The Beginnings Of Philosophy

When did people start doing philosophy? This depends on what we mean by 'philosophy'.

The First Philosopher?

Thales of Miletus - Aristotle's 'First Philosopher'

Many modern philosophers take their cue from the great philosopher Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) who, in a brief history of Greek thinkers before him, named Thales of Miletus (c.624 - c.547 B.C.) as the first philosopher. Aristotle claimed that Thales was the first to look for an non-theological explanation of the underlying nature of reality. To explain what this means, let us look further back in time.

Anatomically modern humans - that is, members of our species homo sapiens sapiens - have been in existence for something like 200,000 years. For much of that time, they used their enormously-powerful brains to address the same sorts of practical concerns that face every creature: how to find food, shelter, warmth, and so on. Unlike every other creature, however, they found themselves aware of their own existence and began to ask more searching questions about the universe and their place in it. They began to wonder about the factors that shape our lives and the mystery of death. They sought explanations that made sense of reality and enabled them to predict and influence it. In the broadest sense, they were doing philosophy.

For Aristotle and for very many people since, such explanations are better thought of as religious or theological. 'Theological' means 'to do with a god or gods'. A theological explanation of reality is one that personifies bits of the natural world and explains events in terms of the actions of one or more god-like beings. It might personify natural things like the sun, the moon, rivers and mountains as beings. It might explain why good and bad things happen to us in terms of the desires of these beings to praise or punish us. The belief that our lives are ultimately subject to some influence by such beings is characteristic of a religion.

The Hawaiian Puo OO volcano erupting.

A non-theological explanation works in impersonal terms. A volcano does not erupt because someone is angry. The explanation talks about matter and forces, temperatures and pressures. Thales was famous for arguing that everything was made of water. Bizarre and simple as this may sound to us now, it was a momentous idea. Thales reasoned that water could be the basis of things because it could exist in many forms and seemed to be the basis of life. He did not simply choose a basic impersonal substance. He presented reasons for believing it. You were not supposed to believe something because it was told to you by your elders and betters. You were supposed to believe it only if you were persuaded.

Note that this does not mean that to be a philosopher you must be an atheist. The philosopher is someone prepared to accept a god or gods if they provided the best explanation. What's vital is that the explanation is coherent, enlightening, plausible and systematic. It is coherent if all the parts of the explanation fit together like a jigsaw. It is enlightening if it gives a deeper and non-obvious explanation. It is plausible if we can believe it. It is systematic if looks for an underlying order that enables us to use the explanation to make predictions.

Was Thales really the first philosopher? So long as we think of a philosopher in the way Aristotle suggested, the way we ultimately think about things today, we may never know whether Thales had predecessors. If we think more broadly, however, he certainly was not the first. How much before Thales were people thinking philosophically in this sense? How much before? Let us now take a brief journey back from the very start to Thales.

A quick bit of history...

According to our best present theories, the universe is around 13.7 billion years old and the Earth around 4.5 billion years old. Life began around 3.8-3.5 billion years with simple, single-celled organisms. Life remained single-celled for nearly three billion years with multicellular organisms appearing about 1,000-700 million years ago. Life then picked up speed. Creatures grow in size and complexity. The first fish appear about 500 million years ago, with land plants shortly after (450 million years ago), insects (400 million years ago), reptiles (300 million years ago), dinosaurs (230 million years ago), mammals (200 million years ago) and birds (150 million years ago).

Reconstruction of Homo Habilis

After the extinction of the dinosaurs (65 million years ago), mammals became the dominant large animals. Around 6-7 million years ago, a line of apes branched into two lines, one whose modern descendants are chimpanzees with the other's modern descendants being us. Our 'family tree' contains an uncertain number of ancestor species to whom we are directly and indirectly related. Our genus Homo emerges about 2.5 with 'handy man', Homo habilis, so-called because he had hands capable of gripping the primitive stone tools he was the first to make. With Homo erectus around 1.7 million years ago, we have the upright ape. Homo sapiens appears around half a million years ago and the bigger-brained Homo sapiens sapiens to which we belong about 200,000 years ago.

