THALES

Thales was born around 624 BCE in Miletus, a prosperous Greek trading city on the coast of what is now Turkey. The city’s position made it a crossroads of cultures — Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician — and Thales absorbed knowledge from all of them.

He travelled to Egypt, where he reportedly calculated the height of the pyramids by measuring their shadows. From Babylon, he learned astronomical techniques that allowed him to predict a solar eclipse in 585 BCE — an event that, according to Herodotus, stopped a battle between the Lydians and Medes. Whether the prediction was lucky or calculated, it made his reputation.

But Thales’ true revolution was philosophical. When he declared that “everything is water,” he wasn’t being naive about chemistry. He was proposing something radical: that the universe could be explained through a single natural principle rather than through the whims of gods. This is the birth of Western philosophy and science in a single sentence.

He was no ivory-tower dreamer. When mocked for his poverty (what use is philosophy?), Thales predicted a good olive harvest, quietly cornered the market on olive presses, and made a fortune — then went back to philosophy, having proved his point. He advised Miletus on politics and engineering, and was counted among the legendary Seven Sages of Greece.

He founded no school, wrote no books that survived, and left only fragments quoted by later writers. Yet every philosopher after him is responding to the question he first asked: what is the world really made of?

Thales asked the question that launched Western philosophy: what is the arche — the underlying principle, origin, or substrate of everything that exists? His answer was water. This sounds bizarre until you consider the alternatives available to him: Zeus, Poseidon, primordial chaos, divine craftsmanship.

To say “water” was to say: the universe is made of something natural, observable, and transformable. Water becomes ice, steam, mist. It falls from the sky, rises from the earth, sustains all life. Perhaps everything is water in different states of transformation.

Whether this is true matters less than what it implies: that the universe is rationally comprehensible, that natural explanations can replace supernatural ones, and that human reason can investigate the ultimate nature of reality. These three assumptions underlie all subsequent philosophy and science.

Thales also contributed to mathematics, proving geometric theorems rather than merely measuring. He predicted eclipses, investigated magnetism (noting that lodestones attract iron), and suggested that earthquakes were caused by waves in the water on which the earth floats — wrong in detail but right in method: natural causes for natural events.

He represents the birth of theoretical thinking: stepping back from practical problems to ask what underlies them all.