PHILOSOPHY BEFORE THALES

Any product of a respectable system of education knows that the first philosopher known to us is Thales. It is not my purpose to debunk this honorable theory here, but to make a sensible interjection, after which the educated world can go back to thinking of Thales as the first philosopher.

My interjection begins with the question: Who says that Homer was only a poet, and not a philosopher too? Who says that Hesiod wasn’t one, or, say, Theognis, so honorably mentioned by Schopenhauer among the “thinkers of all ages”? And we could go on, and on, and on, you know, for as long as we are allowed to go on by the level of our erudition.

Every great Greek of antiquity, whose thoughts have reached us over the ages, whether in fragments or in secondhand retelling, ought to be a philosopher by definition. Incidentally, the classic Pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Parmenides, were also poets, maybe not as great, in terms of their poetry, as Homer was, but just for that kind of reason the great poet cannot be denied his greatness as a philosopher, by the same token as a great thinker must not be denied his greatness as a poet. Besides, we can equally argue that Thales, the first officially recognized philosopher, was mainly a scientist, and that his philosophy somehow flowed out of it.

Well, getting a little more serious or rather more dignified, as we surely have been serious all this time, we may ask the simple question: What is philosophy? and then see whether Homer and the others would qualify under those definitions as philosophers. On the most basic level, philosophy is the study of certain questions addressing human conduct and existence as such, also examining reality, causality, and the concepts of good and evil, freedom, etc.

As we shall see, all the pre-Thalean poets-thinkers, mentioned by us in the next miniseries of entries, qualify on that account, and so they also deserve the proud title of pre-Socratics.