Greek Philosophy & Science

Athens gave the world drama, democracy, and the Parthenon. But the thing that outlasted all of them was stranger and less photogenic: a habit of asking hard questions and refusing to accept lazy answers.

Sometime in the sixth century BCE, a few Greeks stopped explaining the world through myths about quarreling gods and started trying to explain it through reason. Thunder was not Zeus hurling bolts. Earthquakes were not Poseidon's tantrums. There had to be natural causes — principles that held whether or not the gods were paying attention. This shift, from mythological to rational explanation, was not inevitable. It was also not unique to Greece. Indian logicians of the Nyaya school built rigorous systems of inference. Chinese Mohists tested claims against evidence and practical outcomes. Babylonian astronomers compiled centuries of meticulous observations of celestial movements. Rational inquiry surfaced independently in several civilizations. The Greek contribution was distinctive in its form, not singular in its impulse.

The story begins not in Athens but in Ionia, the Greek-settled coast of what is now western Turkey. Around 585 BCE, a merchant and traveler named Thales of Miletus proposed that everything in the universe was made of water. He was wrong, of course. But the question behind his answer — "What is the fundamental substance of reality?" — was new in kind. He was looking for a natural explanation, not a supernatural one.