Thales of Miletus, the father of philosophy and science, was a real genius. In his two major works, he deals with physical science and metaphysics. “The Metaphysicians” introduces us to his ideas about how everything that exists has a physical component. It is matter which creates reality and it is matter alone that can create immaterial things. “Theohydrology” narrates the history of his teachings, beginning with his search for a perfect model of the world at large, in which to find an explanation for all natural phenomena. He discovered that all of Nature had evolved from one source, a fluid medium, namely air.
From this he could derive the concepts of celestial bodies, their orbits, the Earth’s axis of rotation and the movement of heavenly bodies. It was from these discoveries that he came to perceive the connection between all of Nature and the soul, which is believed to be the very basis of all created matter. His great achievements during his time include the enigma of the movement of the stars, the movements of the earth, the daily and seasonal movements of the sun and the oceanic tides. He was also the first person to discover that light consists of rays, which he saw shining through the transparent water.
The Thales of Miletus is mainly known for being the inventors of geometry, and for their great contributions to mathematics. But according to Plato, he also contributed much to the field of medicine and became the first person to say that all disease is a symptom of a diseased mind. He was a huge influence not only on Ptolemy the father of classic astronomy, but also on the school of Aristotle, whose teaching Thales deeply influenced. In fact, many of the concepts of Aristotle and Pliny the Younger was directly derived from those of Thales.
However, some scholars argue that it was Aristotle who actually did come up with the idea of organizing the elements of the universe by placing them in separate shells, which he called the elements of bodies. The most famous of these elements are the element potassium and the element nitrogen, with sodium and chloride being derived from potassium. It was Aristotle’s ideas of formulating matter that came to be associated with the Thales of Miletus. This school of thought is based on a metaphysics of cosmology that postulates that matter is nothing more than a collection of atoms that instantaneously exploded into form at the birth of the universe.
The core of this school is the belief that matter is devoid of any absolute qualities. Everything has a degree of movement that can be described by an abstract set of standards, namely a prime mover and a rest. Every event that occurs has a cause, but no real cause can be pinpointed. It is up to the mind to decide how events in the universe occur and how they will affect the future.
According to Thales of Miletus, all things are made up of atoms that have been balanced in their movement through the void. This was a vast simplification on what was a very complex world, where everything consisted of many different elements basing themselves on the place they occupied in the atom. Thales believed that there was no need for a supreme overlord or leader to rule over any being as everything could be described using only a single term, which he named ‘prime matter.’
In his earliest writings, Thales of Miletus tells us that philosophy is a study that cannot be understood by anyone. He gives us a very skeptical view of the world and shows that all knowledge that we acquire is purely intellectual. For instance, when we talk about plants, we know that they consist of innumerable atoms that make them up, but we do not have a single physical description of these atoms. Philosophy, according to Thales of Miletus, is nothing more than an attempt to penetrate the inner regions of reality through the senses. His philosophy gave way to a new scientific revolution known as Dialectics.
In Dialectics, everything that exists has a series of imitations that must be examined and judged, much like a game of chess. Everything is nothing more than a series of abstractions that can be compared and studied using a series of criteria. The most important concept of Dialectics is Parmenides, who believed that there are no independent realities, only mind-dependent realities that can be studied using available tools. Thales of Miletus believed that all of the existing things in the universe are nothing more than mere forms of energy. This line of thought was adopted by many later philosophers such as Aristotle.