Greek Philosopher

Thales of Miletus which is called "THEH-leez" , was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He is the first philosopher in the Greek tradition.According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales. Thales lived around the mid 620s – mid 540s BC and was born in the city of Miletus. Miletus was an ancient Greek Ionian city on the western coast of Asia Minor (in what is today the Aydin Province ofTurkey) near the mouth of the Maeander River.According to Herodotus, Thales once predicted a solar eclipse which has been determined by modern methods to have been on May 28, 585 BC.

Thales involved himself in many activities, taking the role of an innovator. Some say that he left no writings, others that he wrote "On the Solstice" and "On the Equinox". Neither have survived. Diogenes Laërtius quotes letters of Thales to Pherecydes and Solon, offering to review the book of the former on religion, and offering to keep company with the latter on his sojourn from Athens. Thales identifies the Milesians as Athenians.Thales also explains that water as a first principles and he beliefs in divinity that objects that changed to become other objects, such as water into earth. Besides that,he was also known for his innovative use of geometry. His understanding was theoretical as well as practical.

The most natural epithets of Thales are "materialist" and "naturalist", which are based on ousia and physis. The Catholic Encyclopedia goes so far as to call him a physiologist, a person who studied physis, despite the fact that we already have physiologists. On the other hand, he would have qualified as an early physicist, as did Aristotle. They studied corpora, "bodies", the medieval descendants of substances.

Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers and therefore on Western history. Some believe Anaximander was a pupil of Thales. Early sources report that one of Anaximander's more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and that Thales advised him to travel to Egypt to further his philosophical and mathematical studies.

Many philosophers followed Thales' lead in searching for explanations in nature rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched them in the language of philosophy rather than of myth or of religion.