The Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the 6th Century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the edge of Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They introduced new opinions contrary to the prevailing viewpoint on how the world was organized, in which natural phenomena were explained by the whims of anthropomorphized beings. The Milesians presented a view of nature in terms of methodologically observable entities, and as such was one of the first truly scientific philosophies. (7th century BC - 6th century BCE - 5th century BCE - other centuries) (600s BCE - 590s BCE - 580s BCE - 570s BCE - 560s BCE - 550s BCE - 540s BCE - 530s BCE - 520s BCE - 510s BCE - 500s BCE - other decades) (2nd millennium BCE - 1st millennium BCE - 1st millennium) The 5th and 6th centuries BCE were... A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ... Ionia (Greek Ιωνία; see also List of traditional Greek place names) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (now in Turkey) on the Aegean Sea. ... Miletus was an ancient city on the western coast of Anatolia (in what is now the Aydin Province of Turkey), near the mouth of the Maeander River. ... Asia Minor lies east of the Bosporus, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. ... Thales Thales (in Greek: Θαλής) of Miletus (ca. ... Anaximander Anaximander (Greek: Αναξίμανδρος) (610 BC/609–c. ... Anaximenes (in Greek: Άναξιμένης) of Miletus (585 BC - 525 BC) was a Greek philosopher from the latter half of the 6th century, probably a younger contemporary of Anaximander, whose pupil or friend he is said to have been. ... Anthropomorphism, also referred to as personification or prosopopeia, is the attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects, animals, forces of nature, and others. ... Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Science For the scientific journal named Science, see Science (journal). ...

Note: It is important to make a distinction between the Milesian school and the Ionian, which includes the philosophies of both the Milesians and other distinctly different Ionian thinkers such as Heraclitus. See also Pre-Socratic philosophy. The Ionian School (occasionally known as the Milesian School), a type of Greek philosophy centred in Miletus, Ionia in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., is something of a misnomer. ... Heraclitus of Ephesus (Greek Herakleitos) (about 535 - 475 BC), known as The Obscure, was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor. ... The Pre-Socratic philosophers were active before Socrates, who exerted tremendous influence on later thought. ...

Philosophy of nature

These philosophers defined all things by their quintessential substance, (ἀρχή / arche), of which the Universe was formed and which was the source of all life. Thales thought it to be water. But as it was impossible to explain some things (such as fire) as being composed of this element, Anaximander chose an unobservable, undefined element, which he called apeiron (ἀπείρων). He reasoned that if each of the four traditional elements (water, air, fire, and earth) are opposed to the other three, and if they cancel each other out on contact, none of them could constitute a stable, truly elementary form of matter. Consequently, there must be another entity from which the others originate, and which must truly be the most basic element of all. In the ancient Greek philosophy, arche is the beginning or the first principle of the world. ... Thales Thales (in Greek: Θαλής) of Miletus (ca. ... Water (from the Old English word wæter; c. ... It has been suggested that flame be merged into this article or section. ... The apeiron is a cosmological theory created by Anaximander in the 6th century BC. Anaximanders work is mostly lost. ...

The unspecified nature of the apeiron upset critics, which caused Anaximenes to define it as being air, a more concrete, yet still subtle, element. Anaximenes held that by its evaporation and condensation, air can change into other elements or substances such as fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth. Evaporation is the process whereby atoms or molecules in a liquid state (or solid state if the substance sublimes) gain sufficient energy to enter the gaseous state. ... Condensation is the change in phase of a substance to a denser phase, such as gas (or vapor) to a liquid. ...

Cosmology

The differences between the three philosophers was not limited to the nature of matter. Each of them conceived of the universe differently. Thales held that the Earth was floating in water. He noted the movement of certain stars, which he called Planets. Anaximander placed the Earth at the center of a universe composed of hollow, concentric wheels filled with fire, and pierced by holes at various intervals, which appaired as the sun, the moon, and the other stars. For Anaximenes, the sun and the moon were flat disks traveling around a heavenly canopy, on which the stars were fixed. Earth, also known as Terra, and Tellus mostly in the 19th century, is the third-closest planet to the Sun. ... For alternate meanings see star (disambiguation) Hundreds of stars are visible in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Sagittarius Star Cloud in the Milky Way Galaxy. ... A planet is generally considered to be a relatively large mass of accreted matter in orbit around a star that is not a star itself. ... The Sun is the star at the center of our Solar system. ... Crust composition Oxygen 43% Silicon 21% Aluminium 10% Calcium 9% Iron 9% Magnesium 5% Titanium 2% Nickel 0. ...

Bibliography

• Lahaye, Robert. La philosophie ionienne. L'École de Milet, Cèdre, Paris, 1966.