Thales the Measurer offers a comprehensive and iconoclastic account of Thales of Miletus, considering the full extent of our evidence to build a new picture of his intellectual interests and activity.
Thales is most commonly associated with the claim that ‘everything is water’, but closer examination of the evidence that we have suggests that he could not have said anything of the sort. His real interests, and his real innovations, lay in challenges of quantitative measurement, especially measurements related to the movement of the sun. In this he had no predecessors – and, for centuries to follow, no real successors either.
This book is of interest for scholars in the history of philosophy, science, and life sciences. It is aimed especially at researchers in the field, but is also accessible to students and a more general readership.
1. Who were these ancient masters?, 2. A context for Thales, 3. Elements of a biography, 4. How to measure the height of a pyramid, 5. Thales dates the tropai, 6. From the dating of the tropai to the dating of the isēmeriai, 7. What explains a solar eclipse?, 8. A measurement of ½°, 9. Surface water, archē, earth and, it seems, some fragments of Thales, 10. The periodic flooding of the Nile and the ‘Atlantic corollary’, 11. Thales and the stones of Magnesia, 12. The sky according to Thales, 13. To measure the distance of a ship from land, 14. Thales and the theorems of plane geometry, 15. Thales ‘el injenioso hidalgo’, 16. Thales the sophos, 17. The ‘new’ fragments of Thales, 18. Thales the measurer, 19. The research bug.
Biography
Livio Rossetti, now retired, served for many years as Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Perugia, Italy. His most recent books are Convincere Socrate (Pistoia 2021) and Verso la filosofia: nuove prospettive su Parmenide, Zenone e Melisso (this is a book to which several editors and interlocutors contributed; Baden Baden 2020). The provisional title of his next book is Rethinking the Presocratics.
