Why isnt Thales talked about more? Literally the first known philosopher.

Why isn’t Thales talked about more? Literally the first known philosopher.

  1. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    I’m writing a play about him tbh

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      not OP but anything you can share?

      I love pre-socratics

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        It’s only in drafting phases now. It’s about the Milesians, their awaking to rationality, and the gods’ jealous revenge on them. Two acts.
        I should also mention I’ve only ever actually completed one play I’ve set out to write, but I’m still busy with my degree. We’ll see how this one pans out

  2. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    Be the change you want to see in the world anon.

  3. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    More like the world’s first redditor

  4. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    Because he’s not that interesting. I like the anecdote about him stumbling to a ditch after staring into the night sky and the person laughs at him and he replies “I am down here but it is because I wish to be up there” or something. The effect being that his desire to know the truth is more important than the physical world.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      >“I am down here but it is because I wish to be up there”
      Sounds exactly like a redditor. I bet he'd like
      >thanks for drachma, kind stranger!

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        There is something magical about the way an entire, objectively fundamental human modality like "wit", through the lens of a retard LULZ user, gets shrunken and distorted into nothing more than a marker of "the bad website that I do not like because this is the only way I can have an identity". This place is true outsider art.

        • 2 weeks ago
          Anonymous

          Yeah the whole reddit/redditor insult is played out and lame anymore. It feels like someone trying to fit in making a bond with “us vs them” tribalism which barely has any meaning anymore because it’s so overused. I guess anything to fit in

          • 2 weeks ago
            Anonymous

            Found the Redditor. Did you even spend time on /b/ before moving to other boards?

            • 2 weeks ago
              Anonymous

              Started on /b/ in like 07 when it was the flagship board before it turned into a porn board, and the general public thought all of LULZ was /b/

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                Assuming it's true that you have been around since 07 you should understand that complaints about redditors are even more justified today than 10 years ago. Since there's been an absurd influx of redditors (thanks pol) over the last years, LULZ has been become infinitely worse. The problem is that reddit didn't improve in the meantime, so it can't be argued that it's all the same now anyway.

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                A lot of /misc/ ARE the redditors who got kicked off, or at least they are their spiritual descendants. It’s why they can never let it go and will bear a grudge for the rest of their lives. Maybe I’m just tired or I’ve outgrown the whole reddit LULZ dichotomy. I just would like to post about books but that is hard to do when it is nothing but Elon musk, israeli boogeyman, muh w*menz, twitter threads, current political or cultural flavor of the week. Everything but literature. I wish there was a place to go. I feel like I’m kin to Chingachasiatic and Uncas

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                >mfw the current state of LULZ

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                That I agree with. The irony of pol, who always claimed to be the defenders of "true" LULZ culture and spirit, being responsible for bringing in the cringiest braindead memelords from all over the internet, who then pollute all the other boards, is astonishing.

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                >make an argument on /misc/
                >immediate ad hominem attack on your race or flag
                >repeat ad infinitum
                absolutely useless board. practically unusable since the lockdown. the catalog is /b/ tier

          • 2 weeks ago
            Anonymous

            It's just insidious erosion of the meaning of words/concepts. Exhibit #1898943 in the case for strict elitism when it comes to actually establishing anything of worth.

            • 2 weeks ago
              Anonymous

              Too many chucklefucks on this board for any elitism or gatekeeping

            • 2 weeks ago
              Anonymous

              >only elites like me can determine who is reddit
              You sound like a massive homo

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                It shouldn’t be that much to ask, should it? But it’s been proven time and again that even in the simplest and most trivial of intellectual endeavors, plebs are just not cut out for any sort of competency.

              • 2 weeks ago
                Anonymous

                Or…you are actually just a pleb yourself and have an insane superiority complex about internet memes.

          • 2 weeks ago
            Anonymous

            Nope. I hate reddit. I've tried to use reddit. I hate reddit.

          • 2 weeks ago
            Anonymous

            There is something magical about the way an entire, objectively fundamental human modality like "wit", through the lens of a retard LULZ user, gets shrunken and distorted into nothing more than a marker of "the bad website that I do not like because this is the only way I can have an identity". This place is true outsider art.

            As a matter of fact its positive elitism that punishes credibility of those that have traits similar to leftie postmodernist ideals, or at least those that express them. anything as unfalsifiable as postmodernist retardation or soliptism does not bring about constructive discourse, and neither does toxic positivity/cringe.
            Change the form of your argument and stop writing like a woman and you might be heard
            >inb4 frogposting bad
            this is to further prove how far inside your head i am, and how much i know about your psyche, therefore granting ethos to my claims

          • 2 weeks ago
            Anonymous

            kys redditor

        • 2 weeks ago
          Anonymous

          bump

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        Sadly, it seems entirely apocryphal.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astrologer_who_Fell_into_a_Well

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        Found the Redditor. Did you even spend time on /b/ before moving to other boards?

        This board is dying

        • 2 weeks ago
          Anonymous

          Always has been

  5. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    Anything before Socrates is sophistry.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      He wasn’t one of the sophists because he didn’t give speeches and he didn’t do it for money.

  6. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    One problem with Thales is of course, that there's simply not that much to talk about, since he apparently didn't write anything and we have to rely on philosophers who talk about him but lived long after his death. You could just as well ask why we don't talk more often about Henoch, who, if the trust the Bible, was the perfect believer and therefore should be an example for all of us. There's just not enough information about him.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      Enoch literally has tons of fan fiction about him.

