The Greeks attributed to Thales a great many discoveries and achievements. Few, if any, of these can be said to rest on thoroughly reliable testimony, most of them being the ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death—a period of time equivalent to that between William the Conqueror and the present day. Inevitably there ilso accumulated round the name of Thales, as round that of Pythagoras, a number of anecdotes of varying degrees (...) of plausibility and of no historical worth whatsoever. These and the achievements credited to Thales have, of course, been painstakingly brought together by Hermann Diels in Der Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Useful and necessary as this work undoubtedly is, it nevertheless has probably contributed as much as any other book to the exaggerated and false Aew of Thales which we meet in so many modern histories of science or philosophy, and which it is the purpose of this article to combat. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was (...) the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

Okeanos is at once a mythological figure and a philosophical concept appearing in many ancient accounts of the world. A frequent object of allegoresis, his cosmological role and his name posed an enigma to Homer’s readers, especially those with a rationalizing bent. This paper proposes that the paradoxical representation of Okeanos as a primordial generative power and a geographical limit may be explained by the influence of etymological speculation, which was a popular heuristic method used by Greek intellectuals from the (...) archaic period throughout antiquity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Translating archaic Greek philosophies presents a complex of opportunities and challenges for translators, several of which are regularly overlooked. Among these figure prominently the culture and thematics of oralcy and the predisciplinarity in which early Greek thinking took shape. Additionally, translators engaged with early Greek thinking face layers of interpretive history and expectations that can determine the scope of possible translation, which, in turn, limits the range of interpretive possibilities. Yet their predisciplinary or at least hybrid modes summon a (...) broad attention to contexts of language, forms, and meanings that may challenge, or even disrupt, the predominant lines of inquiry and interpretation. How can translation motivated by the oralcy and predisciplinarity of archaic Greece open new directions for interpretation of the early Greek thinkers? Ranging through Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and others, this article articulates some possibilities for translating on and beyond the boundaries of philosophy. (shrink)

The paper draws a parallel between Iamblichus’ presentation of Pythagoras in the first lines of On the Pythagorean Way of Life, and Aristotle’s presentation of Thales in Metaphysics A. Although the texts present two different accounts of the origins of philosophy, they nevertheless feature strong parallels such as the Greek formulation used to invest the two philosophers with the role of πρῶτος εὑρετής. Consequently, Iamblichus seems to exploit the Aristotelian pattern in order to re-locate the discipline of philosophy within the (...) divine domain so to allow and legitimate the foundation of his peculiar declension of Pythagoreanism. (shrink)