Born circa625 BCE
Died circa547 BCE
Thales was credited by Aristotle with founding Ionian natural philosophy. His fame as an astronomer is based more specifically on his purported prediction of a solar eclipse, an achievement that marks for some historians the beginning of western astronomical science.
One of the major intellectual traditions within pre-Socratic science between 600 and 400 BCE was that established and developed by the Milesians (after the city of Miletus; also Ionians, after the region, the present-day Turkish coast of Asia Minor). Of the new Greek communities that sprang up in Greece itself and across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor, the most prosperous was Miletus. Now but lonely ruins inland from the coast because the river and harbor silted up long ago, Miletus was, in its time, the richest city in the Greek world.
One objective of Ionian science or philosophy – the two were not separate disciplines at this time – seems to have been to search for a basic substance or...
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Aaboe, Asger (1972). “Remarks on the Theoretical Treatment of Eclipses in Antiquity.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 3: 105–118. (For a general discussion of ancient understanding of eclipses.)
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Mosshammer, Alden A. (1981). “Thales’ Eclipse.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 111: 145–155. (For doubts concerning Thales’ ability to predict a solar eclipse.)
Panchenko, Dmitri (1994). “Thales’s Prediction of a Solar Eclipse.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 25: 275–288.
Stephenson, F. Richard and Louay J. Fatoohi (1997). “Thales’s Prediction of a Solar Eclipse.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 28: 279–282.
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Hetherington, N.S. (2014). Thales of Miletus. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1371
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