malleable into all forms. ; that was the second series. Like Thales, these subsequent thinkers would look for the primary element of matter, but unlike Thales, they would choose something different from water. Because of the determination of solstices and equinoxes, it's only fair to presume that Thales could have also known the length of a solar year. the indispensable concomitance of some fundamental properties. Seneca attributed to Thales the following theory: on the occasions when the earth experiences an earthquake, it is actually fluctuating because of the roughness of oceans. It, is significant that in the conclusion of Zaitsev's book we meet the, following words: Thales "was the first to feel the need of proving, geometrical statements that seemed self-evident." Besides, if we admit that Thales proved self-evident theses, the discrepancies are, I assert that proof comes from the demand for proof.The demand for, proof arises, on the one hand, in connection with solving a problem the, answer to which cannot be obtained by means of immediate observation, or measurement, and, on the other hand, in connection with the need to, submit an answer in the form of a substantiated and not an arbitrary, The information preserved by the textual tradition allows us to suggest, how the first geometrical proofs could have been given. In contrast, with Thales' thesis the claim for, authenticity comes into the interpretation of nature--and it is in this, respect that critical discussion became possible. "Properly speaking, we may date the very beginnings of, "theoretical" mathematics to the first proof of irrationality, for in, "practical" (or applied) mathematics there can exist no irrational, numbers." what it is destroyed (eis ho phtheiretai or [End Page 392]analuetai). Does the carrot blink out of being and into flesh? Let us consider some aspects that made it fruitful. Note the following quote from Aristotle: Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded of his views, seems to suppose that the soul is in a sense the cause of movement, since he says that a stone [magnet, or lodestone] has a soul because it causes movement to iron (De An. He points out that the attribution of such, a theory to Thales could result from a scholarly reconstruction of the, grounds for the recognized fact of Thales' prediction. Why would Russell choose water as an 'originary' principle rather than a 'matter' principle? I leave you the a quote about Thales from the the later Greek writer Diogenes Laertius (3rd century AD): This wise Thales died while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old, and the following inscription was placed on histomb. It fell from the sky, it was in the soil, and it was inside of plants. Later philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas would further develop these ideas of causation. therefore it was responsible in its essence. Origin of the Cosmos Influence on Later Philosophy References and Further Reading 1. on 25. )17 The fragment from Anaximander makes, us think that Thales said that all things originated from, were born out, of, water. Primary causation is the being of everything which has its origin in the divine, and secondary causation involves the creatures who are dependent on the divine. It should be noted that the solving of problems concerning the estimation, of the distance to an inaccessible object had been developed also in, Chinese mathematics, but this did not become a deductive system, analogous to the Greeks'--even though in Chinese mathematics one, encounters sporadic proofs. Earth floating on water via philipkay.wordpress.com. Thales gave both a logical scheme that overcame the difficulties, involved in thinking about the origin of the world, and a concrete, physical vision based on his extrapolation, that took into account the, analogy of real natural processes. It is not the case that "deductive mathematics, begins just that very moment when the knowledge obtained only from, practice ceases to be considered quite convincing: when the needof, proof appears even in cases where everyday practice gives, one would, think, a full explanation. Nothing directly attributed to Thales that has come down to us, but Aristotle does mention four views in his books: The earth rests on water. On the other hand, a person arranging, the material of his proof in a chain so that the transition from one link to, another would leave no room for doubt and would win common, recognition 53 would certainly want every link to be solid; after all, the, boundary between the evident and the not-quite-evident is not always, Geometrical truths are not deduced consecutively from one single, fundamental fact, but from a complex of these. In many ways, you could say that Thales changed the world, but what makes him widely popular are usually the theorems which revolutionized math. Why does water appear to be a common creative principle across Indo-European culture? hear that that year, the year of Damasias's archonship (582/581 B.C. Many assume that there is a, connection between Thales' thesis and the beginning of science. Miletus was a very busy and prosperous city on the western coast of the Aegean Sea.6 The prosperity and stability of Miletus provided fertile ground for philosophy to develop. include a book, Platon i Atlantida [Plato and Atlantis] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), and a number of articles on Greek intellectual history and. The very fact that, eclipses repeat after certain intervals of time was discovered by the, Babylonians; however, Babylonian astronomers also ascertained that, these intervals varied (6, 41, 47, 223 lunations, etc. What did Thales think was the arche/source of everything? The key concept: Y was made from X. Thales himself, in the, atmosphere of freed curiosity--solving fascinating problems pertaining to, issues beyond the limits of trivial experience, claiming recognition for his, brilliant intellectual abilities--was the first to recognize the requirements, for responsible judgment applicable to the question of the origin of the, world, to the puzzles of nature, as well as (true in lesser degree of, himself, and in greater degree of his followers) to the properties of, geometrical figures. Apparently, some other scholars have a similar feeling, and therefore they tend to, minimize Thales' innovation and consider his thesis about water as, merely one of a long array of traditional cosmogonies. It is not surprising for Thales to be reasoning about the, origin of things--this was a traditional subject dating back to ancient, cosmogonies. Should we imagine a scene where Thales, prophesied like an oracle? This form is a natural one in Greece, as a specific case of the, fundamental principle of Greek social organization. [End Page, 394] The "first cause," naturally, can be redefined. The doxographic tradition throws light on the contents of Thales', discovery: a solar eclipse happens when the moon, which is earthy by its, nature, finds itself on the straight line between us and the sun (11A17a, DK; Cicero Rep. 1.16.25; cf. The tale was the thing. In its essence, it describes something we all came to be from which we will never be able to truly grasp, but we can think about it and with a little bit of philosophical knowledge on our hands, it could become clearer what it actually means that we came to be from water. This theory describes the mechanism for, releasing the brakes on creative potential and for creating a social climate, in which every success of intellectual activity receives encouragement, independently of its practical applicability. Life and Sources The history of written Greek philosophy starts with Anaximander of Miletus in Asia Minor, a fellow-citizen of Thales. What Thales gives us is the first example of "material monism," i.e. An interpretation of the motives for Thales' thesis is not irrelevant to the, evaluation of its importance. supernatural forces (a state of mind clearly attested in Mimnermos frag. It seems that the only, comprehensive theory of the Greek miracle was advanced in the, remarkable book by A. I Zaitsev, Cultural Breakthrough in Ancient, Greece, referred to above. This, was a more fundamental case of the demand for proof, in comparison, with the solution of the problem concerning the distance to an, inaccessible object, though we should not disregard the similarity, between these two issues. of incommensurability (or irrationality) by Hippasus of Metapontum, who lived a century later than Thales, 47 to the first proof given by, Thales. (If the latter, then a, fundamental difference from Middle Eastern cosmogonies is obvious.) There are many reasons to object to this argument. In addition to the arche, the other thing that characterized the cosmos was movement. Why isn't Summer Solstice plus and minus 90 days the hottest in Northern Hemisphere? The concrete vision left many, questions without satisfactory answers, 24 and was soon replaced; but, the principle was accepted and has survived until the present, day--whether expressed in terms of atoms, matter, superstrings, or any. His publications. The Greeks believed that the cosmos was infused with life throughout. Eudoxus, Eratosthenes, and Archimedes, made considerable progress in this work in ancient times, while the great. The discovery of incommensurability was attended by the introduction, of indirect proof and, apparently in this connection, by the development, of the definitional system of mathematics.
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