Thales of Miletus

Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 BCE) was an Ionian Greek thinker from Miletus, counted by later tradition among the Seven Sages. Herodotus reports that he predicted a solar eclipse, probably that of 585 BCE. Aristotle records his proposal that water is the first principle of all things, which marks him as one of the earliest figures in the Greek search for a natural origin of the cosmos. He wrote no surviving works, and what we know of him comes from Herodotus, Aristotle, and the later biographical tradition of Diogenes Laertius.