From myth to reason
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Why does the sea rage? For centuries the answer was “an angry god.” Then someone in a Greek port asked a stranger question — and philosophy was born.
Around 585 BCE, in the wealthy trading city of Miletus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor (today’s western Turkey), a handful of thinkers began explaining the world in a genuinely new way. They stopped asking who is responsible for storms, earthquakes and eclipses, and started asking what they are made of and how they work.
Scholars name this the shift from mythos to logos. Mythos is explanation by story: the world’s order is the biography of gods — Zeus hurls the lightning, Poseidon shakes the earth. Logos (here: reasoned account, rational explanation) seeks causes within nature itself, causes you can state, question, and argue about.
What unified their inquiry was one bold question: what is the archē (archē = the originating principle, the source and underlying stuff of all things)? They assumed that beneath the dizzying variety of things — fire, stone, water, flesh, air — lies a single underlying reality out of which everything comes and into which it returns.
Which best captures the mythos-to-logos shift?
This is why Aristotle, looking back some two and a half centuries later in Metaphysics A.3 (983b), credits Thales as the founder — the first of those he calls the physikoi or physiologoi, the inquirers into physis (nature). Thales asked what everything is ultimately made of and answered with a natural substance rather than a genealogy of gods. For Aristotle that question — the search for a material archē — is where philosophy begins.
Aristotle calls Thales the first philosopher primarily because Thales…