The School of Miletos

In several places Aristotle lays stress on the difference between those whom he calls the “theologians,” who treat science under the form of myth, and the philosophers or “physiologists,” who set forth their reasons “in a demonstrative form,” whose wisdom, being of a more human kind, does not, like that of the others, affect an air of lordly solemnity, and seeks less to satisfy itself than to communicate itself to others. On both sides, the thinkers whom he thus contrasts are in his eyes the earliest thinkers. Now, the founder of the philosophy which he ascribes to the first philosophers was Thales. ¹ This formal and repeated testimony of Aristotle is not contradicted, but rather confirmed, by Theophrastos. ² For even though the latter declares that Thales had predecessors whom he merely surpassed, yet by including Prometheus among those predecessors he implicitly recognizes the originality of Thales. So, even if Thales is the continuer of the theogony-writers, even if he did not radically change the direction of their efforts, yet he is at least, for us as for Aristotle, the first who transformed the methods of research and exposition in their spirit.