Milesian School

The claim

There is a single underlying stuff — an arche — out of which everything comes and into which everything returns, and it can be named and argued about.

What it held

What the Milesians did is easier to state than to appreciate, because everyone since has done it. They asked what the world is made of, and answered without reference to any god's intention. Thales said water. Anaximander said the boundless, the apeiron, refusing to name any familiar substance as first. Anaximenes said air, thickening into water and earth and thinning into fire.

The answers matter less than the shape of the question. Each is offered as a claim that could be argued with, and each was: Anaximander appears to be correcting Thales, and Anaximenes to be correcting Anaximander. That is a tradition of criticism rather than a lineage of revelation, and it is the reason this small trading city keeps being called the beginning of philosophy.

Anaximander went further than a first substance. He held that the earth hangs unsupported at the centre of things, held by nothing, because it has no reason to move in one direction rather than another — the first argument from symmetry in the record, and made without instruments.

How it argued

Reasoned assertion about nature, offered publicly and open to correction. No appeal to myth, no invocation of the poets, no claim to revelation.

What it was arguing against

Hesiod and the theogonies, which explained the world's order as the outcome of divine births and quarrels. Not by refutation — by simply not doing it.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the arche is one of the familiar elements or something indefinite behind them, which is the whole distance between Thales and Anaximander. Also whether change happens by condensation, as Anaximenes said, or by separating out from an original mixture.

Common misconceptions

That Thales was claiming everything is literally H2O. The claim is about a fundamental substance, and water was chosen partly because it is visibly found as solid, liquid and vapour. And the Milesians were not atheists: Thales is reported as saying all things are full of gods.

How it began

Miletus was the richest Greek city of its day, trading across the Black Sea and Egypt, and the ideas arrive with the goods. Egyptian land measurement and Babylonian astronomy are both in the background.

What became of it

Miletus was destroyed by Persia in 494 BCE and the school did not survive it. Its questions did, taken up by Heraclitus, the Eleatics and the atomists.

Lasting influence

Every subsequent attempt to explain nature naturalistically descends from it. Aristotle's history of philosophy begins here, which is largely why we call it the beginning at all.

Why it still matters

It is the clearest available case of what it looks like when a question changes from religious to investigable, which is a transition still going on in other fields.

Put another way

Someone at a fire asking not who lit it but what it burns.

Where to start

Kirk, Raven and Schofield's The Presocratic Philosophers. There is no primary text to read.

The surprising bit

Thales is said to have cornered the olive-press market after predicting a good harvest, to prove that a philosopher could be rich if he thought it worth the trouble.

In their own words

Connections

Influenced

Heraclitean School, Eleatic School, Atomism

The verdict

Three men in one city, none of whose books survive, who changed what a question about the world could be.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy