PHILOSOPHY BEGINS WITH THALES According to Bertrand Russell, philosophy begins with Thales, a Milesian, from the city of Miletus, a city in Western Anatolia where the Meander river used to meet the sea. In or around the 6th century BC a radical change in the way we think about the world seems to have occurred, which is conventionally seen as the beginnings of philosophy: an intellectual sense of wonder at the sheer fact of existence, and, consequently, a conviction that our normal ways of construing the world are profoundly mistaken. In hindsight, one could call this an awareness of radical inauthenticity which stems from the achievement of a degree of distance from the world. Russells first philosopher, Thales, like his successors in the Milesian school, of which he was, in the early 6th century, the founder, was a dedicated observer of the natural world: he made discoveries in astronomy - he is said to have correctly predicted an eclipse of the sun in 585 BC - and used mathematics to address problems in engineering. He posited that the primary principle of all things, that from which they originate and to which they return, was water, a conclusion which it is assumed he derived from the obvious transitions of water between solid, liquid and gaseous states, and its omnipresence in living things.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:43:57 +0000