We label as Presocratics the world's first official philosophers, a group of men who taught and expounded mostly in the Greek city-states of Ionia beginning in the seventh-century B.C. While many of their theories may seem naïve, primitive, and just plain wrong, these thinkers deserve a great deal of credit for taking the mind of man into an exciting direction.

While entrenched in a rich mythic tradition involving anthropomorphic gods and monsters and the orally transmitted tales of Homer and others, the Presocratics took baby steps into natural law. They sought to explain what it's all about via a scientific method. The Presocratics are sometimes called Monists, meaning that they sought to isolate one thing, usually one of the elements (earth, air, fire, and water) as the basic stuff to which all reality could be reduced.

The ideas and philosophies of the Presocratics were literally written in stone. Unfortunately, only fragments of these slabs survive. In fact, no complete work of any Presocratic philosopher remains intact. All that's left are snippets and fragments, the ancient equivalent of little yellow sticky memo sheets stuck to your computer monitor or refrigerator.

Yet their efforts should not be underestimated. The evolution from superstition to science was a quantum leap in thinking, and their philosophy formed a genesis that grew into many of the truths we now hold to be self-evident.

Thales: Water, Water Everywhere

Thales of Miletus is often designated as the first official philosopher. He is regarded as the founder of natural philosophy. He proposed that everything is composed of water. On a visceral level, Thales saw water as the source of life, an indispensable necessity for survival. In the form of floods and torrents, water could take life as well as sustain it. It could also change form. Even metals and rock could be reduced to a molten, or liquid state. Water and other liquidities were a formidable force of nature.

Though Thales could not have known that the human body is composed of mostly water, he was on to something, simplistic as his theories may seem today. His rational approach of not attributing anything and everything to “the gods” paved the way for the scientific method. He was revered as a sage in his lifetime and long after his death.

Anaximander: A Philosopher of Boundless Energy

Anaximander, a younger contemporary of Thales, didn't believe that water was one of the four familiar elements that was the basic stuff of the world. Instead, he believed that all those elements and more comprised a common element he called ápeiron, or “The Boundless.” All things arise from ápeiron, and all things return to ápeiron. This belief foreshadows Einstein's dictum that “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.”

Anaximenes: Air Apparent

Anaximenes was a pupil of Anaximander. He digressed from his mentor's theory by singling out air as the root of all things. Humans need air as much as water. He believed that the soul was composed of air.

While water could change its composition, air is capable of rarefication and condensation. Air in its densest form would be solid matter. In its most ephemeral form, it would be the atmosphere itself. Modern scientists (and New Age gurus) will tell you that solid matter is simply energy in its densest form.

Though Anaximenes called his stuff du jour “air,” and this may seem a ridiculous proposition, what is important is the principle. It was a movement away from the supernatural and an attempt, like his fellow Milesian scholars and thinkers, to look at things from a scientific perspective. This perspective is what makes the Presocratics important figures in the history of the world.

Anaximenes had another theory that was heading in a more sophisticated direction. In those days, the breath, because it exhales from the body, was linked to the concept of the soul, which was and is believed to dwell within the body. In olden days, when people sneezed, they believed the soul was in danger of being expelled from the body, which is why people say, “Bless you” or some equivalent when someone sneezes. It was originally a call for the soul to skootch back inside the body. Perhaps, and no one knows for sure, old Anaximenes was talking about more than mere air when he espoused this Monist philosophy.

Pythagoras: By the Numbers

Rather than suggest that the basic stuff of reality was an element of nature, Pythagoras proposed that life was a numbers game. He taught that everything could be explained through mathematical theorems and formulae. He also made a connection between mathematical order and music, even going as far as to state that the orbits of celestial bodies were accompanied by tuneful harmonies he dubbed the “Music of the Spheres.” This one was quite a claim, because Pythagoras never popped his ear above the stratosphere to verify this theory.

The Pythagorean school of thought was enormously popular and lasted hundreds of years. In his lifetime, Pythagoras was a cult figure whose disciples were sworn to secrecy upon pain of death. He also believed in reincarnation, and his followers were vegetarians.

Heraclitus and Parmenides: Ionian Odd Couple

Nicknamed the Obscure, Heraclitus was a philosopher who was known as something of a downer. His theory that everything is composed of fire, if taken metaphorically, is expressed in his belief that everything is in flux. There is no constancy in the universe. There was no living in the moment for Heraclitus. You could not even step into the same river twice, he said, because the flowing water was not the same water you dipped your big toe into mere seconds before. Life is a never-ending sequence of birth and death, creation and destruction.

Heraclitus felt that this cycle of combustibility is also applicable to the human spirit. Are you the same person at age forty that you were at twenty? Probably not. If taken to heart, this philosophy can lead to melancholy: Youth fades, loved ones die, you were dust, and unto dust you shall return.

Heraclitus lived much of his life as an eccentric hermit. He had contempt for society and the feeling was mutual. He is also famous for the oft-quoted maxim that “Character is destiny.”

Parmenides was the anti-Heraclitus; he wrote in direct response to him. Simply put, he believed that there is no flux and that, in fact, everything is stagnant. “It is” was his credo. Being is immutable and constant, and change is an illusion.

Parmenides wrote an epic poem called “Truth,” which like everything else from the Presocratics, exists only in fragments. Enough survives, however, to piece together the basics of Parmenidian philosophy.

According to Parmenides, you can look at the world in two ways: You ask yourself whether “it is” or “it is not.” If it “is not,” you cannot be thinking about it, because you can only think about something that exists.

Parmenides also believed that all this coming and going and blossoming and fading away that you see in your daily life is an illusion of the senses. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Zeno: The Tortoise and the Hero

Zeno is best known for a couple of famous paradoxes, which in the real world make no sense whatsoever, but were extremely popular in their day. The first one explains how, sitting in your room, you can never really reach the door. If the distance between two points is composed of an infinite number of points, then you can bisect that line. And you can keep bisecting the areas you previously bisected ad infinitum. Hence, you potentially have an infinite amount of space in a finite distance between two points and can never really get anywhere. Think about that as you get out of your chair, walk to the door, and leave the room.

The second Zeno paradox deals with motion. When you move from one place to another, you reach the midway point before the final destination. And before you get to the halfway mark, you reach the halfway mark of the midway point. Ergo, you have to travel an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time. And that is impossible, right?

The example Zeno uses to make this argument is a race between the mighty hero Achilles (of Iliad and heel fame) and a tortoise. If Achilles graciously gave the tortoise a head start, he could never catch up with the turtle based on the preceding argument. Nevertheless, if you're a gambler, you would be ill advised to bet on the tortoise.