Nietzsche by Roy Jackson

Author:Roy Jackson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781473601512
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2014-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Case study: Thales

In looking at the history of philosophy in the Western world, Thales is a good starting point. He was a ‘Presocratic’, which simply means ‘one who comes before Socrates’ (although, in fact, a number of the ‘Presocratics’ were contemporary with Socrates). The Presocratics are important in understanding what philosophy is all about and how it can be distinguished from other disciplines. It is also important to understand that Plato did not emerge from a cultural vacuum; the kind of philosophical questions he was asking (What is knowledge? What is the best life? What is right and wrong?) were the same questions that philosophers before him were engaged with.

Thales was born in the town of Miletus on the Anatolian coast, just south of the island of Samos – the first ‘Greek’ philosopher was actually from what is now Turkey. However, during the time of Thales, Miletus was a Greek (or, rather, Hellenic) city-state, a modern city that was wealthy and, due to its involvement in commerce with other nations, aware of differing beliefs. Certainly, the fact that the city’s wealth and cosmopolitan nature allowed some people at least to engage in such leisurely activities as thinking and to have access to knowledge of other ideas goes some way in explaining why philosophy began when and where it did. But, also, in many respects the Presocratics were quite ‘modern’ in that their philosophical investigations were very ‘scientific’. The need for trade and commerce was a motivating force in trying to understand nature, astronomy and the art of navigation, and there is a story that Thales was so preoccupied with looking up at the stars that he once fell into a pothole as a result.

Thales’ conclusion that the world consists of water is wrong, of course, but the important point here is that he does get us to question whether the world is really as it seems: that there are fundamental features of the universe that are not immediately accessible to the senses or to ‘common sense’. Where the Greek myth-makers such as Homer and Hesiod looked for explanations with the gods, Thales looked for more natural explanations.

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