ABSTRACT

It would appear that for Socrates, Ennius, and La Fontaine there is no more arrogant class than the philosopher who preoccupies himself with the world above at the expense of things of the world.5

Given the ironic nature of his fall, it is perhaps surprising that Thales has managed to retain his status as one of the founders of natural philosophy. No doubt, Thales’s status within the discipline of philosophy is owed in part

to the radical shift in thinking he and his fellow pre-Socratics signaled when they rejected mythology in favor of more rational ways of understanding reality. Although none of his writings exist today, we know from multiple accounts that Thales had keen interests in astronomy and mathematics. As chronicled in Herodotus, Thales became famous in Miletus for predicting an eclipse of the sun that occurred on May 8, 585 BCE.6 While in Egypt, he also correctly calculated the height of a pyramid by measuring the length of its shadow, “having observed the time when our own shadow is equal to our height”7 Through experiments such as these, Thales and his fellow pre-Socratics helped invent a new materialist approach for philosophy, one deeply attuned to issues of reality and material reality in particular. As Craig R. Smith explains, “In short, they [Thales and the pre-Socratics] changed the focus of human attention from the gods to matter-and hence to earthly externalities.”8 That Thales himself would end up dying from his fall into the well makes his contributions to materialist philosophy all the more ironic, of course-a point not lost on Plato who relishes yet another opportunity to poke fun at the pre-Socratics in the Theaetetus. But the irony of the fall is just one of the reasons why Thales’s status as one of the founders of philosophy continues to hold sway in many quarters today. In addition to his comical demise, what makes the Thales story such a foundational one for philosophy is how it manages to capture a longstanding tension within the history of philosophy itself, one that sees philosophers, on the one hand, as concerned with (divine, xed, or eternal) truth and, on the other, with the realities of worldly existence-the “things that lie at his feet and before his eyes,” as Socrates puts it.9 The real irony in the Thales story, perhaps even its tragedy, is not that Thales forgets to practice what he preaches, but that he cannot nd a way to do both at the same time. This is the tension that more or less dened philosophical thought during the classical period and it is one that continues to haunt philosophy to this day: how to strike the appropriate balance between the abstract and the worldly, the celestial and the things that are.