Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 28 November 2008

Introduction

In the standard account of the history of Western philosophy, the enterprise begins in 624 BCE in ancient Greece with the birth of Thales (THAY-lees). Thales and his two successors, Anaximander (an-AX-ih-man-der) and Anaximenes (an-ax-IH-men-ees), were based out of the city of Miletus (my-LEE-tus), and hence they are known collectively as the Milesian (my-LEE-zhin) philosophers. They are among the first of the so-called Presocratic philosophers, which consists of most of the philosophers who were born before Socrates (though some managed to outlive him).

The geography of Miletus is worth noting, because when we say philosophy began in ancient Greece, it is not Athens, or even the Greek mainland, that we speak of. If, back in the late 7th or early 6th century, you sailed east from the Greek mainland, crossing the Aegean Sea until you hit the coast of what is now called Anatolia, you would have landed in a region then known as Ionia, which consisted of a league of Greek colonies. Miletus, situated a little bit south of Ephesus, was one of these colonies. To the east of Ionia was the kingdom of Lydia, which actually ended up conquering Ionia; even further to the east was the Persian Empire, which in turn ended up conquering both Lydia and Ionia.

Let's take a quick look at what the Milesians are purported to have said.

Thales

Thales (ca. 624-546 BCE) is most noted for three claims: (i) everything is made of water; (ii) everything is full of gods; and (iii) magnets have souls. What does all of this mean?

The most popular interpretation of the first claim is that Thales literally believed everything is made of water. How could this be? Well, you have to put yourself back into an ancient Greek mindset. By tradition, most people believed that everything consisted of four fundamental elements: earth, air, water, and fire. These elements could transform into the apparently diverse kinds of things we experience in our everyday lives. Thales's innovation was to argue that that there was actually only one kind of thing underlying everything; even earth, air, and fire are just different manifestations of water. Why would he say this? Aristotle speculates that Thales saw how things like plants grow when you give them water, as though the water is being transformed into the solid structure of the plant. It might also be that Thales noticed that water has three phases; it is, in fact, the only substance an average person (in a climate like Ionia's) would experience variously as a liquid, a solid, and a gas. Perhaps he extrapolated from this that water could become so solid that it would become rock or metal, or so vaporous that it would become air or fire. It is difficult to know, but the standard story presumes that he drew this conclusion by reasoning from his observations, and this, as we will see, is critical for explaining why we think Thales counts as a philosopher at all.

How about the claim that everything is full of gods? This claim is even more obscure, and few commentators seem to know what to do with it. Let's talk about the third claim, and come back to the second afterwards.

Magnets behave very strangely when compared to other metal things. They almost seem to behave like living things, as though there are objectives that they are trying to accomplish, things that they seek out. Thales took this as evidence that magnets have souls. Ancient Greeks drew the distinction between living and nonliving things by attributing souls to the living things: anything without a soul would be inert, anything with a soul would be active. It is presumed that Thales did not necessarily think that souls were extra things added to the material, as though you would release a ghost if you destroyed a magnet, but rather that the active aspect is something inseparable from the material. Aristotle would run with this kind of idea more than two hundred years later, when he argued that the soul is actually the organization of matter in a fashion that allows it to seek out an end.

Now that we have talked about magnets and souls, we may have a clue as to what Thales meant by his second claim. If we understand gods to be appropriately synonymous with souls, then Thales may just be averring that everything behaves purposefully, though perhaps not always as obviously so as living creatures (or magnets). Why, then, would he use the word gods instead of souls? Perhaps to express a certain reverence towards the cosmos; if one thinks that all of nature, down to rocks and pebbles, is animate, it is a very short step towards thinking of it as divine. Is this interpretation of Thales speculative? Well, yes, assuredly.

Anaximander

Anaximander (ca. 610-546 BCE) apparently agreed with Thales that there must be one fundamental thing underlying everything else, but he disagreed with the contention that it was any of the four familiar elements. Instead, Anaximander posited that it was something which he called the apeiron, which translates into "boundless" or "infinite." Anaximander actually offered a  cosmological model, in which there is initially nothing except the apeiron, but then different elements spontaneously begin to separate out of the apeiron. Whether Anaximander means that everything is fundamentally composed of apeiron, or just that everything started out with apeiron, is not entirely clear.

Anaximenes

Finally, there is Anaximenes (ca. 570-525 BCE), who argued that everything was made of one of the four traditional elements, after all, only the element in question was air rather than water. A lot of people consider Anaximenes a step backwards from Anaximander, a naive retreat from the sophisticated back to the crude and familiar. Others think this is not at all fair. Anaximenes, it is argued, thought that the concept of apeiron was too obscure to be helpful, and realized that the hypothesis that everything is made of air accounted better for what he observed. He also developed an account of how it is air seems to transform into other substances: it is all a matter of density, with sufficiently compressed air becoming water and earth, and sufficiently rarified air becoming fire. This he inferred not through a flight of fancy, but through observations, such as by noticing that one's own breath can be either hot or cold, depending on how much one compresses the stream of air with one's lips.

The Importance of the Milesians

At this point, you are probably about to make a solemn vow never to bother with philosophy again. If the Milesians made such outlandish claims, why do we think they were important? Why, in particular, would we consider them founders of an entirely new discipline? To understand the answer, we have to compare what the Milesians thought, and the methods by which they came to their conclusions, with what came before. What follows is the standard account. I have some reservations about it, but it is the standard account, so I'll put my reservations aside, at least for now.

First of all, before the Milesians came on the scene (and, for most people, also while the Milesians were on the scene, and even after they had left the scene) the standard way of viewing the world tied the behavior of nature with the activity of deities with personalities indistinguishable from those of humans. Because these deities were so volatile, an understanding of the behavior of nature could therefore go no deeper than to understand the moods and motives of the gods. The Milesians bucked this trend by developing a suitably naturalistic view of the world, in which a deeper understanding of nature could be had by analyzing the natural world into its fundamental constituents (water, or apeiron, or air), the behavior of which was not capricious at all. It is much less important that Thales thought the world was made of water, than that he thought it could be understood by appealing to the ordered behavior of a kind of substance, with no fundamental caprice. Anaximander, though dispensing with water, produces a full cosmological model in which the world as we know it is formed through purely mechanical activity. This kind of metaphysics is one of the things that signals the beginning of philosophy, because it makes nature amenable to investigation through scientific (or proto-scientific) methods. And it is really in these methods that philosophy reveals itself.

For the average ancient Greek, to attain an understanding of nature meant understanding the gods, but to understand the gods, one had to appeal to privileged sources of knowledge: to the authority of poets like Homer and Hesiod, who had been inspired by the Muses, or to oracles who received messages directly from the other gods. Thales and his successors presumably would have none of this, at least not when it came to understanding the structure of the world; instead, they appealed to that which everyone could perceive with their own senses, and that which everyone could (at least in principle) figure out through the power of their own reason. Thales, we recall, supposedly concluded that magnets have souls not because Zeus descended from the heavens to give him secret knowledge, but because it was (he thought) the best rational explanation for the observable behavior of magnets. Anaximenes takes air to be transformable into other elements as a rational extrapolation from the observed variation of the temperature of air according to compression. It is this reliance upon reason and publicly available evidence that defines philosophy, and it is thus the Milesian reliance upon these methods that truly entitles them to be called the first philosophers.