ABSTRACT
Without making clear what one understands by ‘origins’ – and several legitimate answers can be given to this question – it might be difficult to answer the question about the origins of Greek philosophy. But one of the least debatable beginnings is to be found in the series of distinctive cosmologies that develop in Miletus at the beginning of the sixth century BC. These cosmologies exhibit two features in comparison with the cosmo-theogonies from which they distance themselves, but of which they are the heirs and undoubtedly still bear traces:2 a secularization of the actors in the story, who are no longer the traditional gods of the pantheon, and a considerable impoverishment of the content, which tends to exclude the entire practical (moral, social, political) dimension that was on the agenda of ancient cosmogonies, for the purpose of focusing on the world alone and on the ‘things’ of which it is composed. ‘Nature’ is the traditional term, both ancient and modern, used to classify this new domain. It has its own complexities, but when Socrates later claims to have reintroduced an interest in human affairs, thus paradoxically reestablishing a link with ‘myth,’ which the ‘philosophers of nature’ had set aside, he certainly captures a dominant tendency in their undertakings.
