Thales and the Origin of Western Philosophy

In this video, I explore the philosophy of Thales, a philosopher whom many believe to have inaugurated the Western philosophical tradition. Most contemporary accounts of Thales portray him as cutting ties to Greece's mythological past and instead adopting a thoroughly naturalistic and empirical approach to reality, an approach that is said to characterize the whole of Western philosophy. In this video, I contend that this naturalistic picture of Thales is misguided and substantially outstrips our available historical evidence. First, I show how this interpretation requires a naïve appropriation of Aristotle's assertions concerning Thales. When we look at Aristotle's account in context, we can see that he isn't so much trying to articulate an objective historical account of previous philosophers as he is trying to set forth a whigish history of philosophy that culminates in his own metaphysics. Second, I demonstrate that contemporary interpreters also ignore Aristotle's observations that Thales account parallels the mythological accounts of Homer and Hesiod. Third, I show that the contemporary view ignores the animistic implications of Thales claim that "all things are full of gods" and I argue against a Spinozistic interpretation of Thales' assertion. Fourth, I show that even the standard anecdotal stories about Thales life are more ambiguous than the naturalistic interpretation would have us believe. And finally, I argue that Goethe offers a better myth of Thales than the current naturalistic myth by examining the Classical Walpurgis Night scene in Faust Part 2.
A corresponding essay can be found here: premieretat.com/beyond-natura...
The images used in this video are in the public domain.

[@sosu6227]

Awesome video, these last three have been some of your best!
I wanted to ask, would you consider the "Homeric faith" and the 'Philosophic faith' to be two separate but related schools of thought? I personally conceive of it that way, with the Mysteries like Orphism and Philosophies like Platonism being a form of Esoterism in contrast to the Homeric Exoterism, by late Antiquity they would grow closer due to be Christian competition and Influence, and because of that Neoplatonists began with reading Plato Allegorically but ended up with also reading Homer and Hesiod that way.
Orientalism is also something that has always being a core feature, the Greeks began with the "Secret Books of the Prygians' and ended up with the Chaldean Oracles

[@premieretatphilosophy]

Thanks! I agree with your idea that Homeric faith and Philosophic faith are two separate but related schools of thought. The main differences I see consist in Homer’s almost exclusive emphasis on the warrior virtues of glory (κλέος) and honor (τίμη), and in his, at best, morally ambiguous depiction of the gods. The philosophic view, in contrast, would widen its sphere of concern to include the soul and its union with the Absolute through contemplation, and, as a result, come to depict the divine as something that is essentially (and unambiguously) good and just. And I think that these differences can be overcome as you note, namely, by taking an allegorical reading of the Homeric myths and treating them as exoteric articulations of an underlying esoteric truth.