Thales’ approach to knowledge was entirely based on sensory perception and observational experience. The reason this approach is regarded as philosophical is that there are no empirical means of knowing whether what they say is true because it is only experienced through these individual observations (O’grady, 2017). Most of the phenomena “were attributed to deities or higher forces” in antiquity. Thales went against the mainstream and employed an entirely new style of thinking without arguing that something was caused or because of God.
Thales strove to organize all this knowledge into a system in an abstract, theoretical form. As a merchant, he traveled a lot, and visited Egypt, Phenicia, and Babylonia, borrowing something unknown to him and expanding his scientific knowledge in various fields of human activity. Considering the world as a continuously changing whole, as a process, Thales believes that it is due to different states of the same beginning, its “condensation” and “rarefaction” relative to some intermediate state (O’grady, 2017). Thales and his followers were called physicists or physiologists by ancient authors.
Thales is recognized for attempting to explain things in terms of component breakdown. This was his kind of philosophy, unlike religion and myths: the reduction of many complex phenomena to a single, simple basis, which is the predominant philosophical theme. He did not take things for granted (or as given by God), he looked for simple answers in what lay next to him. Thales and his followers intuitively understood the world as material. Together with spontaneous materialism, dialectics is also manifested in the thinking of these philosophers, with the help of the conceptual means by which they strive to comprehend the world in the dynamics of its development and changes (O’grady, 2017).
Thales’ spontaneous materialism was the overcoming of the old religious and mythological ideas about the world. To the main question about the root cause of the world, they gave, in contrast to all mythological concepts, a materialistic answer.
Reference
O’grady, P. F. (2017). Thales of Miletus: The beginnings of western science and philosophy. Routledge.