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Welcome to a new series of posts, where we will leisurely stroll down the history of philosophy (mostly Western philosophy), having one quick look at each of the major thinkers of the past three thousand years or so. Come along, enjoy the views, and meet the greatest minds of human history!
First, at the side of the path we’re following, sits old Thales of Miletus. Miletus was a great city, home of many a famous man, long before Athens became the centre of the Greek world. Almost all of the early Greek philosophers came from here. Not only Thales (~624–548), but also Anaximander, Anaximenes, Leucippos (who started the ancient theory of atoms), Hippodamos, who is the father of urban planning, and the first to say that streets should be built straight and cross each other at right angles; and, finally Aspasia, the mistress of Perikles and first lady of Athens at its most glorious moment in history. They all came from this little town on what is now the coast of Turkey.
There’s a Greek research site that has created a 3D model of ancient Miletus and has some beautiful maps and pictures of what it may have looked like. Here is one:
Screenshot of Ancient Miletus model. Head over to fhw.gr for more images and maps.
Thales of Miletus himself seems to have been more of a general-purpose scientist, rather than a typical philosopher. Wikipedia calls him a mathematician because much of what we know of him has to do in some way with geometry. He calculated the distance of ships and the height of pyramids by measuring triangles.
March 28: Thales Predicts a Solar Eclipse
On March 28, 585 BC, Thales of Miletus was supposed to have observed an eclipse of the Sun. A short history of the difficulty of knowing the date.
One day, somebody asked Thales (or so a story goes), if he was so clever, why wasn’t he rich? Thales, of course, being a philosopher, wasn’t interested in money; but the question annoyed him, and in order to show his critics that a philosopher could get rich if he wanted, he used his skills in predicting the weather to determine that the coming olive harvest would be more bountiful than ever. Without telling anyone, he rented all the olive presses around Miletus for the time of the harvest, and when people wanted to press their olives into oil, he made a healthy profit, proving to his doubters that a philosopher could, indeed, get rich if he wanted.
His philosophy itself has …
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