The Milesian School

The Milesian School was a pre-Socratic school of philosophy founded in the Sicilian Greek city of Miletus. Its main figures were Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—three of the first major philosophers to emerge in history. Their theories on cosmology, causation, and human nature shaped our understanding of the world today. Thales proposed that water is fundamental to all life; Anaximander theorized that the Earth began as an undifferentiated mass; while Anaximenes speculated that ‘’air is the primordial element to exist in the universe.  Thanks to these three philosophers and other Milesian thinkers who followed them, we have access to early revolutionary knowledge about our natural environment and our place within it.

     Miletus was a city state on the coast of the Aegean sea in Ionia (modern day Turkey) which had served as the ‘’center of the Ionian rebellion that sought freedom from the Persian Empire.The Milesian School consisted of three philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. The Milesian School, a branch of Natural philosophy  philosophy based in the Asia Minor town of Miletus in the 6 century BC, produced three thinkers who together formed the basis of the later Western scientific method. The Ionians were the first group of philosophers that we know of, and so remain historically important. Pre- Socrates philosophers all believed the world was made of a fundamental element called an arche ("archк",  substance),  who were all primarily interested in cosmology, and the origin and substance of the world. : Thales thought it was water; Anaximander called it "apeiron" (something infinite and indeterminate); Anaximenes settled on air. In general, they believed in hylozoism, the idea that all life is inseparable from matter, and that there is no distinction between the animate and the inanimate, between spirit and matter.They were primarily invested in cosmology, the order and interaction of the elements, and observation of nature. Cosmologists thought that, although matter could change from one form to another, all matter had something in common which did not change. natural philosophers did not agree on what all things had in common, and did not experiment to find out, but used abstract reasoning rather than religion or mythology to explain themselves, thus becoming the first philosophers in the Western tradition.

      Incredibly, only beginning in the classical period do we have complete surviving texts of the great thinkers — whereas in the pre-Socratic era we have only fragments of their works.It is nothing short of miraculous that the momentous ideas created by the earliest philosophical and scientific thinkers of the Milesian School survives at all today, and that their achievements serve as the basis of all the scientific and rational thought which forms the basis of our scientific understanding of the world today.