The Books
The Presocratic Philosophers
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The first named philosopher in the Western tradition — who predicted a solar eclipse, discovered a geometric theorem, and argued that everything in the universe is made of water: not because he was right, but because he asked the question.
Know thyself.Thales of Miletus — as attributed (also attributed to Solon and others)
Thales of Miletus was born around 624 BC in Miletus, a prosperous Greek city on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Almost nothing is known about his life with certainty. He left no writings; everything attributed to him comes from later sources, primarily Aristotle writing two centuries later. The accounts are often contradictory and probably embellished.
What is clear is that Aristotle treated him as the first philosopher — the first person in the Western tradition to attempt to explain natural phenomena through natural causes rather than through the actions of gods. This is the philosophical revolution that Thales represents: not any particular answer he gave, but the question he was asking. What is everything made of? What is the single underlying principle that unifies all natural phenomena? This is the question that philosophy and science have been working on ever since.
The stories told about him are instructive in different ways. He predicted a solar eclipse — probably in 585 BC, using Babylonian astronomical tables — demonstrating that celestial events are regular and predictable rather than divine interventions. He reportedly proved a geometric theorem about circles. He allegedly fell into a well while gazing at the stars, prompting a servant girl to laugh that he was so busy studying the heavens he could not see what was at his feet — the archetypal joke about the unworldly philosopher. In another story he corners the market on olive presses in Miletus, demonstrating to skeptics who called philosophy useless that a philosopher could make money easily enough if he chose to; wisdom simply has better things to do with itself.
Thales's philosophical answer — that everything is water — was wrong. This does not matter. What matters is the structure of the inquiry: that there is a single underlying principle that explains the apparent diversity of natural phenomena, that this principle can be discovered through observation and reasoning, and that the world is intelligible rather than arbitrary. These commitments — the intelligibility of the world, the power of reason to discover it, the unity beneath apparent diversity — are the foundation on which all subsequent philosophy and science is built.
His position in this library is less about his specific answers than about what he represents: the decision to ask the questions. Every person in this library who has refused to accept the world as given, who has insisted that things can be understood and therefore changed, who has treated ignorance as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be accepted, is working in a tradition that Thales began.
The tradition he began is not a Western tradition that simply belongs to ancient Greece. The questions he asked — what is the world made of, what principles govern it, how can human beings understand and navigate it — are questions that every philosophical tradition has asked. The specific Greek contribution was the method: systematic, public, argument-based inquiry that anyone could in principle engage with and anyone could in principle refute. The philosophical conversation he started is still going.
The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.Thales of Miletus — as attributed
The standard scholarly edition of all the pre-Socratic fragments with commentary. The Thales sections are brief but worth reading in context of his successors.
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