Thales

There's an urban legend that says that Thales was such the absentminded philosopher that one night while he was staring at the stars, he tripped and fell into a well, sending a nearby slave girl into hysterical laughter. And yet this was the same man who predicted not only a solar eclipse but a boom year for the olive harvest. With respect to that harvest, he was so enterprising that he bought up all the olive presses in the area so that he would have a monopoly on olive oil. And he did it.

Thales was born in 626 BCE and died in 548 at age 78. He spent most of his professional life as a statesman in a town in Asia Minor called Miletus, famous for its trade in wool, and rich. Fortunately for history, this world gave Thales enough time to philosophize. Unfortunately for us, we know very little of his actual philosophy, and this for the first known philosopher.

Here are two pieces of Thales' philosophy we know about. One is that he believed water was fundamental for life. This view anticipates our contemporary view of water's necessity for life. We don't know how Thales arrived at his conclusion. Perhaps he observed his very own civilization's proximity to water or people's reliance on potable water, or perhaps he watched the growth of plants and crops and thought that their growth generalized to the rest of life. We just don't know.

But we do know about this other piece of philosophy, and this through Aristotle. Thales noticed the effects of magnetism and concluded that there must be some particles within the objects that created these effects of attraction and repulsion. He called these souls. He posited that all things were full of souls. This isn't exactly modern particle theory or our understanding of force fields but this careful observation, using the vocabulary of his day, surely presages modern scientific conceptions of how subatomic particles operate in force fields.