The Milesian School

The Milesian school, in the Ionian city of Miletus in the sixth century BCE, is where Western philosophy began. Its three thinkers — Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes — were the first to seek a single natural first principle underlying all things, explaining the world by reason rather than by myth.

Thales named water as the origin; Anaximander, the boundless apeiron; Anaximenes, air, condensing and rarefying into all things. However different their answers, their shared question — what is the nature and source of the cosmos? — founded the enterprise of natural philosophy, and so of science and philosophy together.