Ancient Philosophy · Part 2 · The first philosophers · B1–B2
The Milesians: Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes
Part 2 of Ancient Philosophy: in the city of Miletus, about 600 BCE, three men asked what everything is made of, and answered without telling stories about gods. Their answers were wrong, but their question changed the world. Reporting beliefs (Thales thought that…, Anaximander believed that…, Anaximenes claimed that…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the first philosophers, in a busy harbour city like ours: Miletus.
That you can ask “what is everything made of?” and look for an answer in the world, not in a myth.
Water, said the first. Something without limits, said the second. Air, said the third.
Miletus was a rich Greek trading city on the coast of Anatolia, with colonies around the Black Sea and contacts with Egypt, Lydia and Babylon. Here, in the 6th century BCE, three thinkers tried to explain the world by natural causes: Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes.
Thales probably wrote nothing. Anaximander wrote one of the first books in Greek prose; one sentence of it survives. Of Anaximenes, almost nothing survives in his own words. Most of what we know comes from Aristotle, writing two centuries later, and from his pupil Theophrastus.
Each of them looked for an archē, a “beginning” or basic principle from which everything comes. Their answers were wrong, but they began a new kind of thinking: explaining nature by nature.
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