>Everything is water. What did he mean by this?

>>9471943
It's not clear. Our sources are secondhand so we don't know what Thales actually claimed. Aristotle reports that he identified the "arche" with water. Pretty much all of our info on Thales is highly suspect.

>>9471963
The book on pre-Socratics that I read claimed that anything Aristotle said of other philosophers is warped because he was only able to view things through his own philosophy (in this case, hylomorphism), rather than objectively.

The presocratics were looking for the underlying principle of matter and reality. They also wrote in allegorical and poetic styles, not prose treatises on science, and half of them are semi-mythical. It's all really confused and confusing. We're getting a received tradition of commenting on the 5th and 4th century COLLATIONS of an equally received tradition, of "Solon" and "Thales" being legendary sages and having hundreds of little tales and anonymous works attributed to them by the Greek imagination.

The basic narrative is that you get a progression from simpler explanations of the arche to the full-blown philosophical systems of the 5th and 4th century, chiefly Plato and Aristotle. Thales thought all matter was just varying stages of one underlying fluid, water, which was ductile and labile enough to take any form you see. Others thought it was actually air rarefying and condensing to form even water and the other elements. Then you get more abstruse and interesting things like "all is flux" or "all flux is mere illusion," the atomism of Democritus or the "nous" of Anaxagoras, etc. The standard narrative condenses ten levels of chaotic post hoc rationalisation of hundreds of years of metaphysical-poetical speculation into a series of propositions with mouthpieces to speak them.

>>9471943

Idealism. The world is really in unity, it is "really" water, and how we perceive it is not the way it actually is.

>>9472021
This.

>>9472021
I have no source for this, but this is what my Greek philosophy professor told me in uni:

Pre-Socratic were civic legislators. They were highly involved in the organization of the polis, and as a justification for their teachings (which were, after all, mostly linked to morality and society, and more in general to how one citizen should behave) they used natural causes: after having derived some of the most important principles that are needed for the efficient functioning of Miletus, then he rephrased them and linked some of their properties to the properties of what he thought was the most universal aspect of the natural world (in order to give to it the highest degree of objectivity, at least from the point of view of his contemporaries).

Their naturalist claims should, therefore, read in function of the moral claims they make.

>>9471943
everything is in flux

Same as what Schopenhauer/Nietzsche mean when they say "the world is will." I would rephrase that as "the world is energy."

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>>9471943

lets ask dave

>>9472839
That is such a vulgar explanation. Contemporary university education is garbage.

>>9472980

lel

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>>9472947
>I would rephrase that as "the world is energy.

Why?
The world as will is the true moral interpretation.