Introduction
The Scientist-Philosophers of Miletus
One of the great significant steps in the development of human thought took place at the Ionian city of Miletus in the six century B.C.E. Miletus was then a thriving seaport on the lower shore of the Aegean Sea, in what is now southwestern Turkey, about midway between the Greek islands of Samos to the north and Cos to the south. Its location together with its harbor facilities made it an important center of maritime commerce in the ancient world, and as a natural consequence it enjoyed the benefits of much trading and ideas as well. An intelligent Milesian, being more or less constantly exposed to various tales and customs from abroad, would soon come to perceive the relative and therefore dubious nature of those tales of the gods and myths of cosmic beginnings on which he had been reared. Such challenges to traditional beliefs tend to stimulate fresh efforts of thought, provided there are thinkers capable of meeting the challenge. Miletus was fortunate in producing at least three such thinkers – Thales, his independent disciple, Anaximander, and the last known member of the school, Anaximenes.
These three ancient Milesian thinkers were philosophers and scientists at once. Fields of knowledge had not yet become compartmentalized, and any inquiry into the nature of things would normally express interest which today we would distinguish as philosophical, scientific, ethical, aesthetic and religious. Thales’ declaration that all things are full of gods, or that the gods are blended with all things, was not totally distinct from his explanation of things in terms of water; for water was to him a living substance with an aura of divine potentialities still clinging to the idea of it. Again, Anaximander’s explanation of natural change with the help of the ethical and religious idea of doing penance would not have appeared to him, as it would to us, a paradoxical combination of two diverse ideas, but a reasonable description of how the living world carries out its visible and teleologically oriented activities.
In what sense were these Milesian philosophers scientific? Not, to be sure, in the full sense of the world as accepted currently. The contemporary demands of maximum exactitude, of experimentally controlled verifications, and of intellectual economy, were unknown to them. Exactitude, by anything like common standards, was by no means characteristic of ancient investigators of nature; nor could it have possibly been so, in view of the fact that scientific thinking in the ancient world was predominately qualitative, and that the concept of identical units, on which quantitative analysis depends, was of little concern to them.
Nevertheless in a three-fold sense they were naturalistic and to that extent scientific. In the first place, they tried systematically to explain nature in terms of nature, instead of referring to the supposed will or caprice of supernatural beings. While Thales’ statements that the magnet "has soul" and that all things are full of gods may appear at first sight to run counter to this naturalistic commitment, yet if carefully interpreted they will serve to illustrate it. For neither the word "soul" (psyche) nor the word "god" (theos) is here intended to carry the older mythological implications. There is no suggestion of immortality when Thales speaks of soul, and little or no anthropomorphic attachment to his idea of god. He seems to be trying, in the absence of an adequate vocabulary, to point toward the notion which Aristotle was later to call "potentiality" or "potency" (dynamis). In both of his concretions of the idea Thales was expressing an awareness of the mystery of birth, growth, activity, and the unforeseen emergence of new qualities. Such ideas do break through the patterns of any naturalistic system and point to the unanswered questions that always extend indefinitely beyond the questions that get answered. But so far as our slim evidence can tell, they never tempted Thales to let his mind dwell upon the supernatural aspects; his focus and his emphasis kept their place and balance within, or just a little beyond, the world of nature as it can be experienced.
A second reason why the Milesian philosophers can be regarded as scientists is that they gave preference systematically, for perhaps the first time, to the kinds of observation that can be shared by virtually any interested and unprejudiced observer. The venerable prestige inspired utterances by prophets and of privileged knowledge which could be imparted only after initiation into the secret mysteries of religious cult was discarded. Thirdly, the Milesians began to make a practice of seeing the individual thing or event not as an isolated phenomena of interest in itself alone, but as representative and symptomatic of a class. A solar eclipse was of interest to Thales not only as an event which changed the tide of battle between the Medes and the Lydians, but more significantly in relation to his hypothesis about the cause of eclipses and to his intellectual faith that given the same conditions the same result would occur.
Thus it is not in their specific conclusions, not in their individual preferences for water or air or the unlimited as the ultimate explanatory principle, that the Milesians are important. It is rather in their new method of procedure, manifested in their new way of asking questions. They were teaching themselves how to ask "What?" instead of "Who?" and to ask "How?" instead of "With what intent and purpose?" These two revived modes of questioning took the more precise and metaphysical form: 1) "What is the primary stuff of which the world is constituted?" and 2) "How do the manifold and changing appearances come about?" The first question is of concern to all three of the Milesians; the second takes hold gradually. Basically the two questions are inseparable however, for to ask seriously what a thing is involves asking what it does; and their interplay, in one manner or another, may be seen as shaping the character of Greek metaphysics during at least the next two centuries.
In examining such proto-scientific inquiries, however, it is important to keep in mind certain characteristic differences of the early Greek intellectual perspective, particularly as represented by the two assumptions – that of the four basic elements and that of the primacy of qualitative opposites. The former assumption finds expression in Thales’ theory that water is the sole fundamental substance, all the various things and qualities of the world being mere transformations of it, as well as in Anaximenes’ theory of the primacy of air. The latter assumption, on the other hand, finds expression in Anaximander’s theory of the Boundless – that is, of an infinite reservoir of all possible qualities, from which one and only one of each pair of opposites comes into existence at any given time. One of the central tasks of subsequent Greek metaphysics then becomes to seek for principles of existence and change that are more fundamental than anything so contingent and perceptually familiar as the substances and qualities of everyday experience.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |