ABSTRACT
Histories of science customarily begin with Greek philosophy, and Greek philosophy conventionally starts with Thales of Miletus. The Greeks themselves counted Thales as among the seven sages at the foundation of their culture, and among the philosophers of ancient Greece there were those who deliberately tried to explain how natural events occurred: they looked at nature, physis, and gave natural, physical explanations. A physikos was a recognised kind of person in ancient Greece.1