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        OK, let me rephrase: there's not enough about him in the Bible itself, which is weird since he should be the perfect example for believers. The book of Henoch is not recognized by the church, so it doesn't count in this case. Same goes for all that esoterical stuff, where it says that he built the pyramids and so on. Interesting to read but for the judeo-christian beliefs not of importance.

  7. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    >DUDE it’s all just water!

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      He was asking the right fundamental question of everything, but face planted so hard with his answer lul

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      >phase states of water

      >Ice niggas, Liquid niggas, GAS niggas, Plasma niggas

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      he was also history's first wildly successful financial speculator. perhaps you would understand the relation between his metaphysics and finance if you had any money.

  8. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    Hylozoism + natural explanation + first mathematical proof + substance monism is plenty to talk about. Dont know what these guys are on about. I think about Thales all the time

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      You forgot
      >Discovered/invented options trading.

  9. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    >Thales of Miletus remained single, but adopted his sister's son, when asked why he didn't have children, he replied:
    >Precisely out of love for children. »
    >Diogenes Laertius, Lives, doctrines and sentences of illustrious philosophers.
    Because he was an antinatalistcuck

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      How do you know he didn’t just mean that as a philosopher he would be bad father? Thales was an incredibly unique person and didn’t exactly have what was considered a normal way of seeing the world at the time. Perhaps he didn’t see himself as an upstanding citizen despite being voted wisest.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      There's a much worse story on this same point, preserved in Plutarch's Lies:

      "On his visit to Thales at Miletus, Solon is said to have expressed astonishment that his host was wholly indifferent to marriage and the getting of children. At the time Thales made no answer, but a few days afterwards he contrived to have a stranger say that he was just arrived after a ten days' journey from Athens. When Solon asked what news there was at Athens, the man, who was under instructions what to say, answered: "None other than the funeral of a young man, who was followed to the grave by the whole city. [...] The man said it was [Solon's son that is dead]; whereupon Solon began to beat his head and to do and say everything else that betokens a transport of grief. But Thales took him by the hand and said, with a smile, "This it is, O Solon, which keeps me from marriage and the getting of children; it overwhelms even thee, who art the most stout-hearted of men. But be not dismayed at this story, for it is not true." Such, at any rate, according to Hermippus, is the story of Pataecus, who used to boast that he had Aesop's soul."

  10. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    He's been mentioned in like 4 of the philosophy classes I've taken

  11. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    You don't know shit!

  12. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    He did not introduce any provocative ideas that influenced others, nor did he have a really interesting story besides speculating about olive prices and predicting solar eclipses.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      He did tho. He gave a new framework to philosophy (namely, the research for a first principle) which has dominated western philosophy for thousands of years.

  13. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    He was wrong about literally everything. To be fair, he was a very early philosopher so I can't really fault him.

  14. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    Thanks OP for reminding me to look for a book of Heraclitus' Fragments at the uni library rn. Presocratic fragments are so interesting to me

  15. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    >everything is made of water!
    fucking retard

  16. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    He's talked about a lot.

  17. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    For the retards in this thread:

    >Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and the womb of all things. Is it really necessary for us to take serious notice of this proposition? It is, and for three reasons. First, because it tells something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, because contained in it, if only embryonically, is the thought. "all things are one." The first reason still leaves Thales in the company of the religious and the superstitious; the second takes him out of such company and shows him as a natural scientist, but the third makes him the first Greek philosopher. Had he said, "water turns into earth," we should have but a scientific hypothesis, a wrong one but difficult to disprove. But he went beyond scientific considerations. By presenting his unity-concept in the form of his water hypothesis, Thales did not, it is true, overcome the low level of empiric insight prevalent in his time. What he did was to pass over its horizon. The sparse and unordered observations of an empirical nature which he made regarding the occurrence and the transformations of water (more specifically, of moisture) would have allowed, much less made advisable, no such gigantic generalization. What drove him to it was a metaphysical conviction which had its origin in a mystic intuition. We meet it in every philosophy, together with the ever-renewed attempts at a more suitable expression, this proposition that "all things are one."

    Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      neitzscheposter should be beheaded publicly on a liveleak directly plugged into LULZ and LULZ

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        Sounds like an inferiority complex 🙂

  18. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    His doctrine of water as fundamental to the organisation of the world seems to have parallels in Near Eastern thought, which he may have learnt about during the cultural upheavals that took place on the coast of Asia Minor in 700-500 BC.

  19. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    I failed at using Thales theorem to copy angles and make cool looking serrated zebra triangles

  20. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    Like every other philosopher who has ever existed, he was mogged hard by Plato.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      plato and kant are responsible for postmodernism

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        get out Ulysse

  21. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    >BRO EVERYTHING IS WATER
    I love the Presocratics, but Thales and Anaximenes are not too interesting. At least Thales (but also attributed to Anaximenes?) has this fun anecdote.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      Thales is, also, interesting for the number of practical/engineering feats attributed to him, like in Herodotus.

    • 2 weeks ago
      Anonymous

      What book is that?

      • 2 weeks ago
        Anonymous

        It's the second volume of Loeb's Early Greek Philosophy set

  22. 2 weeks ago
    Anonymous

    because 60-61 replies is the critical filter of all history and the election of whether or not we are all fucked

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