The First Western Enlightenment
We often read those cliché references, such as, who is the father of philosophy, the father of science, of astronomy, and so on. Thales of Miletus has been called by scholars the father of science. Probably because he was the earliest thinker to seek naturalistic explanations of the phenomena, away from intervention by the gods, showing the way towards scientific endeavor. We might say that Thales marked the beginning of the first western enlightenment.
Miletus was a Greek city on the coast of Ionia, an ancient region on the western coast of present-day Turkey, the region nearest Smyrna or Izmir. Miletus was among the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities, until the middle 6th century BCE when it was captured by the Persians who sold all women and children into slavery, killed all adult men, and expelled all young men as eunuchs, to ensure that no Miletus citizen would be born again. The city was freed by the Greeks twenty years later and then recaptured by the Persians, until its liberation in 334 BCE by the forces of Alexander the Great.
In the 6th century BCE, Miletus became the center of the earliest School of Philosophy, that became known as the Milesian School, focusing on the material constitution of the world and on naturalistic, as opposed to supernatural explanations of natural phenomena.
Thales of Miletus (c. 620 — c. 546 BCE) is the earliest of the Milesian School. He lived 250 years before Aristotle, and like Aristotle, he was a true polymath, investigating almost all areas of knowledge. Philosophy, history, science, mathematics, astronomy, engineering, geography, and politics. It is not certain that Thales wrote anything, and his ideas are known to us from accounts of later Greek writers, including Aristotle, who referred to Thales as The First Philosopher.
Thales, according to Aristotle, was chiefly concerned with the First Cause, the essential substance that is the origin of all other matter. He believed that all matter consists of water and the Earth is a flat disk floating on a vast sea. Thales was a skilled astronomer and mathematician, and it is said that he predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BCE. He was…
