Water, soul, and gods in Thales of Miletus

Abstract

Our knowledge of Thales of Miletus is fragmentary. We only have very short passages attributed to him by ancient sources, and those passages are not always clearly consistent with each other. In this paper, I analyze some of the most representative ancient fragments with theses assigned to Thales of Miletus by means of a methodology based on the general framework of the unified theory of mental models. My intention in doing that is to try to clarify what he truly thought about water, the soul, and gods, and my conclusions refer to the fact that it is very possible that Thales’ philosophy was much closer to myth than sometimes assumed.