ABSTRACT
Thales, nearly all agree, was the first Presocratic. But many have been reluctant to call him the first philosopher. Aristotle famously declares him a ‘founder of this type of philosophy’ (t∞w toiaÊthw érxhgÚw filosof¤aw, Metaph. I.3 983b20-1: 11 A 12 DK). The qualification is crucial, limiting Aristotle’s claim to theories about the material substrate in natural change. What he says Thales founded is thus more akin to science than to what most today call philosophy.1 Aristotle’s verdict has fostered another misconception, though not, I think, for tendentious reasons as some have alleged.2 Rather, the distortion stems mainly from a modern tendency to elevate Aristotle’s carefully circumscribed assessment into a summary verdict on Thales’ overall significance. As a result, we tend to emphasize the speculative side of his thought and to neglect the observational basis for the insights ascribed to him in our earliest sources, including Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle and his colleagues. Thales was clearly a very versatile thinker, a pioneer in the very pragmatic realms of commerce (A 10) and politics, both regional (A 4) and international (D. L. 1.25, cf. Hdt. 1.141), as well as engineering (A 6), surveying (A 21, cf. D.L. 1.27), and navigation (A 20). In fact, he was best known in antiquity for his observations of the sky. The famous story in Herodotus 1.74 (cf. A 4), that he foretold a solar eclipse, may be apocryphal, as some have argued.3 But there is solid evidence for other important insights based less on speculative imagination than careful observation and computation. Thales, it seems, pioneered the quantitative treatment of empirical data. Call him a philosopher or not, he fully deserves credit as the founder of Greek astronomy.
