Thales Case

Though mythology may be significant in providing information about who we are psychologically, culturally, symbolically, affectively and perhaps biologically as well as expressing our place in nature and our environment, it is still clear that a mythological understanding of the world is still shaped by invented stories.

What makes the three Milesian philosophers, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, stand out is that the theoretical human has become a reality. The way of thinking has in its basic form moved away from the mythological thinking (or mythos) and into the domain of the theoretical thinking (or logos). From now on it is about explaining the universal and the general. Everything in the universe can now be approached by the thoughts of humans.

Before Thales, the Greeks explained the origin and nature of the world through myths of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Phenomena like lightning or earthquakes were attributed to actions of the gods. By contrast, Thales attempted to find naturalistic explanations of the world, without reference to the supernatural. He explained earthquakes by imagining that the Earth floats on water, and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves.

Thales, however, also believed in divinity, so he was not completely consistent in his method of inquiry into nature.

What Thales inaugurates is a way of thinking about the world and the universe in a new way. It isn't so much what he said in terms of the fundamental stuff of reality as it is how he arrived at his claim that all is water in the first place. His method is philosophical - in fact, this method of investigating the world was known as natural philosophy, what we'd now identify with the scientific method. This approach where one looks at the world and tries to make a rational explanation for "what" it is and "how" it came to be is quite different from looking at the world and asking "who" in regards to which god is responsible and "why" referring to the mood or desire of the gods as the cause for worldly events.