ABSTRACT
The heart of Michels’ critique was the notion that physics teaching was too often fragmented. It turns out that there is also a problem with fragments when we turn to the earliest chapters of science and natural philosophy. Take, for instance, the ancient Greek philosopher, Thales. Thales lived a long time ago, well before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He was born in the seventh century BC. By tradition, he was the “father” of science, the first to pursue and engage the sort of questions that mark the sciences. Unfortunately, we have only a hint of his teachings, as with these two fragments. The first teaching is that in the beginning all you needed was water, that land and air and life could have teased themselves out from the waters (see Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983b 6-11, 17-27 cited in Barnes, 1987, p. 63). We can understand how Thales might have explained this notion. He might have pointed to the silt that accumulates at the mouths of rivers, as the way land could emerge from water. He might have pointed to the bubbles that emerge as you boil water, as the way air could have come from water. And he might have pointed to mosquito larvae and other insect life in small puddles, as a sign that water can give birth to living things. Here is a reasonable hypothesis about the beginnings of things drawn from the mechanisms of nature. This is a plausible notion for the “father” of science.
