The First Philosophers by Robin Waterfield

Miletus was a trading hub connecting the Greek world with the Babylonian, Egyptian and Indian worlds and hence promoting the intercourse of ideas. Thales of Miletus is usually credited as founding father of this tradition – he offered the first rational explanations of natural phenomena in purely worldly terms. The significance of the Greek philosophers lies in the fact that they started to look for explanations of the world in natural terms.

These archetypical explanations are deemed to be sufficient and when people suffer or need some desire fulfilled, they simply turn to the gods and ancestral heroes, sacrifice something and pray for change. Primitive cultures explain all of this in terms of myths: stories about ancestors from long ago, about heroes and about gods. All human cultures need narratives to explain their origins, the origins of the world, the origins of humanity, and all the change and reality that is part of our world.

That this last step was a major one, we can all agree on. Socrates, and even more so Plato, cannot be understood without connecting them to their predecessors – theirs was a reaction to developments in (mostly) natural philosophy – explaining the world in natural terms. This somewhat arbitrary distinction between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic philosophy becomes problematic when one reads about the ideas of these thinkers. The First Philosophers (2000) is a collection of the ideas of the most important Greek philosophers that lived before or were contemporaries of Socrates.

The First Philosophers by Robin Waterfield