#Part I

Hi!

Do you have a specific source in mind? I mainly ask because it is sort of a strange claim to make with respect to Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. The preeminent influences on those thinkers were, first and foremost, each other. Further back, they are reacting above all to the Sophists, the Eleatics, the Pythagoreans, Anaxagoras, and Heraclitus. Now, there are some more promising candidates for Egyptian or Near Eastern influence on Greek thought, but they are earlier figures. One such exception might be Near Eastern mathematics or astronomy. Or perhaps the influence of myth on the traditional ways of thinking that philosophers reacted against? Though in these latter cases it must be said that it is far more Hesiod and Homer than anything from the Near East that bears mentioning. Think, for example, of the (in)famous passage in Republic in which Plato’s Socrates argues for censoring Homer to remove the “bad” parts!

Let’s start at the beginning, with Thales of Miletus (~624-546 BCE), who is often taken to be the first of the Greek philosophers. Although we don’t know much about him, we do know that Aristotle (Metaphysics 1.3, 983b18-27), writing hundreds of years later, considered Thales to be engaged in the same basic philosophical project as he was (unlike, say, Hesiod). Thales was famous for lots of things, one of which was the prediction of an eclipse. This prediction is reported to us by Herodotus:

As they were having equal success in the war, it happened that in the sixth year, when a battle was being fought, the day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had foretold to the Ionians that this loss of daylight would occur, setting as a limit the very year in which the event occurred. (Histories 1.74)

There is some speculation that, if Thales actually made this prediction (Herodotus is not always a sure guide!), that he did so based on Babylonian techniques. The thought here is that Thales did not have the requisite astronomical knowledge to predict the eclipse in anything like the way a modern astronomer would. Babyolians, however, had been keeping meticulous records of eclipses for a very long time and patterns in these observations would be sufficient to allow for a very rough estimate to be made of when an eclipse would occur. This is a plausible suggestion in a couple of ways. First, it jibes with the rough nature of the prediction that Herodotus reports (“setting as a limit the very year”). Second, it isn’t implausible that Thales could have been exposed to Babylonian astronomy, living as he did in a Greek colony on the coast of what is today Turkey.

I myself incline toward the view that this attribution is spurious, however. The trouble is that it doesn’t seem possible that Thales could have used Babylonian astronomy to have predicted where the eclipse would occur even if he could roughly determine when it would occur. Nor could anyone else, to my knowledge, prior to Ptolemy’s Almagest in the second century CE. So, I think something about Herodotus’s account must be incorrect. On this, see McKirahan(2010, pp.23-25). Probably, Thales was a well-known sage who was genuinely interested in astronomy in general and eclipses in particular and Herodotus, in the interest of telling a good story, plays fast and loose with the facts. There is, however, some reason to think Thales may well have known that solar eclipses were caused by the moon coming in-between the earth and the Sun:

Thales said that the sun suffers eclipse when the moon comes to be in front of it, the day in which the moon produces the eclipse being marked by its concealment (Aristarchus, Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, 53.3710, col. 2, 37-40).

The “concealment” here seems to refer to the moon, and thus to refer to the new moon. The inference would then be from the phases of the moon, the position of the moon in such phases, and the occurence of solar eclipses. None of that is particularly outlandish for a thinker in Thales’s time and place to have figured out, and it would amount to Thales having identified a necessary (but, importantly, not sufficient) condition for the occurence of an eclipse.

So much for eclipses. A connection has also been suggested between Egyptian myth and Thales’s material monism, his thesis that everything is ultimately one single type of thing. This proposed connection dates from Antiquity:

Aristotle speaks quite strongly against this view [Thales’s material monism], which was prevalent perhaps because the Egyptians recounted it in mythological form and Thales may have imported the doctrine from there. (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo, 522.16-18)

Note the contrast here between Aristotle and Thales and the Egyptians. Aristotle is presented (correctly) as not engaging with the Egyptian view as a genuine rival, but rather only with Thales’s philosophical version. The idea seems to be that Thales was alive to an option because it was presented, in mythological form, in Egyptian tradition and that, as it turned out, he thought there was something philosophically defensible (read: true) about that view. But Thales gives an argument for this position, at least as Aristotle understands him, and it is on that argument and that argument alone that the philosophical view rests. We can think similarly of philosophical defenses given today for the existence of God by some theists. Alvin Plantinga is a Christian, but when he argues in Nature of Necessity for the existence of a maximally great being he rests that case entirely on his modal ontological argument. The idea is that his religion says something that happens to be both true and that can be rationally established to be true. (Nevermind if he is right about that, the point is just that the distinction between the religious and philosophical statement of a thesis differ in justification even if not in content). Anway, back to Thales. Here is his argument.

However, they do not all agree about how many or what kinds of such principles there are, but Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, stated it to be water… He may have got this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist, and that even the hot itself comes to be from this and lives on this (the principle of all things is that from which they come to be)... getting this idea from this consideration and also because the seeds of all things have a moist nature; and water is the principle of moist things. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.3, 983b18-27)

First, note how tenative Aristotle is about Thales’s view! Perhaps, even in Aristotle’s day, Thales was an obscure figure. Aristotle had the premier library of his day, which makes the fact that it seems he isn’t quite sure what Thales said even more surprising. On Aristotle’s library, see Casson (2002, pp. 28-29). Be that as it may, Thales’s argument is illuminating. Here is one way to reconstruct it:

1. That from which everything comes to be is that which is ultimately fundamental

2. Water is that from which everything comes to be

3. So, water is that which is ultimately fundamental

A couple things. First, Thales’s view is ambiguous. Does he want to say that everything is, appearances to the contrary, literally water? Or does he rather want to say that everything comes from water? Both readings seem live. Whichever reading is correct, however, the view strikes us all as silly. And silly it is, because it contains an obviously false, empirically motivated premise, namely (2). Now, this premise probably wasn’t crazy to Thales, given the limited empirical evidence he had. But, and this is part of what is distinctive about Greek philosophy, consider the other premise, (1). That looks interesting and plausible, even today! I invite anyone reading this to consider for themselves whether or not they think it is true. That this invitation is not ridiculous in the way inviting you to consider whether the Egyptian myths that possibly served as an inspiration for Thales’s material monism strikes at the heart of why I’m so hesitant to attribute any full-blooded philosophical influence to the Egyptians in such cases.