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Location of
Miletus on the
western coast of
Anatolia,
home to Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes
The Milesian school was a school of thought
founded in the 6th Century BC. The ideas associated with
it are exemplified by three philosophers from the
Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of
Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They introduced new
opinions contrary to the prevailing viewpoint on how the world was
organized, in which natural phenomena were explained solely by the
will of anthropomorphized gods. The Milesians
presented a view of nature in terms of methodologically observable
entities, and as such was one of the first truly scientific philosophies.
Note: It is important to make a distinction between the
Milesian school and the Ionian, which
includes the philosophies of both the Milesians and other
distinctly different Ionian thinkers such as Heraclitus. See also Pre-Socratic philosophy.
Philosophy
of nature
These philosophers defined all things by their
quintessential substance (which Aristotle, perhaps being anachronistic,[1] calls
the αρχή / arche)[2] of
which the world was formed and which was the source of everything.
Thales thought it to be water.[3] But as
it was impossible to explain some things (such as fire) as being composed of this element, Anaximander chose an unobservable,
undefined element, which he called apeiron (ἀπείρων).[4] He
reasoned that if each of the four traditional elements (water, air,
fire, and earth) are opposed to the other three, and if they cancel
each other out on contact, none of them could constitute a stable,
truly elementary form of matter. Consequently, there must be
another entity from which the others originate, and which must
truly be the most basic element of all. The unspecified nature of
the apeiron upset critics, which caused Anaximenes to
define it as being air, a more concrete, yet still subtle,
element.[5]
Anaximenes held that by its evaporation and condensation, air can change into other
elements or substances such as fire, wind, clouds, water, and
earth. However, our modern concept of energy is much more similar to Anaximander's
apeiron.
Cosmology
The differences between the three philosophers was not limited
to the nature of matter. Each of them conceived of the universe
differently. Thales held that the Earth was floating in water. Anaximander placed
the Earth at the center of a universe composed of hollow,
concentric wheels filled with fire, and pierced by holes at various
intervals, which appeared as the sun, the moon, and
the other stars. For Anaximenes, the sun and the moon were flat
disks traveling around a heavenly canopy, on which the stars were
fixed.
See also
Bibliography
- Lahaye, Robert. La philosophie ionienne. L'École de
Milet, Cèdre, Paris, 1966.
References
- ^
Kirk, Raven and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers
(Cambridge University Press, 1983, 108-109.
- ^
Aristotle, Metaphysics Alpha, 983b6ff.
- ^
Kirk, Raven and Schofield, 89.
- ^
Kirk, Raven and Schofield, 105-108.
- ^
Kirk, Raven and Schofield, 143.
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