Studying the Beginning of Philosophy through the Milesians

Learning about the first philosophers like the Milesians was important to me for understanding the characteristics of the history of philosophy. The school of thought of the Milesians taught that the explanation to their questions and inquiries were found in the principles of matter. The three Milesians Patricia Curd talks about in her book A Presocratics Reader are Thales (the founder), Anaximander (his pupil), Anaximenes (the youngest). It was helpful for me to compare them to understand the nature of the beginnings of philosophy.

Previously, it was implied that philosophy surged from the mytho-poetic traditions that inspired the earliest philosophers. Can we say that this is true from Thales, the “founder of philosophy”? The three Milesians knew that the question to all their answers relied on a principle. The principle is differently defined per each philosopher. Thales’ principle is that water is the basic unit of life, the arkhē, the beginning and origin. This sounds like mytho-poetic tradition to me. Water was important to the greek mythology as we all know. Thales makes an argument out of this observation of the nature of water as the  provider of life. Although we do not have any written material of his, later philosophers made arguments with his ideas. So, we can continue to see how the cultural traditions of these greek philosophers triggered them to philosophize.

Even though the school of thought of the Milesians stuck to the principle of matter as the explanation to life, we can see that they differ on their final conclusions. We know that Thales chose water as the basic unit of life. Anaximander recons that the aperion is the origin. His origin is the boundless material, it doesn’t have a beginning, it is eternal. Anaximenes believes that it is a thick air, the aēr, what gives rise to everything visible, the thickness of this air determines what object it gives birth to. Although the three arkhēs are different for these philosophers there is a common train of thought that tells us a lot about the nature of philosophy.

The three focused on a type of matter. It is the characteristic of each matter that makes them appealing to each philosopher. I thought it was interesting to see that one of the characteristics for all three matters was this sense of motion and change required. Thales describes this motion as soul. Anaximander describes this motion as something necessary for his infinite matter, this motion is part of the natural orderly change of matter.  Anaximenes describes this motion or change what makes aēr’s density become different objects. For the philosophers to consider a matter as an origin, this matter had to undergo some kind of motion, or change. But the matter stays the same throughout this change. It makes sense that for something to give life its initial, most original, form has to undergo change. For example water in the form of steam and ice, they are both final states of the same matter.  I found it valuable to have identified this way of thinking among the three philosophers because it shows us, in the present, the way minds were constructed back then.

I will end by saying that even though the origin of life for those philosophers looks so different from what we now consider the origin, their conjectures are still valuable because they brought us closer to the place we are now. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle himself says regarding the study of the matters and studying the predecessors that philosophized about them “and so it will be useful to our present inquiry to survey them: neither we will find some other kind of cause or we will be more confident about the ones now being discussed.” (Curd 14) It is essential to keep learning about how human beings first started thinking to be able to evaluate how we have what we have now.