A native of Miletus, he worked on early geometry (which he may have nicked from the Egyptians). He believed that water was the original substance, out of which all others are formed. He also thought that magnets had souls as they moved iron and that all things are full of gods.
Supposedly he once successfully predicted a great harvest of olives by observing the stars and invested in olive presses in order to prove to his detractors that you could make money from philosophy.
Regarded as one of the founders of Philosophy, but Russell questions whether he is really that interesting. Like all the Pre-socratics there are no surviving texts, so everything we know is based on later comments by other people, mainly later philosophers or historians. In the case of Thales much of what we know about his ideas comes from Aristotle's commentary on him (see Early Greek Philosophy).
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