Thales of Miletus was the first philosopher of the Western tradition, active around 585 BC in the port city of Miletus, in Ionia. He was the first to answer the question about Arché, the principle of all things: for him, it was water.
The answer: everything comes from water
Thales observed that water is the only substance that appears in all states before our eyes: hard as ice, liquid in the river, almost air when it evaporates. He also noticed that food is moist, that the seed of life is moist, that heat is born from moist things. Hence he concluded that water must be the versatile material from which everything else is made, and to which everything else ultimately turns. It is also to him that tradition attributes the prediction of a solar eclipse, which reinforces his reputation as a man who looked at the sky and the world with unusual attention.
Why the answer matters less than the question
Thales' answer is wrong, water is not the beginning of everything. But that almost doesn't matter in light of what he actually did: he changed "which god made the world?" for "what is the single substance beneath all substances?". Before him, the origin of things was explained by a specific, unpredictable divine will. Thales assumed, without proving, that there is a single material principle, accessible by observation and reasoning, sustaining all the diversity we see. This is the genius gesture, not the water: he invented the right question, and a right question is worth more than a thousand ready-made answers.
The detail that almost everyone gets wrong about Thales
A phrase attributed to Thales is often confusing: "All things are full of gods" (apud Aristotle, On the Soul, I, 5, 411a7). It's not a contradiction, it's the key to understanding what actually changed with him. The divine was not expelled from the world, it was dissolved within it: it stopped being a personal god who decides on a whim and became an order, a law that permeates things. Thales was not an atheist, he just displaced the place of the sacred, and it is this displacement, more than water, that opens the door to everything that Greek philosophy would do after him.
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Who was Thales of Miletus?
The first philosopher of the Western tradition, active in Miletus around 585 BC. He became famous for saying that water was the Arché, the beginning of all things, and for, according to tradition, predicting an eclipse.
Why did Thales say that everything comes from water?
Because water is the only thing he observed in every state: solid as ice, liquid in the river, almost air when it evaporates. Food is moist, the seed of life is moist, heat is born from moisture. He concluded that water was the versatile material from which everything else is made.
Was Thales of Miletus right?
No, water is not the beginning of all things. But what makes him important is not the answer, but the reasoning: he changed "which god made the world?" for "what is the single substance behind all substances?", inventing the very format of the philosophical question.
Continue: Why philosophy was born in Miletus · What is Anaximander's Apeiron? · What is Arché? · Living the questions, by Rilke
Source class (NousCast Community): Quem foram os Pré-Socráticos? O momento em que o mundo deixou de ser explicado por deuses