Western Philosophy's weird beginnings

THALES, PYTHAGORAS AND HERACLITUS - BEST AND MOST ANCIENT

There was once a very ancient philosopher called THALES. He was born in Miletus, in modern Turkey. He was fascinated by water. He saw that water can be a solid, a liquid and a vapour. He worked out that all life needs moisture, and probably decided that the world's basic substance is water, or that 'all things are water'.
Why 'probably'?
- Because he lived in the seventh century BC and only a few fragments are left of his writing. People have guessed a lot of things about him, and have even forged ideas and claimed them to be his. He comes to us through a watery haze of time. But we think he was thinking about cause and effect, as well as looking for a basic substance that everything is made of.
Did he do experiments with water, like changing states?
-We don't know.
According to another ancient guy called Aetius, Thales said that 'god is in all things'.

What could he have meant by this? What do you think?

About fifty years later along came PYTHAGORAS, who lived on the Greek island of Samos. He founded a school so he could teach his ideas to a select little band of followers.
Do you like eating beans?
-Then you would not have wanted to go to his school. Beans were off the menu permanently. Pythagoras liked them too much to eat them.
In fact he had to pay his first pupil to attend!
But if you like maths then you would have learnt a lot there. Pythagoras thought the world is basically mathematical. He said, 'Everything is number' and 'Numbers are in everything'. Everything in nature changes, he reasoned, but numbers never change. He investigated patterns and relationships between numbers and shapes. He especially loved geometry and is famous for 'Pythagoras's Theorum' -although the Babylonians had probably worked this out before him.

Pythagoras said that numbers can't be seen or touched, but are always there.

What do you think?

An ancient guy called HERACLITUS also lived around these times. He had an unusual habit.
He would lie on the floor with one foot in the air.
He would move his foot around until the sun was quite behind it. When he got it right, he couldn't see the sun any more (a bit like a foot eclipse).
After a lot of thinking, this is what he said:

'The sun is as big as a foot!'

He could practise this party trick a lot (if he wanted to) because the sun shines fairly often in Ephesus, the place in Turkey where he came from.

DID YOU KNOW THAT...

In these ancient days there was no such thing as science?

You could say that these first philosophers were proto-scientists, or near-scientists because they were carrying out observations and then making up a theory to fit the observations. Some of them were doing investigations.

Good for you, guys! It's just a pity, Heraclitus, that you hadn't worked out that things look smaller as they get further away. Then you could have modified your theory a bit!

I use 'Ancilla to the pre-Socratic Philosophers' (by Kathleen Freeman) to get my facts right. This snazzy book tells me exactly what fragments of writing survive from these ancient times. We don't have any original writings from Pythagoras - but he talked a lot, and his ideas were passed on.

Pre-Socratic means 'the times before Socrates'. We'll come to Socrates himself later on.