Cave paintings from Lascaux

From around 40,000 years ago we find evidence of humans living more sophisticated lives. They made more sophisticated tools such as fishhooks and harpoons. They built huts and sewed furs to make clothes and nets to catch fish. They painted animals on the walls of caves, most famously at Lascaux in France, and shaped figures such as the Venus of Willendorf. They buried their dead, apparently with jewellery, clearly suggesting thoughts about an afterlife. They made notches in bones in groups that suggest a deliberate attempt to represent important numbers and perhaps their relationships. Some have suggested that the bones are primitive calculators; others that they are primitive calendars. Sequences of painted dots on the walls of caves also suggest they were aware of the 29-day lunar month.

For most of the last 100,000 years, the Earth's temperature was much cooler than it is today. Sea water was locked up in huge ice-sheets that spread across most of Britain and much of Northern Europe. The peak of this last 'ice age' (or last glacial period within the current ice age, to be precise) was around 20,000 years ago and finished around 11,000 years ago with the ice-sheets retreating to their modern positions of the Arctic and Antarctica. With the exception of these two continents, human beings were now to be found on all the Earth's continents and many of its islands.

It is shortly after the end of the last ice age, around 8,000 BC, that the age of agriculture begins. For most of our history, humans had hunted and gathered food. Some stayed largely put and others followed animals on their seasonal migrations. Now they started to produce it. Animals were domesticated and seeds sown on land that they learned to plough, to fertilise and to lay fallow so as to regenerate. Settled communities developed and grew in size. People began to construct larger and more elaborate buildings. The earliest cities appear. Amongst them is Jericho, whose original fortifications date back to around 7,000 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. People began to take on specialised jobs: potter, priest, mason, soldier. Organised, rooted and stratified societies - civilisations - began to appear. In the late 6th millennium BC, the first great civilisation, the Sumerian, emerged in Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq). It is in this same part of the world that the Elamite (>3000 BC), Akkadian (>2400 BC), Assyrian (>2000) and Babylonian later appeared (>1700 BC). A little to the south-west, the Egyptian civilisation grew from the end of the 4th millennium (>3200 BC). To the east of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley civilisation in modern-day Pakistan and India developed from around the middle of the 6th millennium B.C. to reach its height reached its height in the middle of the third millennium B.C.

A Sumerian clay tablet with cuneiform inscriptions

It is widely held that the Sumerians invented the first system of writing in around 3300 BC. From pictographic origins, they invented a means of representing both ideas and sounds with collections of notches in a writing system that is known as cuneiform. Egyptian hieroglyphics appeared soon after. (It is unclear whether they arose independently.) Alongside their architectural and engineering genius that enabled them to construct the pyramids, the ancient Egyptians were pioneer mathematicians and geometers. Indeed, the Greek historian credits the Egyptians with the invention of geometry as a means of measuring areas of land. (The Greek word 'geometry' means 'land measurement'.) They had a formula for approximate area of a circle, understood the difference between prime and composite numbers and could work with fractions, for example. They developed the first calendar of 365 days: twelve months of thirty days with five days extra.

They were surpassed in these fields by the Babylonians who were also the world's first great astronomers. They knew of Pythagoras' theorem over a thousand years before Pythagoras and were able to solve quadratic and cubic equations. They carefully catalogued the position of heavenly bodies and phenomena such as eclipses over long periods of time and recognised that (at least some) such phenomena happened in a regular and thus predictable way.

One of the things for what Thales of Miletus was most well known was his (apparent) prediction of an eclipse, an event which inspired sufficient awe in two warring peoples to cease their conflict. Some in ancient Greece and some today believe that Thales may have travelled both in Egypt and Mesopotamia or at least become familiar with Egyptian and Babylonian thought via others who had. Now that we are back with Thales, let us move on to a brief introduction to the Greek schools.

Back to:
Home Page
Forward to:
Ancient Philosophy