Ionian school (philosophy)

The Ionian school included such thinkers as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes of Miletus, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Archelaus. This classification can be traced to the doxographer Sotion. The doxographer Diogenes Laërtius divides pre-Socratic philosophy into the Ionian and Italian school. The collective affinity of the Ionians was first acknowledged by Aristotle who called them physiologoi (φυσιολόγοι), or natural philosophers. They are sometimes referred to as cosmologists, since they studied stars and maths, gave cosmogonies and were largely physicalists who tried to explain the nature of matter.

The first three philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) were all centred in the mercantile city of Miletus on the Maeander River and are collectively referred to as the Milesian school. They sought to explain nature by finding its fundamental element called the arche. They seemed to think although matter could change from one form to another, all matter had something in common that did not change. Aristotle thus characterized them as material monists. They also believed that life permeated everything in the cosmos, i.e., they were hylozoists. The Milesians disagreed on what all things had in common, and did not seem to experiment to find out, but used abstract reasoning rather than religion or mythology to arrive at their positions, and are thus credited as the first philosophers.

Thales

Thales (Greek: Θαλῆς, Thalēs) of Miletus (c. 624 – c. 546 BCE) is regarded as the earliest Western philosopher. Before him, the Greeks explained the origin and nature of the world through myths of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Phenomena like lightning and earthquakes were attributed to the actions of the gods. By contrast, Thales attempted to find naturalistic explanations of the world without referencing the supernatural. He explained earthquakes by imagining that the Earth floats on water and earthquakes occur when waves rock the Earth. Thales' most famous belief was his cosmological doctrine, which held that the world originated from water.

Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics, "Thales, the founder of this school of philosophy [Ionian school], says the permanent entity is water (which is why he also propounded that the earth floats on water). Presumably he derived this assumption from seeing the nutriment of everything is moist, and that heat itself is generated from moisture and depends upon it for its existence (and that from which a thing is generated is always its first principle). He derived his assumption, then, from this; and also from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature, whereas water is the first principle of the nature of moist things."