THE POET AND THE SCIENTIST

Before we move on to our next pre-Socratic philosopher, we shall need to go back to our old nagging question: why is Thales called the first philosopher, when, as we know, Homer, Hesiod, and quite a few other pre-Thaleans were pretty good at philosophizing themselves, and yet they have never been credited as such, and then of course among the hoi hepta sophoi there were several pre-Thaleans, and Thales contemporaries as well, yet it was only Thales among the lot who had been given the title of the philosopher… How come?

It seems to me that Thales was named the first philosopher because he was the first known scientist. As if at that time the name philosopher had to denote a different entity than what had already been known as a poet. For this reason, early philosophizers and poets were not called philosophers, although some are in the hepta, and the word philosopher was to come to denote not just any thinker, but a scientific thinker. Thus it is that we have arrived at philosopher traveling from poet to scientist. However, having become immersed in the concept of a philosopher identified as a scientist, as opposed to a mere poet, we are suddenly coming to our senses and rush to separate the philosopher from the scientist with the obvious conclusion that the former does not have to be the latter. Hence, our next philosopher Xenophanes is not a scientist yet he is included among the bona fide philosophers taking their count from Thales, just because the above described realization is now at work, at last. So welcome to Xenophanes, coming... not exactly next, but after a while.