The
Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the
6th Century BCEThe sixth century BC started the first day of 600 BC and ended the last day of 501 BC.In India, Panini, sometime during this century, composed a grammar for Sanskrit, which is the one of oldest extant grammar of any language after 15 other proto-dravidian languages like Brahmi.In the Near East,...
. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the
IoniaIonia is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir, which was historically Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements...
n town of
MiletusMiletus was an ancient city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria...
, on the Aegean coast of
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
:
ThalesThales of Miletus , was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
,
AnaximanderAnaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded him and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and Pythagoras amongst his...
, and
AnaximenesAnaximenes of Miletus was a Archaic Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher from the latter half of the 6th century, probably a younger contemporary of Anaximander, whose pupil or friend he is said to have been.-Theories:...
. 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
anthropomorphizedAnthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts. Examples include animals and plants depicted as creatures with human motivation able to reason and converse and forces of nature such as...
gods. The Milesians presented a view of nature in terms of methodologically observable entities, and as such was one of the first truly
scientificScience is in its broadest sense to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome...
philosophies.
Note: It is important to make a distinction between the Milesian school and the
IonianThe Ionian school, a type of Greek philosophy centred in Miletus, Ionia in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, is something of a misnomer. Although Ionia was a centre of Western philosophy, the scholars it produced, including Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Diogenes Apolloniates,...
, which includes the philosophies of both the Milesians and other distinctly different Ionian thinkers such as
HeraclitusHeraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
.
The
Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the
6th Century BCEThe sixth century BC started the first day of 600 BC and ended the last day of 501 BC.In India, Panini, sometime during this century, composed a grammar for Sanskrit, which is the one of oldest extant grammar of any language after 15 other proto-dravidian languages like Brahmi.In the Near East,...
. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the
IoniaIonia is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir, which was historically Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements...
n town of
MiletusMiletus was an ancient city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria...
, on the Aegean coast of
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
:
ThalesThales of Miletus , was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
,
AnaximanderAnaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded him and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and Pythagoras amongst his...
, and
AnaximenesAnaximenes of Miletus was a Archaic Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher from the latter half of the 6th century, probably a younger contemporary of Anaximander, whose pupil or friend he is said to have been.-Theories:...
. 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
anthropomorphizedAnthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts. Examples include animals and plants depicted as creatures with human motivation able to reason and converse and forces of nature such as...
gods. The Milesians presented a view of nature in terms of methodologically observable entities, and as such was one of the first truly
scientificScience is in its broadest sense to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome...
philosophies.
Note: It is important to make a distinction between the Milesian school and the
IonianThe Ionian school, a type of Greek philosophy centred in Miletus, Ionia in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, is something of a misnomer. Although Ionia was a centre of Western philosophy, the scholars it produced, including Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Diogenes Apolloniates,...
, which includes the philosophies of both the Milesians and other distinctly different Ionian thinkers such as
HeraclitusHeraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
. See also
Pre-Socratic philosophyThe pre-Socratic Greek philosophers were active before Socrates or contemporaneously, but expounding knowledge developed earlier. The popularity of the term originates with Hermann Diels' work Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker...
.
Philosophy of nature
These philosophers defined all things by their quintessential substance (which
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
, perhaps being anachronistic, calls the /
archeIn the ancient Greek philosophy, arche is the beginning or the first principle of the world. The idea of an arche was first philosophized by Thales of Miletus, who claimed that the first principle of all things is water...
) of which the world was formed and which was the source of everything.
ThalesThales of Miletus , was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
thought it to be
waterWater is an ubiquitous chemical substance that is composed of hydrogen and oxygen and is essential for all known forms of life.In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor or steam. Water covers 71%...
. But as it was impossible to explain some things (such as
fireFire is the rapid oxidation of a combustible material releasing heat, light, and various reaction products such as carbon dioxide and water. If hot enough, the gases may become ionized to produce plasma. Depending on the substances alight, and any impurities outside, the color of the flame and the...
) as being composed of this
elementThe name element may refer to:In chemistry, electronics or the geosciences:*Chemical element, an atomic structure* Electrical element* Landform element, a particular type of feature...
, Anaximander chose an unobservable, undefined element, which he called
apeironApeiron is a Greek word meaning unlimited or infinite.The apeiron is central to the cosmological theory created by Anaximander in the 6th century BC. Anaximander's work is mostly lost...
. 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. Anaximenes held that by its
evaporationEvaporation is the vaporization of a liquid and the reverse, of condensation. A type of phase transition, it is the process by which molecules in a liquid state spontaneously become gaseous . Generally, evaporation can be seen by the gradual disappearance of a liquid from a substance when exposed...
and
condensationCondensation is the change of the physical state of aggregation of matter from gaseous phase into liquid phase and the reverse of evaporation. When the transition happens from the gaseous phase into the solid phase directly, bypassing the liquid phase, the change is called deposition...
, air can change into other elements or substances such as fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth. However, our modern concept of
energyIn physics, energy is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force, an attribute of objects and systems that is subject to a conservation law...
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
EarthEarth is the third planet from the Sun. It is the fifth largest of the eight planets in the solar system, and the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System in terms of diameter, mass and density...
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
sunThe Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Earth and other matter orbit the Sun, which by itself accounts for about 99.86% of the Solar System's mass....
, the
moonThe Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is , about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. The common centre of mass of the system is located at about —a quarter the Earth's...
, 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.