Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were the three men who started what is now known as philosophy in Miletus. Their main focus was to understand the nature of the things around them. The first philosophers thought that,the principles in the form of matter were the only principle of all things?. They held that the substance of all things.
remained constant and only the properties changed from when it was created to when it is destroyed. The most important contribution of the Milesian's was the concept that nature had a rational organization. The endeavor to find an arche or governing principle to explain the origin of all things was a watershed to rational investigation and rational thought.
Thales was the first to speculate that a material substance explains all the natural phenomena, which he identified as water. Aristotle claims that Thales came to this conclusion from observing that everything requires moisture for sustenance and that heat is generated and survives through moisture. Furthermore, theseeds of everything have a moist nature?, and moisture is the result of water (Aristotle, Metaphysics). The.
importance lies not in the understanding that everything was water, but the fact that Thales attempts to explain the origin of the universe. The men of Miletus realized that there was a certain identifiable order to the cosmos. For Anaximander, a contemporary of Thales, it was theapieron?, an unlimited or indefinite indestructible substance, out of which individual things were created and destroyed. For Anaximenes, it was infinite air explained through the principles of rarefaction and condensation; different objects were merely different degrees of density of air. Regardless, these men defined the very meaning of science and philosophy.
Prior to the three men of Miletus, early thinkers and poets also sought to find the origin of the cosmos and the universe. Through mythology, early poets attempted to explain certain phenomena.