Victoria-Thales and Anaxagoras• Once upon a time, in a very far, far away

place, there was a man named Thales, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Miletus and the founder of the Milesian school of Philosophy. Thales taught that everything in nature is composed of one basic thing, water. He was the first recorded Western philosopher. Prior to Thales, mythology had been used to explain the nature of the physical world. The significance of Thales did not lie in his answer, but in his approach. It is said that he predicted the eclipse of the Sun in 585BC. Thales tried to find naturalistic explanations of the worlds, without reference to the supernatural, Now, some years later a man named Anaxagoras, who was also a Greek philosopher, correctly explained solar eclipses. Like Thales, not much of his writing’s survived. Both Anaxagoras and Thales used geometry to change and improve Astronomy.

Victoria- Thales and Anaxagoras

• Thales- He explained earthquakes by imagining that the Earth floats on water, and that earth quakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves.

• Thales’ most famous belief was his cosmological doctrine, which held that the world originated from water.

• Anaxagoras- The Anaxagoras crater on the Moon was named in his honor.

• The most original aspect of his system was his doctrine of nous (“mind” or “reason”), according to which the cosmos, including all living things, was created by mind in a process of attraction of “like to like”; mind also accounts for the power of living things to extract nourishment from surrounding substances.