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Thales of Miletus and the predicted eclipse: the dawn of natural philosophy

28 May 585 BCE (traditional)·Culture, arts & philosophy·Ionia (Miletus, Asia Minor)·
28 May 585 BCE (traditional)Date
Culture, arts & philosophyCategory
9Empires active
Date
28 May 585 BCE (traditional)
Category
Culture, arts & philosophy
Region
Ionia (Miletus, Asia Minor)
Era
Classical Antiquity
Significance

According to Herodotus, a solar eclipse that halted a battle between the Medes and Lydians had been foretold by Thales of Miletus, the figure later remembered as the first of the Ionian or Presocratic philosophers.

Astronomers identify the event with the eclipse of 28 May 585 BCE, though modern scholars doubt Thales could genuinely have predicted it, since no reliable predictive cycle was then available in the Greek world. Whatever the truth of the eclipse story, Thales marks a decisive intellectual turn: he sought to explain the cosmos through natural causes rather than myth, proposing that water was the fundamental principle (arche) underlying all things. This shift from theological to rational, material explanation is conventionally treated as the birth of Western philosophy and science. Thales and his Milesian successors Anaximander and Anaximenes asked what the world is made of and how it works, founding a tradition of inquiry that ran through the later Presocratics to Aristotle and beyond.

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