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Thales
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There is considerable agreement that Thales was born in Miletus in Greek Ionia in the mid 620s BCE and died in about 546 BCE, but even those dates are indefinite. Aristotle, the major source for Thales's philosophy and science, identified Thales as the first person to investigate the basic principles, the question of the originating substances of matter and, therefore, as the founder of the school of natural philosophy. Thales was interested in almost everything, investigating almost all areas of knowledge, philosophy, history, science, mathematics, engineering, geography, and politics. He proposed theories to explain many of the events of nature, the primary substance, the support of the earth, and the cause of change. Thales was much involved in the problems of astronomy and provided a number of explanations of cosmological events which traditionally involved supernatural entities. His questioning approach to the understanding of heavenly phenomena was the beginning of Greek astronomy.
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Thales was the first to abandon a blind empiricism and turn to a theoretical investigation of causes. This is his most important contribution to the development of a universal philosophical and scientific spirit. He attempted to explain things, and give them a justification in theory. He held water to be the prime origin of all things, positing that every kind of matter is produced through the transformation of this uncreated and imperishable elemental substance. He made a number of purely scientific discoveries in geometry, astronomy and physics; he developed his own philosophical system; and he took part in the political life of Ionia. He ... built large engineering works, devised instruments for calculating distances, and travelled widely for both commercial and scientific purposes.
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When you specifically look at the influence Thales had in the pre-Socrates era, he was one of the first thinkers who thought more in the way of logos than mythos. The difference between these two more profound ways of seeing the world is that mythos is concentrated around the stories of holy origin, while logos is concentrated around the argumentation. When the mythical man wants to explain the world the way he sees it, he explains it based on gods and powers. Mythical thought does not differentiate between things and persons and furthermore it does not differentiate between nature and culture. The way a logos thinker would present a world view is radically different from the way of the mythical thinker. In its concrete form, logos is a way of thinking not only about individualism, but ... the abstract.
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Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers and therefore on Western history. Anaximander is sometimes considered to be a pupil of Thales. And it is reported by early sources that one of Anaximander's more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and was advised to travel to Egypt to further his philosophical and mathematical studies. Many philosophers followed his lead in searching for explanations in nature rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched in the language of philosophy, rather than myth or religion.
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Whether the ability to use the seqt, which preceded Thales by about 1000 years, means that he was the first to define trigonometry is a matter of opinion. More practically Thales used the same method to measure the distances of ships at sea, said Eudemus as reported by Proclus (“in Euclidem”). According to Kirk & Raven (reference cited below), all you need for this feat is three straight sticks pinned at one end and knowledge of your altitude. One stick goes vertically into the ground. A second is made level. With the third you sight the ship and calculate the seqt from the height of the stick and its distance from the point of insertion to the line of sight.
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Those who believe that Thales inherited his views from Greek or Near-Eastern sources are wrong. Thales was esteemed in his times as an original thinker, and one who broke with tradition and not as one who conveyed existing mythologies. Aristotle unequivocally recorded Thales's hypothesis on the nature of matter, and proffered a number of conjectures based on observation in favour of Thales's declaration (Metaph. 983 b20-28). His report provided the testimony that Thales supplanted myth in his explanations of the behaviour of natural phenomena. Thales did not derive his thesis from either Greek or non-Greek mythological traditions.
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Thales